Lùshì shī shū guǎngyào 陸氏詩疏廣要
Mr. Lu’s Sub-Commentary on the Classic of Poetry, Expanded with Essentials by 陸璣 (Lù Jī, zì Yuánkè 元恪, fl. 3rd c., Wú-state) — base text; 毛晉 (Máo Jìn, zì Zǐjìn 子晉, hào Jígǔgé zhǔrén 汲古閣主人, 1599–1659, Chángshú 常熟) — guǎngyào 廣要 (“expanded essentials”)
About the work
Máo Jìn’s late-Míng / early-Qīng expansion of KR1c0005 Máoshī cǎomù niǎoshòu chóngyú shū. The original Lù Jī text in 2 juǎn is here re-divided into 4 juǎn (each of the original two further sub-divided), with Máo Jìn supplying additional citations from rhyme-books, Sòng Shī commentaries (e.g. Yán Càn’s Shī jí 詩緝 KR1c0023), epigraphic materials, and his own bibliographic resources. The Sìkù editors fault Máo Jìn for occasionally drifting off-topic — they single out his note on Hèmíng yú jiǔ gāo 鶴鳴於九皋, which appends a long discussion of the Jiāoshān 焦山 Yìhè míng 瘞鶴銘 stele inscription that has nothing to do with the Shī — but credit him with consistent appeal to evidence at a moment when many late-Míng Shī commentators were turning the Classic into a literary plaything.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Máoshī Lù shū guǎngyào in 4 juǎn — Lù Jī of Wú as base, Máo Jìn of the Míng as annotator. Jìn’s original name was Fèngbāo 鳳苞, zì Zǐjìn, native of Chángshú; his family was wealthy in books and images, the world transmitting many manuscripts copied from Sòng editions; he held many; he also delighted in cutting and printing old books, his Jígǔgé blocks circulating to this day; and so in the late Míng he made a name for breadth and bibliophily. He cut the Jīn dài bìshū 津逮秘書 in fifteen sets, all of them old plates from before the SòngYuán; only this work was Jìn’s own compilation.
The Lù Jī original is in 2 juǎn; each juǎn is again split into two sub-juǎn. Since his collection was rich, citations come easily; since he gathered widely, the variants and disagreements multiply, and the discussion of them must run on. Items like the entry on Nán shān yǒu tái 南山有臺, which uses rhyme-books to demonstrate textual loss; or Yǒu jí wéi jiāo 有集維鷮, which uses Yán Càn’s Shī jí to demonstrate variant readings — the textual investigation is not casual. As for his fondness for the unusual and his greed for breadth, he often errs by digression: in the Hèmíng yú jiǔ gāo entry, the appended Jiāoshān Yìhè míng kǎo 焦山瘞鶴銘考 leads off into stone-inscription matters with no connection to the classical sense — measured against the old method of glossing the Classics, this is contrary to the genre.
But though prone to verbiage, the work is still better than empty looseness. Late-Míng Shī-commentators often played at being clever, turning the sage-classics into casual essays; Jìn alone speaks evidence-by-evidence — therefore he should be retained, even though he overreaches. As they say, “judge his world.”
Respectfully revised and submitted, fourth month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng [1781].
General Compilers: Jǐ Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General Reviser: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
This is the principal carrier through which the Lù shū circulated in Qīng Shī scholarship. Máo Jìn (1599–1659) — head of the Jígǔgé 汲古閣 publishing house in Chángshú, the foremost private classical-text publisher of his generation — drew on his unparalleled library to expand Lù Jī’s terse third-century natural-history glosses with citations from the Ěryǎ yì 爾雅翼 (Luó Yuàn 羅願), Yán Càn’s Shī jí 詩緝 (KR1c0023), Lú Diàn 陸佃’s Pí yǎ 埤雅, and a wide range of Hàn through Míng rhyme-books, epigraphic studies, and miscellaneous notebooks. The result is a substantially larger work than the Lù base — in places three or four times the length — but Máo Jìn carefully marks the textual stratum: he keeps Lù Jī’s text in the upper register and his own additions in commentary form below, so the two layers can be read separately.
The Sìkù tíyào’s assessment is balanced: the work occasionally errs by digression (the Yìhè míng excursus is the standard example), but is grounded in evidence and is more reliable than the average Míng Shī commentary. The work has retained its scholarly currency: modern Shī natural-history work (e.g. Pan Fucheng 潘富俊’s Shījīng zhíwù tújiàn 詩經植物圖鑑, Shanghai 2002) still routinely cites it alongside the Lù base. The original separately-printed Jígǔgé edition is one of the standard reference forms; the Sìkù recension is a clean-set re-issue.
Translations and research
No English translation. The work is treated alongside KR1c0005 in modern Shī natural-history scholarship; the standard Chinese reference is Pan Fucheng (cited above) and Lù Wényù 陸文郁, Shī cǎo mù jīn shì 詩草木今釋 (Tianjin, 1957). On Máo Jìn and the Jígǔgé more broadly: Inoue Susumu 井上進, Min mat-shin shoki Mōshin shi-shū kō 明末清初毛晋詩集考 (Kyoto, 1991); Lucille Chia, “Of Three Mountain Street: The Commercial Publishers of Ming Nanjing,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley, 2005). Máo Jìn’s guǎngyào method has not received a dedicated study in any Western language.
Other points of interest
The Jiāoshān Yìhè míng digression flagged by the Sìkù editors is in fact one of the more interesting parts of the work for the historian of Míng / Qīng epigraphic studies: the Yìhè míng (a famous and famously elusive Six-Dynasties cliff-inscription, partially submerged in the Yangtze) was a focus of Míng / Qīng jīnshí xué 金石學 attention, and Máo Jìn’s discussion preserves a Míng-period state of the rubbing tradition that is otherwise hard to reconstruct. The Sìkù editors’ insistence that this material is irrelevant to Máoshī exegesis is, on a strict reading of the genre, fair; but as a witness to seventeenth-century epigraphic practice, the digression is itself a primary source.
Links
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Jin (Máo Jìn)