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春秋集傳微旨

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Text ID
KR1e0014
Date
770–805
Dynasty
唐

Chūnqiū jí zhuàn wēi zhǐ 春秋集傳微旨

Subtle Purport of the Collected Tradition of the Spring and Autumn Annals

by 陸淳 (撰)

About the work

The Chūnqiū jí zhuàn wēi zhǐ 春秋集傳微旨 in three juan is the second of Lù Chún’s 陸淳 three Chūnqiū works (the others being KR1e0013 Chūnqiū jí zhuàn zuǎn lì and KR1e0015 Chūnqiū jí zhuàn biàn yí) and the most concentrated single statement of Dàn Zhù’s [Dàn Zhù 啖助] hermeneutical programme. It surveys the major Chūnqiū entries on which the three commentaries differ, registering Dàn–Zhào–Lù’s adjudication of the disputed cases. The Sìkù base is the Northern-Sòng Huángyòu 皇祐 (1049–1054) Biànjīng 汴京 print, retrieved by the Yuán scholar Yuán Jué 袁桷 in Hángzhōu and the only complete witness; the work was almost completely lost between the Northern-Sòng print and the Yuán recovery.

Tiyao

The Sìkù tíyào (text from the Kyoto Zinbun digital Sìkù tíyào):

By Lù Chún of Táng. Chén Zhènsūn’s Shū lù jiětí says: “the Táng zhì records Lù Chún’s Chūnqiū jí zhuàn in twenty juan, no longer extant; also a Wēi zhǐ in one juan, not seen.” Yuán Jué’s postface to the Chūnqiū zuǎn lì says he came to Hángzhōu and obtained the Wēi zhǐ in three juan, of the Huángyòu Biànjīng 汴京 (Kāifēng) print — the work having been printed at Kāifēng, hence rare south of the Yangtze after the southern crossing; only with Yuán Jué’s recovery of the Northern-Sòng print did it again come into circulation. Liǔ Zōngyuán’s tomb-inscription for Lù calls the Chūnqiū wēi zhǐ a work in two piān 篇; the Táng shū yìwén zhì records two juan. The present text is three juan; we cannot determine when the redivision occurred. The opening juan carries Lù’s own preface, which says “totalling three juan,” so possibly Liǔ’s collected works were misedited (sān piān corrupted to èr piān), and the Táng shū compilers followed the corruption.

The work first lists the points of divergence among the three commentaries, supplements them with Dàn–Zhào’s adjudications, and judges right and wrong. Lù’s own preface says: “Some events are contrary to canonical norm but their intent agrees with the way; some traces approach what is right but their intent in fact harbours villainy; some are correct at the start and turn perverse at the end; some are wrong at the beginning and right in the end; some are halfway between resemblance and doubt.” All such cases the work clarifies through extended explanation. Hence the title Wēi zhǐ (Subtle Purport).

Although the work is Lù’s own composition, every entry begins “Your servant Chún has heard from his master that…” — testifying to his reverence for Dàn Zhù. The preface also says that the three commentaries’ old explanations are also preserved in the text, and that their relative correctness is distinguished by red and black ink. The current circulating text uses square boxes and connecting lines instead of the red-ink markings, since the Huángyòu woodblock could not reproduce the original two colours; the practice follows the Jiāyòu 嘉祐 Běn cǎo 本草 convention of using yīnwén 陰文 and yángwén 陽文 in place of two-colour printing. Later transcriptions found the box-and-line method also too laborious and substituted simple boundary-lines. We have retained the present text-state and not noted the earlier editorial conventions, since they are not core to the work’s purport.

Abstract

The Sìkù tíyào makes the principal points: that this work is the most concentrated single statement of Dàn Zhù’s xīnyì programme, surveying the cases where the three commentaries differ and weighing them via Lù’s “your servant has heard” formula; that the textual transmission is fragile (the Northern-Sòng Biànjīng print, recovered by Yuán Jué after centuries of effective non-circulation south of the Yangtze, is the principal witness); that the original two-colour printing has been simplified in successive copyings.

The Wēi zhǐ is methodologically the most important of Lù’s three works because it is the one that explicitly sets out the criteria by which Dàn Zhù judged the three commentaries’ adjudications. Its preface — translated above in part — is one of the most concise statements of Chūnqiū hermeneutics in any era of Chinese scholarship. The category of cases in which “the act is contrary to canonical norm but the intent agrees with the way” (shì huò fǎn jīng ér zhì xié hū dào 事或反經而志協乎道) directly anticipates the xīnyì discourse of intentional vs. behavioural moral evaluation that became central to Sòng Confucian ethics.

Translations and research

See KR1e0013 for the principal scholarship on the Dàn–Zhào–Lù school.

Other points of interest

The work’s elaborate two-colour-print tradition — using red ink to distinguish the three-commentary readings from Lù’s own adjudications — is among the earliest documented uses of multi-colour printing for textual annotation in Chinese book history; the analogous Jiāyòu Běn cǎo 本草 also uses yīnwén / yángwén (white-on-black / black-on-white) to substitute for missing colour distinctions.

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