Lǐjì yàoyì 禮記要義
Essential Meanings of the Book of Rites
by 魏了翁 (撰)
About the work
A Southern Sòng yàoyì 要義 (“essential meanings”) digest of the Lǐjì in 33 juàn by Wèi Liǎowēng 魏了翁 (1178–1237), the Lǐzhōu 邛州 Pǔjiāng 蒲江 jìnshì who became one of the senior Dàoxué 道學 ministers of the late Southern Sòng court. The work is the Lǐjì member of Wèi Liǎowēng’s projected Jiǔ jīng yàoyì 九經要義 series — the same editorial enterprise that produced the Zhōuyì yàoyì 周易要義, Shàngshū yàoyì 尚書要義, MáoShī yàoyì 毛詩要義, Yílǐ yàoyì KR1d0033, Chūnqiū yàoyì, Lǐjì yàoyì, Lúnyǔ yàoyì, Mèngzǐ yàoyì, and Xiàojīng yàoyì — a coherent late-Southern-Sòng project to digest the standard HànTáng zhùshū down to its essential textual decisions, organised topically rather than by canonical chapter order. The Sìbù cóngkān reproduction is from the surviving Sòng imprint, with substantial textual lacunae.
Abstract
Wèi Liǎowēng (1178–1237, zì Huáfǔ 華父, hào Hèshān 鶴山) was one of the most senior Dàoxué statesmen of the late Southern Sòng court — jìnshì of 1199 — who reached Cānzhī zhèngshì (deputy chief councillor) in the Lǐzōng era and was a major patron of the late-Southern-Sòng Dàoxué revival following the lifting of the Qìngyuán dǎngjīn 慶元黨禁 proscription on Zhū Xī’s school. The Yàoyì series was composed during his political eclipse — particularly during his Tàichángsì 太常寺 office and after his banishments — as an effort to systematise the accumulated late-Hàn through Táng zhùshū tradition into a usable single-volume reference. The format selects key passages of Zhèng Xuán’s annotation and Kǒng Yǐngdá’s zhèngyì and arranges them under topic-headings, dropping the canonical order in favour of analytic reorganisation.
The dating bracket 1220–1237 reflects the period of Wèi Liǎowēng’s active scholarly work after his Tàichángsì office through to his death; the precise composition date of the Lǐjì yàoyì is undocumented. The Sìkù Yílǐ yàoyì tíyào (which discusses the Yàoyì series as a whole) emphasises Wèi Liǎowēng’s editorial principle of preserving the zhùshū base while selecting only the textually substantive passages — a method later judged by Qīng evidential scholars (notably YùRuòqú 閻若璩, Sìshū shìdì 四書釋地) to have anticipated the methods of the kǎojù school.
The work’s Sòng-imprint survival is partial: the SBCK reproduction is from a fragmentary Sòng edition with several juan missing or damaged. The standard scholarly access is through the Sìkùquánshū copy, which is itself a Qīng reconstruction. The Yílǐ yàoyì member of the same series KR1d0033 is more completely preserved; the Lǐjì yàoyì tradition — perhaps because the Lǐjì itself is much more voluminous — survives in a more attenuated form.
Translations and research
- Sòng shǐ 宋史 j. 437 (biography of Wèi Liǎowēng).
- Hèshān xiānsheng dà-quán wén-jí 鶴山先生大全文集 (Wèi Liǎowēng’s collected works) — primary biographical source.
- Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1279) (Harvard-Yenching, 2007) — situates the Yàoyì series in the late-Southern-Sòng examination culture.
- Pèng Lín 彭林, Sānlǐ yánjiū rùmén 三禮研究入門 (Fùdàn dàxué chūbǎnshè, 2012) — covers Wèi Liǎowēng’s Yàoyì enterprise.
Other points of interest
Wèi Liǎowēng’s Yàoyì series stands at an interesting editorial crossroads in Sòng classical scholarship: it is a Dàoxué project (Wèi was one of the central figures of the post-Qìngyuán dǎngjīn Zhū Xī revival) but it is methodologically a HànTáng zhùshū digest rather than a LǐZhūXué exegesis. This makes it more useful as a critical-text reference than as a doctrinal exposition, and explains both its admiration by later Qīng evidential scholars and its relative neglect in the YuánMíng curriculum after Chén Hào’s KR1d0059 Lǐjì jíshuō dominated the examination system.
Links
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Liaoweng
- Chinaknowledge: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/liji.html