Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo 絜齋家塾書鈔
Family School Notes of the Jiézhāi Studio by 袁燮 (zhuàn 撰)
About the work
A Shàngshū 尚書 (KR1b0001) commentary in the form of family-school lecture notes from the household of Yuán Xiè 袁燮 (Jiézhāi 絜齋, 1144–1224), the chief Lù-school xīnxué 心學 Shū-exegete in the Sìkù. The work was not composed by Yuán Xiè himself: it is the transcription, by his eldest son Yuán Qiáo 袁喬, of the morning- and evening-lectures Yuán Xiè delivered every day at home to his sons and to his students. Yuán Qiáo died before bringing the record beyond the chapter “Jūn Shì” 君奭, leaving the compilation incomplete; in Shàodìng 4 / 1231, his youngest brother Yuán Fǔ 袁甫 had the surviving notes printed at the Xiàngshān shūyuàn 象山書院 — Lù Jiǔyuān’s 陸九淵 own academy — explicitly to preserve the family learning despite its incompleteness.
The doctrinal core is the Lù-school doctrine of “běn xīn” 本心 (the original mind) — Yuán Qiáo’s preface gives the key formula: “One’s own original mind is the mind of the ancient sages, the mind of Heaven-and-Earth, the mind of the Ten Thousand Generations of all-under-Heaven” (wú zhī běn xīn jí gǔ shèng zhī xīn jí tiāndì zhī xīn jí tiānxià wànshì zhī xīn 吾之本心即古聖之心即天地之心即天下萬世之心). Even Wáng Yīnglín 王應麟 — a LuòMǐn (ChéngZhū) 洛閩 partisan whose intellectual track diverged from Lù-school orthodoxy — adopted Yuán Xiè’s reading of the Dà Yǔ mó 大禹謨 phrase jǐng jiè wú yú 儆戒無虞 (“be vigilant lest there be no calamity yet to come”) into his Kùnxué jìwén 困學紀聞 — the highest indirect endorsement the work received in its own era.
Tiyao
Imperially Authorized Sìkù Quánshū. Classics, division 2. Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo. Books-class.
Précis. Your servants etc. respectfully submit: the Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo in twelve juǎn is by Yuán Xiè of the Sòng. Xiè, zì Héshū, Jiézhāi his self-styled name, was a man of Yín county. Chúnxī xīnchǒu (1181) jìnshì, his offices reached Xiǎnmógé xuéshì and his canonical name was Zhèngxiàn; the events of his career are fully recorded in his Sòngshǐ biography. Xiè’s learning came out of Lù Jiǔyuān; the principal aim of this compilation is to bring out [the doctrine of] běn xīn, and turning it back and forth and unfolding it he is well able to give play to his master’s teaching. As for the records of imperial-and-royal administration, he weighs ancient and modern across the board and draws out the essentials of each item one by one. Wáng Yīnglín, as he developed his LuòMǐn learning, in much went a different way from Jīnxī (Lù Jiǔyuān’s town) — yet Xiè’s gloss on the various passages of jǐng jiè wú yú he absorbed into his Kùnxué jì[wén]; clearly when the principle is sufficient, those of differing taste cannot but be brought round to it.
The Yìwén zhì 藝文志 of Sòngshǐ records the work in ten juǎn; Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí says that “[Yuán] Xiè’s son Yuán Qiáo recorded what he heard at the family table, [and that the record] reached only to Jūn Shì and stopped” — so it was originally an unfinished work and not by his own hand. In Shàodìng 4 [1231] his son [Yuán Fǔ — bù 甫] had it cut and deposited at the Xiàngshān shūyuàn — that is, valuing the family learning, [the family] would not abandon what was unfinished and fragmentary. The Lúzhū táng shūmù 菉竹堂書目 of Yè Shèng 葉盛 of the Míng still preserves the title, but those discussing the Shàngshū rarely hear it cited — clearly transmitted copies were already scarce, which is why Zhū Yízūn in compiling his Jīngyì kǎo annotated it “not seen.” Now in our sage age, with the wide gathering of remaining compilations and the issuing of all rare and arcane books, even so the title of this book has not been encountered — it has indeed been lost long. We have respectfully extracted, on basis of what was carried in the Yǒnglè dàdiàn, and re-edited the material into its old form; the volume being somewhat extensive we have arranged it into twelve juǎn. That worm-eaten and broken slips should once again become visible from out of submersion is also, one may say, the great fortune of [Yuán] Xiè.
[Yuán] Qiáo, zì Chóngqiān, once served as magistrate of Lìyáng, and predeceased Xiè by only a short interval; he never became famous in the world, so the Sòngshǐ preserves a biography only of his younger brother [Yuán] Fǔ and does not give Qiáo a separate biography. According to the funerary xíngzhuàng of [Yuán] Xiè composed by Zhēn Déxiù, [Yuán] Xiè had four sons in all: Qiáo was the eldest; Fǔ was the youngest. Respectfully submitted, Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, ninth 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.
(The WYG copy is also prefaced with a Qiánlóng-emperor poem on the work, Yùtí Yuán Xiè Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo 御題袁燮絜齋家塾書鈔, in which the emperor remarks on Yuán’s gloss of liú sī shī fǎdù 流斯失法度 in the Dà Yǔ mó: that what makes a “loss of standard” is precisely allowing oneself to drift — a reading which, the emperor avers, “had already lain in my own heart” before he saw Yuán’s commentary, since he himself when on imperial tours never let sightseeing slow the pace of administration.)
Abstract
The Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo is the principal Sòng Shàngshū commentary from within the Lù Jiǔyuān 陸九淵 xīnxué 心學 lineage, surviving as a 12-juǎn reconstruction by the Sìkù compilers. Its actual textual situation is unusually well-documented: the Shàngshū lectures Yuán Xiè 袁燮 (1144–1224) delivered at his family school were recorded by his eldest son Yuán Qiáo 袁喬, who reached only the chapter “Jūn Shì” 君奭 before dying (predeceasing his father by only a short interval). Twenty-some years later, in Shàodìng 4 / 1231, the youngest son Yuán Fǔ 袁甫 (1174–1240, zhuàngyuán 狀元 of 1214) had the unfinished record cut and printed at the Xiàngshān shūyuàn 象山書院 in Jiāngxī — the academy founded by Lù Jiǔyuān himself — explicitly as a double memorial to his father’s teaching and to his eldest brother’s filial transcription.
The composition window is therefore tightly bounded: the lectures fall during Yuán Xiè’s mature teaching career (call it 1200–1224, with most of the lecturing concentrated in the years after his metropolitan service); the printing and final form is dated Shàodìng 4 / 1231. The frontmatter window 1200–1231 covers both. The Sòngshǐ yìwén zhì records the work at 10 juǎn; the Sìkù reconstruction yields 12 juǎn by reconfiguring the surviving material out of the Yǒnglè dàdiàn 永樂大典 (the original Xiàngshān imprint having become extremely rare by the early Qīng — Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo 經義考 marks the title “not seen”).
The doctrinal program of the work — to read the Shàngshū as a continuous demonstration of the doctrine of the original mind (běn xīn 本心) — is laid out unapologetically in Yuán Qiáo’s autograph preface, which is preserved at the front of the WYG copy: every paradigmatic Shū episode (Shùn weeping at Mín Tiān, Yǔ thrice passing his door without entering, Tài Jiǎ overturning the rules and then repenting, Zhōu Chéngwáng’s tearful response to the famine and the prodigy of “Heaven made it rain and turned the wind back”) is to be read as an instance of the obscuration or restoration of the same single original mind. The jiāshú (家塾, “family school”) of the title is literal: the work derives from the morning and evening sessions Yuán held with his sons and his students, which Yuán Qiáo “transcribed at the side, not allowing a word or a phrase to be lost.”
The Sìkù compilers’ acknowledgment that even Wáng Yīnglín 王應麟 — a LuòMǐn 洛閩 (ChéngZhū) partisan of the next generation, normally hostile to Jīnxī 金谿 (Lù-school) doctrine — quoted Yuán Xiè’s gloss into his Kùnxué jìwén 困學紀聞 is the strongest endorsement the work received in its own era. The Sìkù judgment is itself notable: the compilers usually prefer Cài Shěn’s Shū jízhuàn 書集傳 (KR1b0017, the next entry) and treat xīnxué readings as secondary, but for Yuán Xiè they make an exception and allow that “when the principle is sufficient, those of differing taste cannot but come round to it.”
Yuán Qiáo (zì Chóngqiān 崇謙) himself never became famous: he served only as magistrate of Lìyáng 溧陽 in southern Jiāngsū before his early death, and the Sòngshǐ contains no separate biography for him; the only record of his name is in his father’s xíngzhuàng 行狀 by Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀 and in this preface. Because he is the actual transcriber and editor of the surviving record, he is named in the prose body but not in the catalog meta’s persons: list (which mirrors the catalog meta).
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language translation of the Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo is known. For the broader Sòng Lù-school xīnxué program of which the work is the leading Shàngshū exemplar, see the standard treatments cited under 楊簡 and 袁燮. For the Yǒngshàng 甬上 (Sì-Míng 四明) Lù-school circle to which Yuán Xiè belonged, see Lì Hòu 李厚, Sì-Míng xuépài yánjiū 四明學派研究 (Hangzhou: Zhèjiāng dàxué chūbǎnshè, 2010).
Other points of interest
The Qiánlóng-emperor’s yùtí 御題 prefatory poem (Yùtí Yuán Xiè Jiézhāi jiāshú shūchāo) is a typical instance of the emperor staking his own reading-of-the-classics in the WYG paratext: he latches onto Yuán Xiè’s gloss of liú sī shī fǎdù 流斯失法度 in the Dà Yǔ mó and uses it to defend his own administrative practice during southern tours. The poem’s interlinear note specifically references the Yǐn Jì shàn yǒu chí yì yóu shān zhī yǔ 尹繼善有馳驛遊山之語 episode (a remark of the Manchu official Yǐn Jìshàn 尹繼善 about Qiánlóng’s “post-station hurrying to sightsee”), and is one of the better self-aware Qiánlóng yùtí tying classical commentary to imperial self-justification.
Note also: the chapter “Jūn Shì” 君奭 marks where Yuán Qiáo’s transcription stopped — i.e. the family-school lectures are complete through the eight earlier chapters of the Zhōushū and stop in the middle of the late Zhōushū. The Sìkù reconstruction from the Yǒnglè dàdiàn therefore reflects the original incompleteness of the family-school record itself, not merely transmissional loss.