Lǐyì dáwèn 禮義答問
Question-and-Answer on Ritual Principles
by 范甯 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction of the lost Lǐyì dáwèn 禮義答問 attributed by CHANT (CH2c1362) to 范甯 Fàn Níng (339–401). The CHANT reconstruction draws all surviving citations from Dù Yòu 杜佑’s Tōngdiǎn 通典. However, the surviving fragments are dated to the Southern-Qí 南齊 Jiànyuán 建元 reign (479–482) and Yǒngmíng 永明 reign (483–493), substantially post-dating Fàn Níng’s death — making this almost certainly not Fàn Níng’s own Lǐyì dáwèn but rather a Southern-Qí court compendium of biàn-lǐ judgements organised as answers (dá) to questions raised in Fàn Níng’s earlier ritual scholarship (or alternatively a homonymous text by a different author transmitted under the same title).
Abstract
The transmitted “Lǐyì dáwèn” is the principal extant Southern-Qí court-ritual compilation, with the named principal interlocutor being 王儉 Wáng Jiǎn (452–489), Qí Shàngshū-lìng and Tài-zǐ shǎo-shī. The internal dating evidence:
- Jiànyuán 1, seventh month (479) opening memorial cycle on the jiāo-yīn (suburban-seasonal-comprehensive) sacrifice protocol;
- Jiànyuán 4 (482) subsequent court decisions;
- Yǒngmíng 1 (483) ruling on the nán-jiāo / míng-táng relation;
- Yǒngmíng 2 (484) further court memorials;
- Yǒngmíng 6 (488) ruling on the jīn-lù jiǔ-liú (gold-chariot nine-tassel) regalia, with 王儉 cited as the deciding voice and 何諲之 Hé Yìnzhī (the then Tài-cháng) providing the technical opinion.
The substantive content is overwhelmingly regalia / court-protocol (chē-fú 車服, qí-zhāng 旗章, jiā-fù 甲服) rather than mourning ritual: the jīn-lù and mù-lù chariot protocols, the gōng-qīng nine-section embroidery, the míng-táng arrangement for absent-from-court sacrifice, and the regalia downgrades for the sān-gōng and qīng ranks.
Authorship note. The CHANT and krp-titles attribution to 范甯 cannot be reconciled with the internal Southern-Qí dating. The most defensible reconstruction is that the text records a Southern-Qí court compendium that frequently cited 范甯’s earlier Lǐyì work as a base authority, and was subsequently catalogued under his name through bibliographic confusion. The actual compiler may be Wáng Jiǎn himself or a Wáng-school court-ritualist. The dating bracket here (479–493) reflects the documented internal-year range; the attribution to 范甯 in frontmatter follows the catalog convention but should be read as “Lǐyì dáwèn in the tradition associated with 范甯” rather than as a literal authorship claim.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The text is treated paragraph-by-paragraph as a Tōngdiǎn-source for Southern-Qí court-ritual reconstruction.
Other points of interest
The CHANT / krp-titles authorship attribution to 范甯 is in direct conflict with the dated Southern-Qí internal evidence — a paradigmatic case of how Táng-Sòng lèishū-citation can produce later-period bibliographic confusion when the same title is reused or extended. The text should be read as Southern-Qí court-ritual scholarship, with 王儉’s Lǐlùn chāo-lüè (KR1d0104) as its closest contemporaneous parallel.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Tōngdiǎn: https://ctext.org/tongdian