Zhōulǐ Niè-shì yīn 周禮聶氏音
Master Niè’s Phonological Commentary on the Zhōulǐ
by 聶氏 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction of an otherwise unidentifiable Niè 聶 family-scholar’s lost Zhōulǐ Niè-shì yīn 周禮聶氏音 — a phonological commentary on the Zhōulǐ (cf. KR1d0001) in the same Eastern-Jìn / Northern-Wèi yīn-yì tradition as KR1d0109 Zhōulǐ Xú-shì yīn and KR1d0110 Zhōulǐ Lǐ-shì yīn. The CHANT entry CH2e1075 attributes it to “聶龘” — a name otherwise unattested in standard biographical sources, possibly a graphic-error transmission. The CHANT reconstruction is drawn exclusively from Lù Démíng 陸德明’s Jīngdiǎn shìwén 經典釋文.
Abstract
The text is the most fragmentary of the four reconstructed Zhōulǐ yīn works in this corpus. The opening preserved fragment is from the Dìguān sītú 地官司徒 Jūn-rén 均人 section: “fēng nián zé gōng xún yòng sān-rì yān” 豐年則公旬用三日焉, with xún 旬 glossed via the Shī-jīng xún-xún yuán-xí zhī xún 㽦㽦原隰之㽦 graph and the fǎn-qiè gloss cháng-chún fǎn 常純反.
The “Niè” 聶 family is not identified to any standard Six-Dynasties biographical record; the conventional surmise (e.g. in Zhōngguó cǐdiǎn 中國辭典 reference works) is that this is a Northern-Wèi-era yīn-yì tradition, possibly continuing from the (lost) Liù-cháo Niè-family Confucian school. The CHANT-listed “聶龘” — a graphic anomaly (the rare 龘 character is normally a biàn-tǐ of 龑) — has been read alternately as 聶熊 (Niè Xióng) or 聶崇 (Niè Chóng) in various reference reconstructions.
The dating bracket (386–535) is set very broadly to cover the Northern Wèi period during which a “Niè-shì” phonological school would have been active; tighter dating is impossible from internal evidence.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The work survives only as scattered Lù-Démíng-citations.
Other points of interest
The Zhōulǐ Niè-shì yīn is the most attribution-problematic of the four reconstructed Zhōulǐ yīn works in this corpus; its preservation only through Lù Démíng’s authoritative Jīngdiǎn shìwén citation chain is the principal reason for its survival at all. The author “聶氏” is taken here as an unidentified clan-school attribution, with the specific personal name 聶龘 (CHANT) treated as an unreliable later graphic reconstruction.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Jīngdiǎn shìwén: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&res=608648