Zhōulǐ fùgǔ biān 周禮復古編
Restoring the Antiquity of the Rites of Zhōu
by 兪庭椿 (撰)
About the work
A short polemical work in one juan by Yú Tíngchūn 兪庭椿 (jìnshì 1172), arguing that the lost Dōngguān 冬官 portion of the Zhōulǐ (KR1d0001) was not in fact lost but absorbed into the surviving five ministries; offices in excess of the supposed canonical sixty per ministry could therefore be redistributed back to the Dōngguān. Founding text of the Dōngguān bù wáng 冬官不亡 (“the Dōngguān is not lost”) school of Zhōulǐ exegesis, which the Sìkù editors regard as fundamentally illegitimate but which inspired a substantial later sub-tradition through Qiū Kuí 邱葵 and Wú Chéng 吳澄 down to the end of the Míng. Originally three juan in the Sòngshǐ yìwén zhì; survives in one juan as an appendix to Chén Yǒurén 陳友仁’s recension of Zhōulǐ jíshuō KR1d0013.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Zhōulǐ fùgǔ biān in one juan was composed by Yú Tíngchūn of the Sòng. Tíngchūn (zì Shòuwēng, native of Línchuān) was a jìnshì of Qiándào 8 [1172] who served as magistrate of Gǔtián. The Sòng zhì registers this book as three juan; the present text is in one, marked as edited by Chén Yǒurén — for Yǒurén when revising the Zhōulǐ jíshuō appended this work to the end.
Tíngchūn’s argument runs: the offices subordinate to each of the five ministries are sixty, and there cannot be any “surplus”; the surplus offices are all to be lifted out and used to fill in the Dōngguān. This is bored-from-empty arbitrary judgement, and its absurdity is hardly worth refuting. He also says that the Tiānguān shìfù and the Chūnguān shìfù, and the Xiàguān huánrén and the Qiūguān huánrén, are each one office redundantly listed and ought to be reduced to one. The argument seems clever, but its absurdity is even greater. The two shìfù and two huánrén, never mind that their official duties differ — the xùguān itself shows that the Tiānguān shìfù belongs to the king’s rear palace, hence is grouped with the jiǔ pín and the eighty-one royal women, none of whom have subordinate staff. The Chūnguān shìfù, by contrast, is the king’s palace officer; for each office there is a qīng of one, xià dàfū of four, zhōng shì of eight, nǚfǔ of two, nǚshǐ of two, xī of sixteen — manifestly different from the Tiānguān shìfù. Zhèng Xuán’s note proves this point by analogy with the Hàn dàchángqiū, zhānshì, zhōng shǎofǔ and tàipú offices, and his argument is fundamentally correct. Tíngchūn merges the two and ends up mistaking the Chūnguān shìfù for women.
As to the Sīmǎ huánrén (掌下士六人, shǐ 2, tú 12) and the Sīkòu huánrén (掌中士四人, shǐ 4, xū 4, tú 40) — if these were a single office, why would the subordinate zhōng- and xiàshì and the shǐ, xū, tú counts differ as they do? This is the case of one who is fond of inventing strange theories ending up self-blinded.
Yet the talk of “restoring the antiquity” begins with Tíngchūn, and afterwards Qiū Kuí 邱葵 and Wú Chéng 吳澄 inherit his absurdity. The Zhōulǐ commentators consequently developed an entire sub-school holding that the Dōngguān was not lost; sects multiplied and the abuse persisted to the end of the Míng. So we deliberately preserve the book to record the origin of the corruption-and-derangement of the holy classic, as a clear warning to scholars.
Respectfully revised and submitted, tenth 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
Yú Tíngchūn’s Fùgǔ biān is the founding document of a Southern-Sòng-to-late-Míng exegetical tradition holding that the missing Dōngguān portion of the Zhōulǐ could be reconstituted from the surviving five ministries by detaching all “surplus” office-titles. The Sìkù editors regard this as a categorical philological error and admit the work to the Sìkù only as a salutary negative example. The argument has been universally rejected by modern scholarship — both because the supposed canonical figure of sixty offices per ministry is itself a Sòng construction with no HànWèi attestation, and because the textual evidence Yú adduces (especially the alleged duplication of shìfù and huánrén) collapses on inspection of staffing-list details, as Zhèng Xuán’s gloss already noted.
The school nevertheless attracted serious adherents. Qiū Kuí 邱葵 (1244–1333) wrote a Zhōulǐ quánshū 周禮全書 reconstructing a complete Dōngguān on Yú’s principles. Wú Chéng’s KR1d0034 Yílǐ yìjīng zhuàn extends the recompositional method to the Yílǐ, and his Zhōulǐ kǎozhù 周禮考注 (not in the Sìkù) follows Yú’s framework on the Zhōulǐ itself. Late-Míng commentators such as Kē Shàngqiān 柯尚遷 (KR1d0016) carry forward the school. The Qīng Hàn xué revival under the Sìkù editors put a definitive end to it.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The work and the school it founded are discussed briefly in Yè Chúnfāng 葉純芳, Sòngdài Zhōulǐ xué shǐ 宋代周禮學史 (Líng-bō chūbǎn 2010), and in surveys of Zhōulǐ historiography but have received no monograph treatment.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù editors’ decision to include negative-example works like the Fùgǔ biān — preserving them precisely to document where the editors regard later scholarship as having gone wrong — is one of the more revealing methodological choices in the Sìkù quánshū project, and an explicit precedent for the Hàn xué-driven critical-historical posture of the Qīng evidential movement.
Links
- Chinaknowledge: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/zhouli.html