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禹貢說斷

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Text ID
KR1b0012
Date
1180–1215
Dynasty
宋

Yǔ gòng shuō duàn 禹貢說斷

Discriminating Explanations of the “Tribute of Yǔ” by 傅寅 (zhuàn 撰)

About the work

A Southern-Sòng monographic commentary on a single chapter of the Shàngshū — the geographically dense “Yǔ gòng” 禹貢 — devoted to weighing earlier explanations and arbitrating among them. It was originally one piece of a much larger investigative project Fù Yín called Qúnshū bǎi kǎo 群書百考 (“A Hundred Investigations into the Various Books”); it survives because the Sìkù compilers were able to reconstitute it. The body opens with four maps (tú 圖) — a “general convergence of mountains and rivers” plus the Nine Hé, the Three Jiāng and the Nine Jiāng — and then proceeds chapter by chapter through the canonical “Yǔ gòng,” collating the explanations of earlier scholars and pronouncing his own verdict.

(The catalog meta gives the extent as 26 juǎn; this is a copyist’s error — the Sìkù compilers explicitly arranged the work into 4 juǎn, and the WYG file structure (_001.txt–_004.txt) follows the same. The frontmatter here is corrected accordingly.)

Tiyao

Imperially Authorized Sìkù Quánshū. Classics, division 2. Yǔ gòng shuō duàn. Books-class.

Précis. Your servants etc. respectfully submit: the Yǔ gòng shuō duàn is the work of the Sòng recluse Fù Yín of Jīnhuá. In Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo 經義考 there is recorded a Yǔ gòng xiángjiě 禹貢詳解 in two juǎn by Yín, which the Tōngzhì Hall once cut and printed in its Nine Classics Explained (Jiǔjīng jiě 九經解); but the Yǒnglè dàdiàn version of the book is titled Yǔ gòng shuō duàn, with no mention of “xiángjiě.” The Jīngjiě recension also notes that more than forty original slips were missing; we have now checked the Yǒnglè dàdiàn version against it, and not only is everything that the Jīngjiě lacked supplied, but the “Five-zone disquisition” (Wǔ fú biàn 五服辨) of more than three thousand characters and the “Nine-province disquisition” (Jiǔ zhōu biàn 九州辨) of more than a thousand characters are likewise present — exceeding the gap in the Jīngjiě by several times. Furthermore, the preface by Qiáo Xíngjiǎn declares that Yín composed his Hundred Investigations of the Various Books in which each topic is illustrated with diagrams, the Yǔ gòng shuō being only one of these. The present work should therefore open with the General Convergence of Mountains and Rivers and the diagrams of the Nine Hé, Three Jiāng, Nine Jiāng — four diagrams in all — and only then continue to the explanations of the various schools. In the Jīngjiě, however, these four diagrams are wrongly editorialized into Chéng Dàchāng’s 程大昌 Yǔ gòng lùn 禹貢論, where they have no organic connection at all, while the Yǒnglè dàdiàn alone keeps them within the Shuō duàn. The Dàdiàn exemplar is plainly the original Sòng-period text and may be relied on; the Jīngjiě-cut version, by contrast, has been corrupted by transmissional copying — even the title was altered — and is no longer the original.

The book draws widely from the various explanations and arbitrates with the author’s own judgment, often arriving at distinctive readings and refusing to follow earlier writers. His view that Mèngzǐ’s “channelling the Rǔ and Hàn, the Huái and the Sì, into the Jiāng” is in fact the ancient method of gōuxù 溝洫 (irrigation-and-drainage canals) is something none of the previous scholars had reached: this is genuinely the kind of independent insight that he was capable of. Lǚ Zǔjiǎn called him “the synthesizer of the great achievement of the earlier Confucians”; Táng Zhòngyǒu said that “all the territorial-administration and topography of the empire was inside his belly.” He was esteemed by the leading literary figures, and it was no idle praise. We have now taken the Jīngjiě edition and respectfully collated it against the Yǒnglè dàdiàn: errors corrected, lacunae filled, and the work divided into four juǎn, restored to its old title Shuō duàn. At the start and finish of each filled-in lacuna we have appended a note marking it, so that future students may recover the complete book. Respectfully submitted, the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng (1781), fourth month.

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

Abstract

Fù Yín’s Yǔ gòng shuō duàn is one of the most original Southern-Sòng glosses on the “Yǔ gòng” 禹貢. Born 1148 in Jīnhuá 金華 (specifically Yìwū 義烏 / Dōngyáng 東陽 in modern Zhèjiāng) and dying in 1215, Fù Yín never held office; his scholarly identity was shaped by association with the Jīnhuá branch of the Lǚ-school (Lǚ Zǔqiān 呂祖謙 and his younger brother Lǚ Zǔjiǎn 呂祖儉) and with Táng Zhòngyǒu 唐仲友 of Tiāntái. Composition of the Shuō duàn falls within his mature period; with Táng Zhòngyǒu (d. 1188) and Lǚ Zǔjiǎn (d. 1196) both endorsing it, an early version must have circulated by the late 1180s, while Qiáo Xíngjiǎn’s 喬行簡 (1156–1241) preface — Qiáo was almost certainly writing as a younger man, before his later high office — provides a terminus ante quem coterminous with Fù’s life. The frontmatter window 1180–1215 covers the most defensible bracket.

The work’s transmission history is unusually instructive. Fù’s larger compilation Qúnshū bǎi kǎo 群書百考 — a series of investigative monographs each fitted with diagrams (tú 圖) — survives only in the present fragment. The textual form first known to Qīng-dynasty bibliographers was a 2-juǎn recension titled Yǔ gòng xiángjiě 禹貢詳解 entered in Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 Jīngyì kǎo 經義考 and reprinted by the Tōngzhì Hall (Tōngzhì táng 通志堂) in its Jiǔjīng jiě 九經解 — a recension already heavily defective (over forty missing slips). The Yǒnglè dàdiàn 永樂大典 preserves a fuller version under the title Yǔ gòng shuō duàn, including roughly three thousand characters of Wǔ fú biàn 五服辨 (“On the five [centripetal] zones of the realm”) and over a thousand of Jiǔ zhōu biàn 九州辨 — both lost from the Jīngjiě recension — and crucially preserves the four tú (general topographic chart, plus the Nine Hé, Three Jiāng, Nine Jiāng) which the Jīngjiě had wrongly editorialized into Chéng Dàchāng’s 程大昌 Yǔ gòng lùn 禹貢論. The Sìkù compilers (Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Lù Fèichí 陸費墀 collation chief), submitting their work in Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, arranged it into four juǎn and restored the Yǒnglè dàdiàn title.

Substantively, Fù Yín’s distinctive contribution is to read the geographical chapter through the lens of Sòng administrative-geographical knowledge while respecting the canonical text. His most cited single insight — that Mèngzǐ’s Téng Wéngōng image of “channeling the Rǔ, Hàn, Huái and Sì so that they all flow into the Jiāng” should be understood as a description of ancient gōuxù 溝洫 (field-irrigation canals) rather than a literal hydrological claim — became a standard exegetical point in late-Imperial Yǔ gòng commentary.

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language secondary literature located on the Yǔ gòng shuō duàn specifically. For Sòng-period Yǔ gòng exegesis more broadly, see Hú Wèi 胡渭, Yǔ gòng zhuīzhǐ 禹貢錐指 (Qīng-period synthesis); Cài Gēnxiáng 蔡根祥, Sòngdài Shàngshū xué àn 宋代尚書學案 (Taipei: Huámùlán, 2006); and the relevant chapters in Bryan W. Van Norden et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Chinese Geography (forthcoming) — but no monograph on Fù Yín’s commentary alone.

Other points of interest

The work is a useful early case of the geographical tú (diagram) becoming a structural element of canonical commentary in its own right rather than mere decoration: Fù Yín’s project as described by Qiáo Xíngjiǎn’s preface — a hundred investigative monographs, each fitted with diagrams — anticipates the later Yuán–Míng tradition of jīngjiě 經解 with embedded mappings.

The Tongzhi Hall (通志堂) print history of this text is also notable: it is one of the very rare cases where the Sìkù editorial intervention demonstrably improves on a famous late-Míng / early-Qīng commercial recension, by recovering through the Yǒnglè dàdiàn both content and pictorial apparatus that the Jiǔjīng jiě had garbled, mis-attributed (the four diagrams to Chéng Dàchāng), and mis-titled.

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