古文尚書冤詞

Gǔwén Shàngshū yuān cí 古文尚書冤詞

Lament-and-Plea for the Old-Text Documents by 毛奇齡 (zhuàn 撰)

About the work

The classic counter-attack on Yán Ruòqú’s Shàngshū gǔwén shū zhèng (KR1b0048): a vigorous 8-juǎn defense of the authenticity of the Gǔwén Shàngshū by Máo Qílíng 毛奇齡 (1623–1716), the prolific and contrarian early-Qīng polemicist. The title — yuān cí 冤詞 — means “complaint of injustice / lament for one wrongly accused”: Máo Qílíng treats the Gǔwén Shàngshū as a defendant unjustly condemned by Wú Yù, Zhū Xī, Wú Chéng, Méi Zhuó, and Yán Ruòqú over five centuries, and writes a forensic defense at trial.

The Sìkù WYG copy of the work has missing source files in the Kanripo extraction; the tíyào below is taken from the Kyoto University Zinbun digital edition (entry 0024901), and the abstract treats the tíyào’s analysis since direct quotation from the body is not possible without the source files.

The work is structured as a sequence of ten “lament” essays: (1) zǒng lùn 總論 (general argument); (2) jīnwén Shàngshū 今文尚書; (3) gǔwén Shàngshū 古文尚書; (4) “the lament begins with Mr Zhū” 古文之冤始於朱氏 (— the Sìkù compilers note this is reversed: Wú Yù was prior to Zhū Xī, and the original “Shū bǐ zhuàn 書埤傳” doubt should attach to Wú); (5) “the lament is consummated by Mr Wú” 古文之冤成於吳氏 (— similarly reversed); (6–10) injustices regarding chapter-titles, the Shū xù, the Shū xiǎo xù, the Shū phrasing, and the Shū characters.

Tiyao

Imperially Authorized Sìkù Quánshū. [Classics, division 12; Books-class, second division.] Gǔwén Shàngshū yuān cí, eight juǎn. [Source recension: copy presented by the Zhèjiāng provincial governor.]

By Máo Qílíng of our State. Qílíng has the Zhòngshì Yì, already entered in our catalog. His learning is broad and synthesizing, and he is fond of refutational disputation in pursuit of victory; whatever others have said, he must by force reverse the language. So the Yílǐ in seventeen chapters had no ancient dissent — only Zhāng Rúyú’s Shāntáng kǎosuǒ records Yuè Shǐ’s “five doubt-able points,” but later Confucians too gave it no credence. Qílíng alone picks up that dropped argument and denounces [the Yílǐ] as a Warring-States forgery. The Gǔwén Shàngshū, since Wú Yù and Master Zhū, has been doubted as forged by all; and when Yán Ruòqú composed the Gǔwén Shàngshū shū zhèng, Qílíng again defended it forcefully as authentic.

Knowing that the Kǒng Ān’guó zhuàn contains place-names from later than Ān’guó’s time which cannot be hidden, [Qílíng] therefore changes his approach: drawing on the wording of the Suí shū jīngjí zhì he holds that what Méi Zé submitted was the Kǒng zhuàn (commentary), not the Gǔwén Shàngshū itself; the Gǔwén Shàngshū, [he claims], was already privately transmitted in society, and Jiǎ Kuí, Mǎ Róng, and the various Confucians did not see it.

— [The Sìkù compilers then mount a detailed refutation, drawing on Mǎ Róng’s preface to the Shū*, Zhèng Xuán’s named commentary on sixteen chapters, the witness of* Shǐjì*,* Hànshū yìwén zhì*,* Hàn shū yìwén zhì etc., the Dù Yù annotations to the Zuǒ zhuàn*, and Zhào Qí’s* Mèngzǐ annotations and Guō Pú’s Erya annotations. They conclude:]

The Méi Zé recension has been circulating long; its content is in fact gathered from lost canonical fragments, arranged and connected together; therefore its meaning is not at variance with the sage. There is absolutely no principle for abolishing it. But that it is decisively not the original Kǒng family book — the verifying-evidence runs to many sides; this is not something one hand can fully cover up. Recently Huì Dòng 惠棟 and Wáng Màozhuō 王懋竑 have continued the verification; their argument is even clearer; basically there is no longer need to take up the comparison-and-discussion afresh.

Only: Qílíng’s talent and disputation are sufficient to move people; and he has used “defending the canon” as his banner — a most respectable cover-name. Were [his book] to be set aside and not entered, people would on the contrary suspect his argument has some basis. Therefore we preserve it [in the Sìkù] together [with the Shū zhèng], and have summarized the broad thrust [of his case], so that one may know his argument amounts only to this; future readers may correlate-and-compare the two.

— [Submission date not preserved on the WYG copy; the tíyào itself bears the standard Sìkù compilers’ signatures.]

Abstract

The Gǔwén Shàngshū yuān cí is the principal Qing-period counter-attack on the Yán Ruòqú anti-Gǔwén case (KR1b0048). Composed by Máo Qílíng 毛奇齡 (1623–1716, the same Hangzhou-region polymath whose Zhòngshì Yì 仲氏易 is a major Qing Yìjīng commentary), the work mounts a forensic defense of the authenticity of the 25 Gǔwén Shàngshū chapters. The composition window in the frontmatter (1690–1716) covers Máo Qílíng’s mature productive period after Yán Ruòqú’s manuscript circulation began; the Yuān cí presupposes the Shū zhèng and was definitely composed after 1690.

Máo Qílíng’s strategy, as the Sìkù tíyào characterizes it, is precise: he concedes that the Kǒng Ān’guó zhuàn (commentary) contains anachronistic geographic terms post-dating Kǒng Ān’guó, but argues that these undermine only the zhuàn, not the canonical text it accompanies. He posits that the canonical Gǔwén Shàngshū itself was transmitted in private circulation (off the academic record, hence Jiǎ Kuí 賈逵 and Mǎ Róng 馬融 didn’t see it); that Méi Zé’s 320-CE upload was of the Kǒng zhuàn paired with this independently-circulating canonical text; and that the Suí shū jīngjí zhì’s wording on the Eastern-Jìn transmission supports this two-track theory.

The Sìkù compilers’ detailed refutation — preserved in the tíyào — marshals five distinct lines of evidence:

(1) Mǎ Róng’s preface to the Shū (cited in the Suí zhì and Jīngdiǎn shìwén) explicitly says “sixteen chapters lost; absolutely no school-explanation”; Zhèng Xuán’s commentary names 16 specific lost chapters (Shùn diǎn, Mì zuò, Jiǔ gòng, Dà Yǔ mó, Yì Jì, Wǔ zǐ zhī gē, Yǔn zhēng, Tāng gào, Xián yǒu yī dé, Diǎn bǎo, Yī xùn, Sì mìng, Yuán mìng, Wǔ chéng, Lǚ áo, Jiǒng mìng) — patently different from the 25 chapters Méi Zé submitted as Gǔwén. Máo Qílíng inverts this: rather than concluding that the discrepancy proves Méi’s chapters are forged, he concludes that the discrepancy proves MǎZhèng didn’t see the real Gǔwén.

(2) The Shǐjì (司馬遷, Kǒng Ān’guó’s student), Hànshū yìwén zhì (班固, who edited the Lántái archive), and Liú Xīn’s 劉歆 letter to the Tàicháng all clearly attest that the Kǒngbì 孔壁 (Kǒng-wall) discovery yielded 16 additional chapters, not 25. The 25-chapter form of the Gǔwén therefore cannot be the Kǒng-wall original.

(3) The MǎZhèng commentary covers 29 chapters (= the jīnwén count, removing the 16 “no-school-explanation” lost chapters); the Suí zhì and Jīngdiǎn shìwén both confirm this. The MǎZhèng recension is therefore the Kǒng-line Shàngshū that was actually scholiastically commented; the 25-chapter form is a later forgery.

(4) Dù Yù’s Zuǒ zhuàn annotations distinguish “Shàngshū somewhere” (an extant chapter) from “lost-from-the-Shū” (a chapter known to him only as missing); Dù never identifies a chapter as both Gǔwén and “lost.” If the Gǔwén (in 25 chapters) had existed for him, his “lost” attributions would name those chapters. Similarly with Zhào Qí’s Mèngzǐ annotations and Guō Pú’s Erya annotations.

(5) Specific yì shū 逸書 (lost-Shū) citations preserved by Zhào Qí and Guō Pú do not appear in the surviving Gǔwén — proof again that the Gǔwén is not the source from which these earlier writers drew.

The compilers’ synthetic verdict — that the Méi Zé recension is “decisively not the original Kǒng family book” but that since it is “assembled from lost canonical fragments” and its meaning is “not at variance with the sage” it has “no principle for abolishing it” — is the consensus Qing position: the Gǔwén Shàngshū is forged but should be retained as a useful synthetic compilation. Yán Ruòqú had drawn the same conclusion. Modern scholarship continues to follow this verdict.

The Sìkù compilers’ decision to preserve Máo Qílíng’s Yuān cí in the Quán shū is openly tactical: Máo’s “talent and disputation are sufficient to move people”; suppressing the work would risk readers thinking the case unrebutted; therefore preserve-and-refute is preferred. This is one of the cleaner Sìkù tíyào statements of the editorial principle of preservation-with-explicit-refutation.

The work is paired in the Shū lèi with KR1b0048 and KR1b0050 (Huì Dòng’s Gǔ wén Shàngshū kǎo — the next entry — which the tíyào notes as having “continued the verification” in the post-Yán Ruòqú generation).

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language translation of the Gǔwén Shàngshū yuān cí is known. The work is treated extensively in the Gǔ-wén historiography literature: Jiǎng Shànguó 蔣善國, Shàngshū zōngshù 尚書綜述 (Shanghai: Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1988); Liú Qǐyú 劉起釪, Shàngshū yánjiū yàolùn 尚書研究要論 (Jǐnán: Qílǔ shūshè, 2007); Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1984), which reads Máo Qílíng’s defense as one of the last serious efforts to maintain the Gǔ-wén against the rising tide of kǎojù. For Máo Qílíng more broadly see his entry in 毛奇齡 person note.

Other points of interest

The Sìkù compilers’ explicit identification of Máo Qílíng’s strategy — partition the question into (a) the Kǒng zhuàn commentary’s authenticity (conceded as compromised) and (b) the Gǔwén canonical text’s authenticity (defended) — is methodologically interesting: it illustrates how the most sophisticated Qing-period defense of the Gǔwén arrived at a two-tier theory that both protected the canonical text and granted the philological case against the commentary. The strategy nevertheless failed because the Gǔwén canonical text shares anachronistic features with the Kǒng zhuàn, indicating common forgery rather than independent transmission.

The Sìkù compilers’ explicit naming of Huì Dòng 惠棟 (1697–1758) and Wáng Màozhuō 王懋竑 (1668–1741) as the post-Yán-Ruòqú generation that “continued the verification” registers the institutional self-understanding of the high Qing kǎojù tradition: by the 1750s the case was effectively closed, and the Sìkù preservation of Máo Qílíng’s defense was already historiographical rather than substantive.

The Sìkù file structure for KR1b0049 in the Kanripo extraction has missing source files; the WYG copy itself does exist, and the tíyào preserved in the Kyoto Zinbun digital edition provides full access to the work’s structure and the Sìkù compilers’ assessment.

Links

• CBDB: see 毛奇齡 person note
• Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15912024 (毛奇齡)
• Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào, Shū lèi, Gǔwén Shàngshū yuān cí entry