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春秋集傳辨疑

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Text ID
KR1e0015
Date
770–805
Dynasty
唐

Chūnqiū jí zhuàn biàn yí 春秋集傳辨疑

Discussion of Doubts in the Collected Tradition of the Spring and Autumn Annals

by 陸淳 (撰)

About the work

The Chūnqiū jí zhuàn biàn yí 春秋集傳辨疑 in ten juan is the third of Lù Chún’s 陸淳 Chūnqiū works (the others being KR1e0013 Zuǎn lì and KR1e0014 Wēi zhǐ) — a sustained polemic against the three commentaries’ specific entries which Lù judged unsupportable. The work refutes the Sān zhuàn on a phrase-by-phrase basis where the Zuǎn lì had only treated the same material as a structured catalog. Liǔ Zōngyuán’s 柳宗元 tomb-inscription gives the work as seven piān 篇; the present text is ten juan, redivided after the Yuán Yányòu 延祐 5 (1318) Jiāngxī xíngshěng 江西行省 imperial recutting at the petition of the Hànlín scholar Kèchóu 克酬.

Tiyao

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

By Lù Chún of Táng — what he records of the Dàn 啖 and Zhào 趙 schools’ attacks on the three commentaries. Liǔ Zōngyuán’s epitaph for Lù gives the Biàn yí in seven chapters; the Táng shū yìwén zhì the same; Wú Lái’s preface also says seven juan. The present text is ten juan; we do not know who first divided it so. At the end of Wú Lái’s preface in the printed exemplar there is a Yányòu 5 (1318) report by the Hànlín-school Jíxián xuéshì 集賢學士 Kèchóu 克酬 (the original wrongly read 曲出 — corrected here): “Lù Chún of Táng’s three works Zuǎn lì, Biàn yí, Wēi zhǐ are of benefit to later students; we petition that the Jiāngxī provincial bureau commit them to woodblock.” The present subdivision likely dates from this re-cutting.

The Zuǎn lì set out Dàn Zhù’s editorial regulations and his exposition of Confucius’ purposive selection-and-rejection; its attacks on the three commentaries are summary and general. The Biàn yí takes up zhuàn-text not entered in the Zuǎn lì and lists its faults in detail, phrase by phrase. Hence the title Biàn yí (Discussion of Doubts). The work draws more heavily on Zhào Kuāng’s views than on Dàn Zhù’s. It opens with one chapter of editorial principles in seventeen items, simply explaining the reasons for omitting parts of the jīng and zhuàn; the substantive judgments of acceptance and rejection then follow the jīng’s sequence of years and months.

In the jīng’s entry on Zhèngbó keqì Duàn 鄭伯克段 [Yǐn 1], Dàn says “Zhèngbó certainly would not have imprisoned his mother” — too suspect to be a sound judgment; with that as a regulating principle, what reliable historical record could remain? The story of the great tunnel (dà suì 大隧) preserves clear external evidence in the Shuǐjīng zhù 水經注; one cannot dismiss it as a Zuǒzhuàn fabrication. Such cases incline to over-doubt of the ancients. Again, in the zhuàn on the Qí–Wèi xū mìng 胥命 [Huán 3], the explanation accords with the Xúnzǐ; the time being not far from the sage, the explanation must rest on transmission, but the Zhào-school takes it as a satire on ill-mannered behaviour — such cases are too eager to find fault. Again, on Shū Jī’s return to Jì 紀 [Yǐn 7], the Gǔliáng says “the failure to mention ‘meeting’ [the bride] indicates that the conventions of meeting were lax”; Lù counters that “the failure to mention ‘meeting’ is in every case because it is the husband himself who comes to meet” — but the rite is for husband to meet wife, not for husband to come and meet his wife’s accompanying junior wives, so the zhuàn’s reading is missing something, and Lù’s own reading equally so. Such cases find that “the more it argues, the more wrong it gets.”

Yet the Zuǒzhuàn has its events well rooted but its judgments often defective; the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng often offer twisted readings, and the Gōngyáng most of all. Hàn-period scholarship clung to its single masters: those of sweet taste shunned the bitter; those of red ink rejected the plain. From this work and the Wēi zhǐ onwards, attacks on the cracks in the commentaries often hit their mark. Though they are uneven — flaws and merits both showing — the choicest passages contain insights that pre-Hàn and HànTáng scholars never proposed. They are different in kind from those of pure speculation that grow extra branches with no relation to the text.

Abstract

The Sìkù tíyào makes the principal points: that this work is the polemical complement to the Zuǎn lì — the Zuǎn lì gives the constructive Dàn–Zhào–Lù programme, the Biàn yí lists the negative case against the three commentaries entry by entry; that the work draws more heavily on Zhào Kuāng than on Dàn Zhù; that the tíyào itself takes a balanced view, recognising both the work’s tendency to over-doubt and the genuine philological precision of its best passages.

The Biàn yí’s significance is that, alongside the Wēi zhǐ, it is the most fully argued single Táng-period polemical attack on the Zuǒzhuàn’s historicity and the Gōngyáng/Gǔliáng’s exegetical fidelity. Its judgments — whatever one’s verdict on individual cases — opened the doctrinal space within which Sòng xīnyì commentators could read the Chūnqiū directly. Sūn Fù’s Zūn wáng fā wéi KR1e0018, building explicitly on Lù Chún, takes the same direct-reading line, as do Liú Chǎng KR1e0021 et seq. and ultimately Hú Ānguó KR1e0036. Without Lù Chún’s Biàn yí, the Sòng Chūnqiū xīnyì movement would have been hermeneutically unintelligible.

Translations and research

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

Other points of interest

The Yányòu 5 (1318) imperial recutting recorded in the postface is a notable instance of the early Yuán imperial state actively underwriting the preservation of Chūnqiū scholarship from the previous dynasty — a Mongol-era policy of cultural continuity often overlooked.

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