Hè-shì sāngfú pǔ 賀氏喪服譜
Master Hè’s Genealogical Chart of Mourning Dress
by 賀循 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction of 賀循 Hè Xún’s (260–319) lost Sāngfú pǔ 喪服譜 — his principal Sāngfú (mourning-dress) genealogical-chart commentary on the canonical Yílǐ-Sāngfú and Sāngfú-zhuàn. Hè Xún was the chief southern-school ritualist of the early Eastern Jìn court and the principal advisor to Jìn Yuándì on Sānlǐ matters; his ritual scholarship is the most substantial of the early-fourth-century court tradition. The CHANT reconstruction (CH2e1085) is drawn from Dù Yòu 杜佑’s Tōngdiǎn 通典 citations.
Abstract
The text opens with a zōng-yì 宗義 (lineage-doctrine) section establishing the canonical zōng-fǎ (lineage-law) framework: the bié-zǐ (collateral son) of an ancient zhū-hóu and the founding dàfū (great officer) of a state each became a tài-zǔ (great ancestor) with permanent shrine-worship. This sets the doctrinal foundation for the subsequent chart of mourning-grades through cross-generational and collateral kinship relations.
The substantive content covers the full Sāngfú zhuàn schedule:
(i) The five-grade mourning-dress system with detailed specifications for zhǎn-cuī (full mourning, three years), zī-cuī (one-year mourning), dà-gōng (nine-month), xiǎo-gōng (five-month), and sī-má (three-month) protocols.
(ii) Cross-generational mourning protocols for the cóng-fù (father’s collateral siblings), cóng-zǔ (grandfather’s collateral siblings), and their corresponding cóng-mǔ female relations.
(iii) The post-marriage downgrading protocols for the bride’s natal kin and the bride’s mourning for the husband’s kin.
(iv) The bié-zǐ wéi zǔ (collateral-son-as-founder) doctrine and its implications for the dà-zōng / xiǎo-zōng succession.
The dating bracket (280–319) reflects Hè Xún’s documented life-span in Jìn shū 68; the work is conventionally placed in his Eastern-Jìn Tài-cháng period (after 317), where it served as the court’s authoritative Sāngfú reference.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located on the Sāngfú pǔ as such. Hè Xún’s ritual scholarship is treated in:
- 楊志剛 Yáng Zhìgāng, Sānlǐ xué shǐ 三禮學史, chapters on Eastern-Jìn court ritualism.
Other points of interest
The pairing of 賀循’s Sāngfú pǔ (this work) and KR1d0118 Sāngfú yàojì — a genealogical-chart commentary plus a question-and-answer ruling-compendium — became the standard two-part format for Sāngfú scholarship in the Six-Dynasties period, repeatedly imitated by later authors.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Tōngdiǎn: https://ctext.org/tongdian