聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

劉氏春秋傳

4 min read

Text ID
KR1e0022
Date
1058–1068
Dynasty
宋

Liúshì Chūnqiū zhuàn 劉氏春秋傳

Master Liú’s Tradition of the Spring and Autumn Annals

by 劉敞 (撰)

About the work

The Liúshì Chūnqiū zhuàn 劉氏春秋傳 in fifteen juan is the running commentary at the centre of Liú Chǎng’s 劉敞 Chūnqiū trilogy (KR1e0021, this work, KR1e0023). It is the work in which Liú gathers the doctrines weighed in the Quán héng and concludes with his own readings, arranged year-by-year. The Sìkù base is the Tōngzhìtáng jīngjiě 通志堂經解 (a Qīng-period printed digest of SòngYuán jīng commentaries) recutting; the work circulated only in manuscript before that.

Tiyao

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

By Liú Chǎng of Sòng. Liú’s Chūnqiū quán héng and Yì lín both had Sòng-period printed editions, but the present zhuàn circulated only in family manuscripts; it was first cut for the Tōngzhìtáng jīngjiě in the Kāngxī era, hence some have suspected it of being a forgery. But on examining its argumentation and style — they perfectly match Liú’s other works, and could not have been forged by a later hand.

The work is throughout an extracted-and-judged abridgement of the three commentaries’ narrative and the jīng’s entries, with Liú’s own conclusions. On praise-and-blame regulatory items, it draws heavily on the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng: as on the entry on Duke Zhuāng’s “encirclement of Chéng with the host returning” — judged a humane and righteous act; on Gōngsūn Níng 公孫寧 and Yí Xíngfù 儀行父 — judged to have preserved the state; on Jìn’s killing of Xiān Hú 先縠 — judged a punishment for transgression; on the ninth-month jiāo sacrifice — judged a sacrifice using men. The entry “Zhào Yāng entered Jìnyáng to revolt” still follows the two commentaries’ erroneous “fixing the state by occupying its territory” reading — all such cases are excessively rigid.

The jīng-text mixes elements from all three commentaries, not from any one; he frequently writes jīng and zhuàn continuously without distinction, which clutters. He also likes to omit or shorten zhuàn phrases, often falsifying the original. As with the Zuǒzhuàn’s “regrettable that he did not cross the border, then he would have been exonerated” — later scholars suspected the line was not Confucius’; Liú simply changed it to “had he attacked the rebel he would have been exonerated,” still prefixed with “Confucius said,” which is incoherent. Huáng Bósī’s 黃伯思 Dōngguān yú lùn 東觀餘論 reports that “the textual correction of the Wǔ chéng 武成 of the Shàngshū in fact began with Liú Chǎng” — so Sòng-period emendation of the classics began under Liú; no wonder he treated emending the zhuàn as routine.

But on the whole, more often than not he gets the jīng’s sense. From the Northern Sòng onwards, those who explained the Chūnqiū with new ideas began with Sūn Fù KR1e0018 and Liú Chǎng. Sūn followed the wave of DànZhào, almost discarding the three commentaries entirely; Liú does not entirely follow the commentaries, nor does he entirely discard them — hence his interpretation is far superior to Sūn’s.

Abstract

The Sìkù tíyào makes the principal points: that the zhuàn is the running-commentary heart of Liú’s trilogy; that it circulated only in manuscript through the Sòng and Yuán, first being printed only in the Qīng Tōngzhìtáng jīngjiě; that despite some textual liberties (Liú’s willingness to emend the zhuàn itself when he found a phrasing he disliked) and some over-rigid judgements on specific entries, the work’s overall accomplishment in the eclectic-ritual reading places it well above Sūn Fù; that Liú is the figure with whom Sòng-period emendation of the jīng itself begins.

The zhuàn’s method — eclectic acceptance and rejection from all three commentaries on a jīng-by-jīng basis, anchored by the canonical ritual code — is the methodological prototype for the entire Northern-Sòng eclectic line, taken up subsequently by Sūn Jué KR1e0025, Sū Zhé KR1e0026, Lǚ Běnzhōng KR1e0035, and Hú Ānguó KR1e0036.

Translations and research

See KR1e0021.

Other points of interest

Liú Chǎng’s role as initiator of Sòng-period textual emendation of the classics — beginning with the Wǔ chéng chapter of the Shàngshū and extending naturally to the Zuǒzhuàn — is documented by Huáng Bósī’s Dōngguān yú lùn and is one of the under-studied facets of his classical programme.

Graph View

Backlinks