Sāngfú nánwèn 喪服難問
Difficult Questions on Mourning Dress
by 崔凱 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction of 崔凱 Cuī Kǎi’s (third century, Cáo-Wèi) lost Sāngfú nánwèn 喪服難問 — a biàn-lùn (debate-and-question) collection on the canonical Sāngfú. Cuī Kǎi was a Cáo-Wèi-court ritualist; his standard biography is not in Sānguó zhì but is recoverable through scattered citations. The CHANT reconstruction (CH2e1095) is drawn from Dù Yòu 杜佑’s Tōngdiǎn 通典 citations.
Abstract
The opening preserved fragment is the celebrated Sì-gū lùn 四孤論 (Four Orphans Discussion) — a hypothetical-case discussion attributed to “Wèi-shí huò wéi” 魏時或為 (someone in the Wèi era composed). The four orphan-types:
(i) One sold by parents under war-and-famine duress; (ii) One abandoned in a gōuhè (ditch) by parents; (iii) One whose parents have died at birth, with no sī-má (third-degree) kin, the death certain; (iv) [The text continues with the fourth case].
Each case is then assessed for the mourning-and-kinship obligations the surviving child should observe toward birth-parents who have effectively or actually disappeared from the social-ritual frame. The text is one of the earliest biàn-lǐ treatments of post-war orphan-and-stepparent problems — corresponding to the early-Cáo-Wèi historical context of the Three-Kingdoms famines.
The substantive content includes:
(i) The Sì-gū lùn hypothetical-case analysis of the four orphan-types.
(ii) General Sāngfú difficult-cases drawn from canonical sources with Cuī Kǎi’s reasoned judgements.
(iii) Court-context applications to specific Cáo-Wèi mourning-protocol decisions.
The dating bracket (220–280) reflects Cuī Kǎi’s documented Wèi-period activity; no firm lifespan years are preserved.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The work is treated as a Tōngdiǎn-citation source in studies of Wèi-period ritual scholarship.
Other points of interest
The Sì-gū lùn preserved in this fragment is one of the earliest documented biàn-lǐ treatments of mass-displacement and orphan-protocol problems in Chinese ritualism, with significant historical-context value for understanding the early Three-Kingdoms social-disruption period.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Tōngdiǎn: https://ctext.org/tongdian