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春秋通義

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Text ID
KR1e0020
Date
960–1279
Dynasty
宋

Chūnqiū tōng yì 春秋通義

Comprehensive Meanings of the Spring and Autumn Annals

by 闕名 (撰)

About the work

The Chūnqiū tōng yì 春秋通義 in one juan is an anonymous Sòng-period work surviving as a fragment — forty-eight items with a brief authorial preface — out of what was originally a much larger Tōng yì compilation. The Sìkù base reproduces the WYG one-juan text. Per the Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì, four Sòng-period authors composed works under the title Chūnqiū tōng yì: Jiǎn Zūnpǐn 蹇遵品 (12 juan), Wáng Xī 王晳 (12 juan, see KR1e0019), Jiā Ānguó 家安國 (24 juan), and Qiū Kuí 邱葵 (2 juan); all are lost, and the present one-juan fragment cannot be assigned to any of them with certainty.

Tiyao

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

Author not registered. Examining the Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì: Jiǎn Zūnpǐn, Wáng Xī, Jiā Ānguó, and Qiū Kuí all have works titled Chūnqiū tōng yì; all are lost. Jiǎn’s and Wáng’s are each twelve juan, Jiā’s twenty-four, Qiū’s two. The present text is one juan, with forty-eight entries. The opening contains a short preface: “When Confucius redacted the Chūnqiū, he relied on the old text and rode it with new intent. Regular cases he wrote down; commonplace events he deleted. Where matters were perverse and conflicting, he then corrected them. Following his correction, he categorised them under the rubric tè bǐ 特筆 (extraordinary brushstroke).” After the preface, tè bǐ is given as the chapter heading. The work is therefore one segment of a Tōng yì; we cannot tell to which of the four authors it belongs.

For example, on “stars fell like rain” (xīng yǔn rú yǔ 星隕如雨), the Gōngyáng cites the unredacted Chūnqiū as “the stars fell — falling not yet a chǐ from the ground but recovering”; the gentleman corrected it to “stars fell like rain.” This is no more than literary polish, with no praise-and-blame implication. To take it as an “extraordinary brushstroke” is incoherent. Yet on Huá Dū’s 華督 having “regicidal intent before he acted on the evil — therefore [the Chūnqiū] first wrote of [the killing of] Shānggōng 殤公, and afterward of [the killing of] Kǒng Fù 孔父” — this is genuinely an extraordinary brushstroke, with clear zhuàn-evidence; yet the work omits this, an inattentive lacuna. As for the larger thesis: that the Chūnqiū covers 242 years and ends with the capture of the lín 麟 (unicorn) — illustrating that disorder pushed to the extreme must turn to order, while the trace of the king’s way is finally extinguished — this view is much higher than that of many of the other commentators.

Abstract

The Sìkù tíyào makes the principal points: that the Chūnqiū tōng yì one-juan text is a fragment of an unidentified Sòng Tōng yì compilation, possibly that of Jiǎn Zūnpǐn, Wáng Xī, Jiā Ānguó, or Qiū Kuí (all four works of which are lost in their original form); that the work treats only the category of “extraordinary brushstrokes” (tè bǐ 特筆) — entries which depart from the Chūnqiū’s editorial norms — in forty-eight items with a methodological preface; that the editorial judgement is mixed (some assignments are inappropriate, some genuine cases are missed) but the work’s broader thesis on the Chūnqiū’s closing — that it terminates with the capture of the unicorn to mark the extinction of kingly tradition — is unusually elevated.

The connection of the work to Wáng Xī’s Chūnqiū tōng yì (one of the Wáng Xī works mentioned at KR1e0019) is plausible but not provable: Wáng’s was twelve juan, the present text is one juan, and the methodological preface here is consistent with Wáng’s general approach. The Kanripo catalog meta correctly leaves the author as 闕名 (anonymous).

Translations and research

No specific Western-language treatment. The work is referenced in surveys of Sòng Chūnqiū scholarship:

  • Lǐ Wěitài 李偉泰, Sòng-rén Chūnqiū xué dōu lùn 宋人春秋學論衡 (Tāiběi: Wénjīn 1995).

Other points of interest

The technical tè bǐ category — “extraordinary brushstrokes,” that is, Chūnqiū entries which depart from the editor’s standard regulatory items — is the foundation of the entire Sòng xīnyì exegetical method. Identifying which entries are normal biàn lì 變例 (variant regulatory items) and which are true tè bǐ (extraordinary brushstrokes) is the central technical operation of Sòng Chūnqiū hermeneutics.

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