Guǎnglín 廣林
Broadening the [Sānglǐ-fú] Corpus
by 虞喜 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction by Táng lèishū-citation of 虞喜 Yú Xǐ’s (281–356) lost Guǎnglín 廣林 — one of his three principal ritual treatises in this corpus alongside KR1d0094 Tōngyí and KR1d0096 Shìzhì. The CHANT reconstruction (CH2c1354) draws all surviving citations from Dù Yòu 杜佑’s Tōngdiǎn 通典 — specifically juàn 47, 48, 50, 51, 67, 68, 80, 87, 89, 95, 96, and 97. Like its companions, the text is a series of case-decisions on contested ritual cruxes, but with a broader scope: ancestral-shrine (zōngmiào 宗廟) ordering, jí-niǎo (sacrifice-protocol) rules, post-Wèi destruction-of-shrine (huǐ zhǔ 毀主) cases, and the liǎng-fēng-jūn (twice-enfeoffed prince) shrine question are all addressed. Several opinions are paired with 賀循 Hè Xún’s Sāngfú jì 喪服記, with 譙周 Qiáo Zhōu’s Wǔjīng ránfǒu 五經然否, and with the Zuǒ shì shuō 左氏說 tradition on the qī-miào 七廟 (seven-shrine) system.
Abstract
The title Guǎnglín — literally “broadening the Lín [classics]” — is a deliberate echo of the Hàn Yìlín 易林 / Sānlǐ lín 三禮林 genre of comprehensive supplementary commentary. The work was conceived as Yú Xǐ’s broader supplementing of contested Lǐjì and Yílǐ cases, paired with the narrower question-and-answer Tōngyí. The surviving fragments cover three principal biàn lǐ problem-areas:
(i) Shrine-order and huǐ-zhǔ protocol. A Yǒnghé 永和 2 (346) court memorial reports the question of where to store the destroyed-shrine tablets of the four Sīmǎ-clan ancestral princes (Zhēngxī, Zhāngjùn, Yǐngchuān, Jīngzhào fǔ jūn). Yú Xǐ argues against the Hàn precedent of burying in the yuán 園 and the Wèi-court precedent of burial between the two stairs, in favour of permanent secret storage (yǒngcáng 永藏), citing the Zuǒshì tradition’s gāo-zēng yuè-sì, shí-xiǎng èr-tiào, suì-jiā jí tán-shàn, zhōng-dì jí jiāo-zōng shí-shì (paragraphic ascending-frequency rule). His proposal is for storage in the jiā shì 夾室 (side-chamber).
(ii) Twice-enfeoffed-prince shrine cases. The court referral on the Qiáo wáng 譙王 (Sīmǎ Suì) / Zhōngshān wáng 中山王 case — whether two brothers each separately enfeoffed-as-prince should each have a chēng-miào (titulary-shrine) for their common father — receives Yú Xǐ’s ruling that two parallel chēng-miào are appropriate as each is a shǐfēng-zhī-jūn 始封之君 (founding-prince of the line), without subordination. The ruling sides with Xún Yǐ’s prior position against the imperial zhàoshū preference for shared shrine.
(iii) The qī-miào / zōng-tiào relation. Yú Xǐ argues against 譙周 Qiáo Zhōu’s Wǔjīng ránfǒu that the seven-shrine system did not originate with Zhōu (citing the Yījīng “seven generations” reference), and against the conventional reading of Zhōuguān “zōng-tiào” as referring only to yuǎn-miào (distant shrines), insisting on a reverse-counting (“nì shǔ chéng”) principle for shrine inheritance.
The reconstruction is exclusively from Tōngdiǎn citations; no other lèishū tradition (Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū, Hànxuétáng cóngshū) records substantive new material for the work. The dating bracket reflects Yú Xǐ’s documented lifespan (281–356), with the Yǒnghé 2 (346) reference in the surviving text confirming composition no earlier than that year.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The text is treated paragraph-by-paragraph in KR2m0014 Tōngdiǎn studies and in Eastern-Jìn court-ritual scholarship.
Other points of interest
The Guǎnglín and Tōngyí together constitute the largest single-author corpus of Eastern-Jìn biàn lǐ judgements to survive, with the Yǒnghé 2 (346) huǐ-zhǔ ruling especially important as documentation of the moment when the southern Jìn court was forced — for political and practical reasons — to settle the four-fǔ-jūn shrine question that the parallel Wèi-court ritualists had not concluded.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Tōngdiǎn: https://ctext.org/tongdian