Shān fén 山墳
The Mountain Mound: the Liánshān Yì of Fú Xī nominally by 伏羲 Fú Xī; in fact a Northern-Sòng forgery from the Yuánfēng era, surfaced through 毛漸 Máo Jiàn
About the work
This single fascicle is the first of the three fén 墳 (“mounds” or “tumular books”) that constitute the spurious Gǔ sān fén shū 古三墳書 (“Three Ancient Mound-writings”) — a Northern-Sòng confection that purports to preserve the lost ur-classics of the Three August Ones (三皇 Sān huáng): the Shān fén attributed to Fú Xī (= the Liánshān Yì 連山易), the Qì fén 氣墳 attributed to Shénnóng (= the Guī cáng Yì 歸藏易), and the Xíng fén 形墳 attributed to Huángdì (= the Qián-Kūn Yì 乾坤易). The Shān fén sets out an eightfold sequence of pseudo-hexagrams under the rubric Tiān-huáng Fú Xī shì Liánshān Yì yáo guà dà xiàng 天皇伏犧氏連山易爻卦大象, each headed by a constituent (“Mountain-of-Sovereign 崇山君, Mountain-of-Subject 伏山臣, Mountain-of-People 列山民, Mountain-of-Things 兼山物, Mountain-of-Yin 潛山陰…”) and articulated through a series of correlative quaternities (sovereign-subject, yin-yang, civil-military, etc.). The book has no relation to any genuine pre-Hàn divinatory tradition and is, in textual character, a Sòng-period exercise in archaicising cosmology.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source. The text is not transmitted in the Wényuāngé Sìkù quánshū and is registered in the Sìkù tíyào only as part of the cún mù 存目 (“listed but not collected”) record under the rubric Gǔ sān fén shū 古三墳書, where the Sìkù editors decisively reject it as a Sòng-period forgery.
Abstract
The transmitted Sān fén 三墳 first surfaces in the Northern Sòng Yuánfēng 元豐 era (1078–1085). The Sòng bǐjì and bibliographic record agree that it was 毛漸 Máo Jiàn — a court official then on assignment in Tángzhōu 唐州 (modern Tánghé 唐河, Hénán) — who reported its discovery, said to have been recovered from the house of a peasant, and brought it to the capital. Some sources (cf. KR1a0049 Xīxī Yì shuō) identify 張商英 Zhāng Shāngyīng (1043–1121) as the actual fabricator, with Máo Jiàn merely the disseminator; the scholarly consensus that no genuine pre-Hàn ur-classic underlies the work is older still, reaching back into the Sòng–Yuán transition: 馮椅 Féng Yǐ (Hòuzhāi Yì xué 厚齋易學, KR1a0046) and others already noted that no record of such a 三墳 with this content exists in the Hàn shū·Yì wén zhì 漢書藝文志, Suí shū·Jīng jí zhì 隋書經籍志, or Chóngwén zǒngmù 崇文總目, and that the work’s correlative-cosmology vocabulary is anachronistic.
Notwithstanding the unanimous philological verdict, the Sān fén enjoyed real influence in Sòng Yì scholarship: 李過 Lǐ Guò’s Xīxī Yì shuō 西溪易說 KR1a0049 uses the Sān fén’s claimed eight-times-eight architecture as evidence for a Fú-Xī-period 64-hexagram structure; 吳沆 Wú Hàng even composed a Sān fén xùn yì 三墳訓義 (“Glosses on the Three Mounds”) and presented it to court in 1146, where it was refuted by the Tàixué bóshì 王之望 Wáng Zhīwàng (see KR1a0026). The work was rejected by all major Yuán, Míng, and Qīng critical bibliographies; 紀昀 Jǐ Yún’s Sìkù tíyào assigns it to cún mù and characterises it as a Sòng manufacture in the style of 阮逸 Ruǎn Yì’s spurious Guān Lǎng Yì zhuàn 闗朗易傳.
The present file contains only the Shān fén portion (the would-be Liánshān); the Qì fén and Xíng fén are not included. The notional “hexagrams” enumerated here — Chóng shān 崇山, Fú shān 伏山, Liè shān 列山, Jiān shān 兼山, Qián shān 潛山, Lián shān 連山, Cáng shān 藏山, Dié shān 疊山 — are arranged not on the conventional xiào 爻 / guà 卦 structure of the canonical Yì but on a correlative scheme keyed to social and natural categories (sovereign, subject, people, things, yin, yang, military, image).
Translations and research
- LIN Zhōngjūn 林忠軍, Yì xué yuán liú yǔ tǐ yòng 易學源流與體用 (Jǐnán: Qílǔ shū shè, 2007), ch. on Sòng-period Yì apocrypha.
- MARTIN, François, “Le ‘San fen’, un faux Song?” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie (older study, cited in Goodman’s Han-period writings bibliographies).
- SHCHUTSKII, Iulian K. Researches on the I Ching (Princeton, 1979), ch. on the apocryphal Sānfén and Wǔdiǎn.
- For the broader Sòng-forgery context, Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §32.1 on the Yì jīng corpus and apocrypha.
Other points of interest
The Sān fén is paired in Sòng-Yuán bibliography with the Wǔ diǎn 五典 (“Five Canons”) — another spurious “ur-classic” text — under the standard formula fén diǎn 墳典 (the “Mound-and-Canon writings” supposedly antedating the Six Classics). Both designations derive from the Zuǒ zhuàn (Zhāo 12), where they appear as titles of ancient lost books that no Hàn-or-later writer ever claimed to have seen; the Sòng forgers exploited this lacuna.