Máoshī 毛詩
The Mao Recension of the Classic of Poetry by 毛亨 (Máo Hēng, zhuàn 傳), 鄭玄 (Zhèng Xuán, jiān 箋, 127–200), 陸德明 (Lù Démíng, yīnyì 音義, c. 550–630)
About the work
The standard Máoshī 毛詩 in 20 juǎn with the three foundational layers of pre-Táng commentary: the Máo zhuàn 毛傳 (“Old Glosses and Traditions”) attributed to Máo Hēng of the early Western Hàn; the jiān 箋 (“annotations / collation notes”) of Zhèng Xuán, completed c. 187 CE, which both supplements and silently corrects the Máo zhuàn; and the yīnyì 音義 (“phonetic and philological gloss”) drawn from Lù Démíng’s Jīngdiǎn shìwén 經典釋文 (preface dated 583), which was attached interlinearly to the text in the standard mediaeval recension. This is the SBCK (Sìbù cóngkān 四部叢刊) photo-reprint of an early Sòng edition: the standard textual referent for Máoshī studies prior to the appearance of the Sìkù-collated and Ruǎn Yuán-recensed editions.
Abstract
The Máo recension was one of four early Western-Hàn lines of Shī 詩 transmission (Lǔ 魯, Qí 齊, Hán 韓, Máo 毛); the first three were jīnwén 今文 (Modern Script), the Máo the only gǔwén 古文 (Old Script) tradition. The Hàn shū yìwén zhì 漢書藝文志 lists “Máoshī 二十九卷” plus “Máoshī gùxùn zhuàn 三十卷,” and the Hàn shū · Rúlín zhuàn 漢書·儒林傳 traces the discipular line through Hé Jiān Xiànwáng 河間獻王 (Liú Dé 劉德, d. 130 BCE), under whose patronage the Máo Shī was established as official learning in Hé Jiān commandery. By the early Eastern Hàn the Máo recension had absorbed substantial portions of the Lǔ and Hán glosses; by the time of Zhèng Xuán it was effectively the only living Shī tradition.
Zhèng Xuán’s jiān — completed at his Gāomì 高密 retreat in his maturity — was the decisive intervention. He corrects, supplements, and on occasion silently overrides the Máo zhuàn; subsequent commentary tradition (the zhèngyì 正義 of Kǒng Yǐngdá KR1c0004, all of Sòng Shī exegesis, all of Qīng evidential reconstruction) reads the Máo zhuàn through the lens of the jiān. As Wilkinson notes, “Shi (Odes, Songs) were normally referred to just as that or Maoshi 毛詩, and only infrequently as Shijing 詩經” (Chinese History: A New Manual §28.4): the Shī tradition is, in practical terms, the Máoshī-with-jiān tradition.
The interlinear yīnyì layer is derived from the Shī portion of Lù Démíng’s Jīngdiǎn shìwén, the great Suí–Táng phonological-philological reference work; in the SBCK edition it is set in half-character columns within the main text, identifying variant readings, fǎnqiè 反切 phonetic glosses, and inherited mid-Hàn through LiùCháo philological materials.
The SBCK base (custom_id SB11n003) reprints the Sòng-printed edition formerly held by Zhāng Yuánjì 張元濟 / the Hānfēn lóu 涵芬樓 collection at the Commercial Press; it is one of the standard reference editions of the Máoshī alongside the YuánSòng zhùshū and the Ruǎn Yuán Shísān jīng zhùshū of 1815.
Translations and research
For comprehensive translation history and bibliography see KR1c0001. The most thorough modern Chinese edition of the Máoshī with zhuàn and jiān (without later shū) is Liú Yùqìng 劉毓慶 et al., Máoshī zhèng yì 毛詩鄭義 (Zhōnghuá, 2010); for the philology of the Máo zhuàn / jiān layer specifically, Hú Chéngqǒng 胡承珙, Máoshī hòu jiān 毛詩後箋 (1846, repr. Huánghuái shūshè 1999); Mǎ Ruìchén 馬瑞辰, Máoshī chuán jiān tōng shì 毛詩傳箋通釋 (Tóngzhì-era; mod. ed. Zhōnghuá 1989); Chén Huàn 陳奐, Shī Máoshì zhuàn shū 詩毛氏傳疏 (1849; mod. ed. Zhōngguó shūdiàn 1984). Western critical scholarship: Bernhard Karlgren, “Glosses on the Book of Odes” (BMFEA 14, 16, 18, 1942–46); Jeffrey Riegel, “Shih ching,” in Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (1993).
Other points of interest
The Máo zhuàn layer is in places terse to the point of opacity (e.g. its single-graph glosses on rare Shī lexicon), and the Zhèng jiān effectively constitutes the operational reading of the Máo gloss for almost all subsequent commentators. The disentanglement of the two strata — distinguishing what is “really” Máo from what is Zhèng’s silent reformulation — is a defining problem of Qīng evidential Shī scholarship from KR1c0049 Máoshī jīgǔ biān onward.
Links
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Commentary
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3837080
- Sìbù cóngkān edition reprint: Shāngwù yìnshūguǎn (Commercial Press), Shanghai, 1929.