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書集傳或問

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Text ID
KR1b0023
Date
1230–1260
Dynasty
宋

Shū jízhuàn huò wèn 書集傳或問

Doubtful Questions on the Collected Commentary on the Documents by 陳大猷 (zhuàn 撰)

About the work

The disputational companion-volume to a now-lost Shū jízhuàn 書集傳 (under the same title as Cài Shěn’s, KR1b0017, but a wholly distinct work) by Chén Dàyóu 陳大猷 of Dōngyáng 東陽 (Wùzhōu 婺州), a 1229 jìnshì. The genre — huò wèn 或問 (“doubtful questions”) — was a recognized Sòng commentarial form codified by Zhū Xī’s own Sì shū huò wèn 四書或問: the master records the objections and difficulties his friends and students had raised against his preceding jízhuàn, and gives his expanded answers. Chén Dàyóu’s Jízhuàn itself perished in the late Míng (recorded only in Yè Shèng’s 葉盛 Lúzhútáng shūmù 菉竹堂書目); the present Huò wèn in 2 juǎn survives, and now stands alone as our access to his Shàngshū exegesis. The work is doctrinally combative — willing to disagree with both Zhū Xī and Cài Shěn directly — but methodologically uneven: strong on Shàngshū doctrine and history, weak on the geography of Yǔ gòng 禹貢, since the author lived deep in the late Southern Sòng with no first-hand access to the northwest or the frontier zones north of the HánSòngJīn border.

This Chén Dàyóu must not be confused with the homonymous Chén Dàyóu of Dūchāng 都昌 (Jiāngxī), Ráo Lǔ’s 饒魯 (Shuāngfēng) student and Chén Hào’s 陳澔 father. The Sìkù tíyào explicitly disambiguates the two.

Tiyao

Imperially Authorized Sìkù Quánshū. Classics, division 2. Shàngshū jízhuàn huò wèn. Books-class.

Précis. Your servants etc. respectfully submit: the Shàngshū jízhuàn huò wèn in two juǎn is by Chén Dàyóu of the Sòng. Dàyóu was a man of Dōngyáng. He passed jìnshì in Shàodìng 2; his offices reached Liù bù jià gé. The Sòngshǐ has no biography of him, and the Yìwén zhì also does not record his name. The autograph preface says: “Having compiled the Shū zhuàn, in response to the questioning of like-minded fellows I noted down [my reasoning for] what I took and what I left out, in its various twists and turns, in order to make this volume.” So the present compilation was made on the basis of the Jízhuàn. Yet the Jízhuàn is recorded only in Yèshì’s Lúzhútáng shūmù; afterward it is no longer encountered — by the late Míng it had already been lost. What survives is solely these two juǎn. The book draws on a wide selection of voices and back-and-forths in vigorous disputation; he does not accommodate the readings of even Master Zhū and Master Cài [Shěn], and may be called one who genuinely stands on his own. As for places where he over-firmly holds his own view and assails earlier writers — for instance his claim that Yáo diǎn should not properly be classed with the Yú shū — these strike one as somewhat speculative; and being born in the late Southern Sòng, he never saw the rivers and mountains of the northwest in person, and what lies beyond the frontier walls is for him only second-hand hearsay. So in his glosses on, say, the source of the [Yellow] River in Yǔ gòng, errors and slips are also not few. Nevertheless one does not abandon a man for a single blemish.

In the same period there is also a Chén Dàyóu of Dūchāng who wrote a Shū zhuàn huì tōng — that man was the father of Chén Hào, and a student under Ráo Lǔ of Shuāngfēng. The world sometimes mistakenly takes them for one person; they are not. Respectfully submitted, Qiánlóng 39 / 1774, 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

The Shū jízhuàn huò wèn is one of the few Sòng-period Shàngshū commentaries surviving primarily through its huò wèn genre rather than its jízhuàn base — i.e., the disputational appendix outlived the main work. Chén Dàyóu of Dōngyáng (CBDB id 15026; jìnshì 1229; held only the Liù bù jià gé archive post; no Sòngshǐ biography) wrote a Shū jízhuàn and the present Huò wèn as a deliberate pair, modeled on Zhū Xī’s coupling of the Sì shū jízhū 四書集注 with the Sì shū huò wèn 四書或問. The Jízhuàn survived into the early Míng — Yè Shèng’s late-Míng Lúzhútáng shūmù 菉竹堂書目 still records it — but was lost in the late-Míng / early-Qīng transition; only the 2-juǎn Huò wèn persisted. The Sìkù compilers’ submission was made in Qiánlóng 39 / 1774.

The composition window is bracketed by Chén Dàyóu’s 1229 jìnshì and a defensible mid-thirteenth-century terminus; absent firmer evidence, 1230–1260 covers his probable mature productive period.

The doctrinal interest of the work lies in its independence. Chén Dàyóu disagrees freely with Zhū Xī, with Cài Shěn (whose Shū jízhuàn of 1209 is the contemporary standard), and with earlier Sòng commentators when he sees fit. The tíyào singles out two examples of his judgment: positively, that he draws on a wide selection of voices and refuses to accommodate orthodox readings; negatively, that some of his idiosyncratic positions overshoot — most notably his claim that Yáo diǎn 堯典 should not be classed under the Yú shū 虞書 (a position the Sìkù compilers find speculative, and which contradicts the canonical fourfold YúXiàShāngZhōu division). The geographic chapters of the Yǔ gòng are also uneven, since Chén — like the author of the Yǔ gòng shuō duàn (KR1b0012) and many other late-Sòng Shàngshū commentators — lived deep in the south and had no direct experience of the northwest or the frontier zones; passages on the source of the Yellow River are particularly weak.

The Dōngyáng / Dūchāng disambiguation is the tíyào’s most consequential single intervention on this work. The contemporaneous Chén Dàyóu of Dūchāng 都昌 (Jiāngxī) was a quite different scholar — a student of Ráo Lǔ 饒魯 (Shuāngfēng 雙峰) at Bāilùdòng 白鹿洞, and the father of Chén Hào 陳澔 (1260–1341), the much-later author of the Lǐjì jíshuō 禮記集說 — and wrote a Shū zhuàn huì tōng 書傳會通, also lost in independent transmission. Conflation of the two Chén Dàyóus is recorded in some Yuán and Míng catalogs and is the source of much error in modern bibliography.

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language translation of the Shū jízhuàn huò wèn is known. Treatment in modern scholarship is primarily via its place in the post-Cài Shěn dialectical reception of the Shū: see Cài Gēnxiáng 蔡根祥, Sòngdài Shàngshū xué àn 宋代尚書學案 (Taipei: Huámùlán, 2006); and Liú Qǐyú 劉起釪, Shàngshū yánjiū yàolùn 尚書研究要論 (Jǐnán: Qílǔ shūshè, 2007). For the Dōngyáng / Dūchāng disambiguation see Dù Hǎijūn 杜海軍, “Liǎng Chén Dàyóu kǎo” 兩陳大猷考 in Wénxiàn 2003.4.

Other points of interest

The work’s structural format — a huò wèn whose underlying jízhuàn is lost — is itself a documentary peculiarity. It means that for many of Chén Dàyóu’s contested glosses we possess only his defense of a position whose actual canonical-text exposition we cannot recover. The 38 chapters of the Shàngshū listed in the table of contents (covering essentially the entire transmitted canon, from Yáo diǎn through Qín shì with a mid-stretch Yǔ gòng breakdown by province) confirm that Chén’s underlying Jízhuàn covered the canon comprehensively.

The work’s idiosyncratic claim that Yáo diǎn does not belong to Yú shū anticipates much-later philological debates — Yán Ruòqú’s Shàngshū gǔwén shūzhèng (1745) revisits the chapter classification — but in Chén Dàyóu’s own time it had no significant uptake, partly because the Cài zhuàn’s growing curricular hegemony made independent Shàngshū taxonomies institutionally pointless.

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