Sāngfú shìyí 喪服釋疑
Resolving Doubts on Mourning Dress
by 劉智 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction of 劉智 Liú Zhì’s (c. 245–305) lost Sāngfú shìyí 喪服釋疑 — Liú Zhì’s principal Sāngfú (mourning-dress) treatise, distinct from his more general KR1d0094 / KR1d0099-cited Shìyí 釋疑 (question-and-answer ritual rulings). Liú Zhì is the named interlocutor of 虞喜 Yú Xǐ in the KR1d0094 Tōngyí fragment-record, where his Shìyí supplies first-rulings and Yú Xǐ’s Tōngyí the complementary judgements. The CHANT reconstruction (CH2e1084) is drawn from Dù Yòu 杜佑’s Tōngdiǎn 通典 citations.
Abstract
The opening preserved fragment is a question on Lǐjì-Wén-wáng shì-zǐ: “gōng sù-fú bù jǔ, wú qí lún zhī sāng, wú fú, qīn kū zhī” 公素服不舉，無其倫之喪，無服。親哭之 — the duke wears the plain dress and ceases entertainment, but lacking a lún (collateral-relation) mourning-case, wears no mourning-dress and personally performs the wailing.
Liú Zhì’s Sāngfú shìyí addresses the technical question of what mourning the duke (and by extension the Son of Heaven) should observe for mourning-cases outside the canonical five-grade Sāngfú schema — i.e. for relatives by yì (rightness) rather than qīn (blood-kinship), for foster-children, and for collateral cases not anticipated by the Sāngfú zhuàn. The principal Liú Zhì position throughout is restrictive: where the Sāngfú does not prescribe, no formal mourning-dress should be assumed, but personal wailing (qīn kū) should be observed as an emotional commitment.
The dating bracket (265–320) reflects Liú Zhì’s documented Western- and early-Eastern-Jìn court career. The Sāngfú shìyí is conventionally placed in his middle-career Yǔshǐ-zhōng-chéng and Sǎn-qí cháng-shì period.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. Treated in surveys of Western-Jìn ritual scholarship and in Tōngdiǎn-source-criticism.
Other points of interest
Liú Zhì’s restrictive position in the Sāngfú shìyí — that absent a canonical Sāngfú rule, no formal mourning-dress should be assumed — is the doctrinal counterweight to 賀循’s more inclusive KR1d0117 Hè-shì sāngfú pǔ approach. The two positions frame the Eastern-Jìn court’s debates on cross-canonical mourning cases.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Tōngdiǎn: https://ctext.org/tongdian