Lǐjīng huìyuán 禮經會元
Returning to the Source: An Anthology on the Ritual Classic
by 葉時 (撰)
About the work
Yè Shí’s 葉時 (fl. Lǐzōng era) four-juan topical treatise on the Zhōulǐ (KR1d0001), arranged as one hundred substantive essays on selected institutional themes rather than as a line-by-line commentary. Composed under the influence of the ChéngZhū Dàoxué school and explicitly framed as an anti-Wáng Ānshí response: Yè holds with Chéng Yí 程頤 that the institutions of the Zhōuguān presuppose the moral conditions described in the Guānjū 關雎 and Línzhǐ 麟趾 odes — a Reform-school misuse of the Zhōulǐ without those moral foundations is the source of the Sòng disaster. The catalog gives the date 1184; this is the early end of Yè’s adult activity. The composition probably belongs to the early to mid Lǐzōng era, when Yè held senior office.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Lǐjīng huìyuán in four juan was composed by Yè Shí of the Sòng. Shí (zì Xiùfā, native of Qiántáng) under Lǐzōng was a Lónggétú gé xuéshì and Guānglù dàfū, retiring at the higher age, posthumously named Wénkāng. The book is named “explication of the classic” but does not in fact gloss line-by-line — it lifts the principal topics of the Zhōulǐ and lists them as headings, in all one hundred chapters, all developed by lateral inference and cross-reference to set out their meaning. This is a case of subordinating the meanings of the classic to one’s own line of argument.
Shí was a friend of Zhū Xī and rejected Wáng Ānshí’s New Policies in the most uncompromising terms. He says that what Master Chéng [Yí] meant by “only with the intent of Guānjū and Línzhǐ can the institutions of the Zhōuguān be put into practice” was made for [the case of] Wáng Ānshí — and this is indeed so. But when he says the Dōngguān need not be supplied, and rebukes the Héjiān Xiànwáng for having taken the Kǎogōngjì and appended it to the Zhōulǐ (whereby it merely opened the way for Emperor Wǔ to neglect the classic), and even goes so far as to say that the corruption of the Zhōulǐ began with Zhèng Kāngchéng — these are all over-zealous denigrations of the ancients and lapse into the habit of self-establishing a school of one’s own.
His other arbitrary judgements occur from time to time, but he also has many that are deep, clear, and applicable in practice. For Shí had once given his attention to the implements of statecraft, and one cannot account him by the standard of an ordinary classical scholar.
Respectfully revised and submitted, second 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
The Lǐjīng huìyuán is one of the most distinctive Southern-Sòng works in the Zhōulǐ commentary tradition, both for its non-canonical genre (topical anthology rather than line gloss) and for its strongly Dàoxué-inflected stance. Yè Shí’s central thesis — that institutional reform fails without prior moral cultivation — is the orthodox ChéngZhū answer to the Reform-school appeal to the Zhōuguān, and Lǐjīng huìyuán is the most extended Sòng working-out of that answer.
The Sìkù editors approve Yè’s anti-Wáng position and his attention to statecraft applications, but flag two genuinely heterodox positions: (1) his agreement with Yú Tíngchūn (KR1d0006) that the Dōngguān is not in fact lost, and (2) his accusation that Zhèng Xuán was the original corrupter of the Zhōulǐ. Both are dismissed as the over-reach of “self-founding a school” (zì lì méndòu 自立門戶), but the editors recognise the work’s genuine institutional acuity.
The catalog dates the work to 1184; the catalog meta gives Yè’s floruit across the Lǐzōng reign (1224–1264), so the date 1184 is most plausibly understood as the starting boundary of Yè’s career rather than a precise composition date. The composition window adopted here (1180–1240) covers the most defensible bracket.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. Treated briefly in surveys of Sòng Zhōulǐ scholarship and Dàoxué statecraft.
Other points of interest
The work’s hundred-essay topical organisation is an unusual format in Sòng classical scholarship and prefigures the MíngQīng xuéàn 學案 and zhájì 札記 genres of substantive essay-collection. As a generic experiment, it is one of the Sòng landmarks in the move away from line-by-line zhùshū exegesis toward thematic and synthetic treatment of classical texts.
Links
- Chinaknowledge: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/zhouli.html