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尚書詳解

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Text ID
KR1b0011
Date
1170–1189
Dynasty
宋

Shàngshū xiángjiě 尚書詳解

A Detailed Exposition of the Book of Documents by 夏僎 (zhuàn 撰)

About the work

A Southern-Sòng running commentary on the Shàngshū 尚書 (here KR1b0001), originally entitled Kēshān shūzhuàn 柯山書傳 in 40 juǎn and transmitted to the Sìkù quánshū compilers in 26 juǎn (with substantial Yuán-era loss patched from the Yǒnglè dàdiàn 永樂大典). Xià Shàn 夏僎 (zì Yuánsù 元肅, hào Kēshān 柯山) digests and arbitrates the major Northern-Sòng exegetical voices — Kǒng Ān’guó 孔安國, Kǒng Yǐngdá 孔穎達, Wáng Ānshí 王安石, Sū Shì 蘇軾, Chén Jīng 陳經, Chéng Yí 程頤, and Zhāng Zài 張載 — but follows Lín Zhīqí’s 林之奇 Shàngshū jíjiě 尚書集解 in roughly six or seven cases out of ten, placing the book firmly within the Sānshān 三山 transmission of Lín-school Shàngshū learning that runs through Lǚ Zǔqiān 呂祖謙 and Shí Lán 時瀾.

Tiyao

Imperially Authorized Sìkù Quánshū. Classics, division 2. Shàngshū xiángjiě. Books-class.

Précis. Your servants etc. respectfully submit: the Shàngshū xiángjiě in twenty-six juǎn is the work of Xià Shàn of the Sòng. Shàn, zì Yuánsù, hào Kēshān, was a man of Lóngyóu in Zhèjiāng. Together with Zhōu Shēng and Miù Jǐngrén he was a friend, and the three were styled “the Three Eminents” of their day. Shàn passed the jìnshì examination, and applied himself to the Shàngshū his whole life, growing more refined in old age, drawing widely on the various explanations to put together the present commentary. During the Chúnxī era it was cut and printed by the Liú family of the Mashā booksellers; Shí Lán wrote a preface for it, praising its profound argument and elevated diction, calling it equalled by none who came before and unmatched by any who came after — an extravagant tribute. Now, after the Sòng moved south, those who studied the Shàngshū numbered in the hundreds, and the Jíjiě of Lín Zhīqí of Sānshān was held in particular esteem. Even though Xià Shàn’s book takes its materials from the two Kǒngs and from the explanations of Wáng [Ānshí], Sū [Shì], Chén [Jīng], Chéng [Yí] and Zhāng [Zài], when it comes to weighing them up he sides with Zhīqí six or seven times out of ten. Lǚ Zǔqiān had at the time studied under Zhīqí’s gate, and Shí Lán was Zǔqiān’s leading disciple; the Augmented Dōnglái Shū shuō 增修東萊書說 came from his hand, yet in this volume he is uniquely lavish in praise.

Lǐ Gōngkǎi of Yíchūn, who in classical studies attached himself to no single school — taking Dōnglái’s Shī jì 詩記 as his model in the Odes, but in the Documents setting Lǚ aside and following the Kēshān xiángjiě alone — likewise endorsed it. Although Chén Zhènsūn judged the book to have been written for the convenience of examination candidates, in the soundness of its lineage and the temperance of its argument no contemporary work surpassed it. Early in the Hóngwǔ reign, when the examination format was first fixed, students of the Shàngshū were ordered to use both the Xià and the Cài commentaries; only later, after the Dàquán was issued in the Yǒnglè era, did the Cài commentary stand alone in the imperial academy, and the Xià text gradually fell into neglect.

Looked at today, its synthesis of the various explanations — discarding the inferior, adopting the superior, weighing the alternatives, and judging by his own lights — though set against the Jiǔfēng [Cài] Shū zhuàn it cannot quite avoid the charge of being a little prolix, yet in turning each matter back and forth, plumbing it deeply and unfolding it in detail, so that the great norms and great patterns of Yáo, Shùn and the Three Dynasties find their inflection and their thoroughgoing unity, the labor he expended truly stands above the Cài zhuàn — it is genuinely a fine reference for those who would speak about the Documents.

The book exists only in manuscript copies, much of it in defective transmission. The present text submitted by Zhèjiāng, on collation, was wholly missing from “Yáodiǎn” 堯典 to “Yǔ mó” 禹謨, and further missing the middle and lower sections of “Tài shì” 泰誓 and the whole “Mù shì” 牧誓 — three chapters in all — together with the closing slip of “Qín shì” 秦誓. We have respectfully collated the Yǒnglè dàdiàn against it; with the exception of the original loss of “Qín shì,” everything else carried by the Dàdiàn is intact, and we have used it to fill out and complete the volume. For the rest of the text, the Dàdiàn recension and the Zhèjiāng manuscript have been collated against each other and the better reading adopted — close enough to thoroughness to surpass the older state. The original was divided into sixteen juǎn, with appendices of “重言重意” attached beneath the canonical text, this being the cheapest and shoddiest form of the Sòng booksellers’ layout, and we have therefore stripped it all out and rearranged the work into twenty-six juǎn, no longer matching the original sectioning. Respectfully submitted, the forty-ninth year of Qiánlóng (1784), tenth month.

— Director-General of the Editorial Office, Jì Yún 紀昀; Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊; Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. — Director of Final Collation, Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The work was composed during the Southern Sòng — almost certainly in the 1170s and 1180s — and was already in print at Mashā 麻沙 (the Liú 劉 family bookshops of Jiànyáng 建陽 in Fújiàn) within the Chúnxī 淳熙 era (1174–1189), with a preface by Shí Lán 時瀾, the leading student of Lǚ Zǔqiān 呂祖謙. The composition window in the frontmatter (1170–1189) is bracketed by Xià Shàn’s jìnshì of 1178 and the latest year of Chúnxī. In structure it is a jíshì 集釋 (“collected explanations”) of the canon: a verse-by-verse commentary excerpting and weighing the explanations of Kǒng Ān’guó, Kǒng Yǐngdá, Wáng Ānshí, Sū Shì, Chén Jīng (one of Lín Zhīqí’s pupils), Chéng Yí, and Zhāng Zài, but consistently — by the Sìkù compilers’ estimate, six or seven times out of ten — coming down on the side of Lín Zhīqí, whose own Shàngshū jíjiě belonged to the Sānshān (Fúzhōu) tradition that fed into the Lǚ-school Dōnglái shū shuō 東萊書說.

The transmission was unstable. The work originally circulated in 16 juǎn with so-called “重言重意” 重言重意 (repeated-words / repeated-meanings) appendices in the Mashā commercial layout. The Sìkù editors received only a defective Zhèjiāng manuscript: the entire “Yáodiǎn” 堯典 through “Yǔ mó” 禹謨 was missing, as were the middle and lower “Tài shì” 泰誓 and the whole “Mù shì” 牧誓; the closing slip of “Qín shì” 秦誓 was likewise lost. They patched the work from the Yǒnglè dàdiàn 永樂大典 (which preserved everything except the very end of “Qín shì”), stripped out the commercial appendices, and re-divided the text into 26 juǎn, abandoning the original sectioning. The version preserved in the WYG copy is therefore an editorial reconstruction, not the Mashā recension.

Reception was bumpy. Chén Zhènsūn 陳振孫 (Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí 直齋書錄解題) had already dismissed the book as written “for the convenience of examination candidates”; nevertheless under the Hóngwǔ 洪武 reorganization of the civil-service curriculum (early Míng) Xià’s commentary was prescribed alongside Cài Shěn’s 蔡沈 Shū jízhuàn 書集傳 for Shàngshū candidates. Once the Yǒnglè dàdiàn-derived Shū zhuàn dàquán 書傳大全 became the sole imperial text in the early fifteenth century, Xià’s work was rapidly displaced and survived only in manuscript until the Sìkù recovery. The Sìkù compilers — emphatically and somewhat against their usual deference to Cài Shěn — judged Xià’s work in fact superior in depth of analysis to the Jiǔfēng commentary, although prolix.

There is a small typographical issue in the WYG frontmatter that bears notice: the supplied tíyào is signed by 紀昀 (here written 紀昀, correctly) together with 陸錫熊 and 孫士毅 — the standard Sìkù tíyào subscription — and dated to Qiánlóng 49 / 1784 / month 10.

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language secondary literature located on the Shàngshū xiángjiě specifically. The work appears in passing in surveys of Sòng Shàngshū learning (e.g. Cài Gēnxiáng 蔡根祥, Sòngdài Shàngshū xué àn 宋代尚書學案, Taipei: Huámùlán 花木蘭, 2006) and in studies of the Hóngwǔ examination curriculum, but no critical edition or monographic study exists. A modern punctuated edition was issued in the Sìkù quánshū jīngbù 四庫全書經部 reprint series; for the textual history of the Mashā imprint see Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2002).

Other points of interest

The Qiánlóng emperor contributed two prefatory poems to the WYG copy. The second, Yùzhì shū Xià Shàn Shàngshū xiángjiě “Fèi shì” piān lùn Huái yí Xú róng shì 御製書夏僎尚書詳解費誓篇論淮夷徐戎事, is unusually substantive: in it the emperor takes Xià to task for his exegesis of the “Fèi shì” 費誓 chapter, where Xià argued that the Huáiyí 淮夷 and Xúróng 徐戎 mentioned in the chapter could not have been ethnically non-Huá peoples settled inside the central plains of antiquity. Qiánlóng counters that “China” in high antiquity was geographically much smaller than later, and that any group inside that smaller perimeter who refused civilization was conventionally tagged 戎/夷 — citing the Yǔ gòng 禹貢 and Mencius. The criticism is mild and the emperor concedes that the error was already in Kǒng Ān’guó’s 孔傳; nevertheless it is a striking instance of the Qiánlóng tendency to use prefatory poems as a venue for interventionist classical commentary.

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