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春秋傳說例

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Text ID
KR1e0024
Date
1058–1068
Dynasty
宋

Chūnqiū chuán shuō lì 春秋傳說例

Regulatory Items in Explanations of the Spring and Autumn Tradition

by 劉敞 (撰)

About the work

The Chūnqiū chuán shuō lì 春秋傳說例 in one juan is a Qīng-period reconstruction (from Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 fragments) of Liú Chǎng’s 劉敞 regulatory-item handbook, originally a partner volume to his commentary trilogy. The Sòng catalogues differ on the original size (Liú’s xíng zhuàng and tomb-inscription, plus the Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì, give 2 juan; Chén Zhènsūn’s Shū lù jiětí, 1 juan; the Sòng zhì in another listing, “11 juan” — an obvious copyist’s error). The Sìkù editors recovered roughly half of the original 49 entries from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. Different from KR1e0021 (Quán héng, the critical adjudication) and KR1e0022 (the zhuàn, the running commentary), the Shuō lì lays out Liú’s own theoretical regulations in the manner of Dù Yù’s Shì lì (KR1e0012).

Tiyao

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

By Liú Chǎng of Sòng. Per Liú’s xíng zhuàng and tomb-inscription, the Chūnqiū shuō lì is in two juan. Chén Zhènsūn’s Shū lù jiětí gives one juan — possibly a difference in subdivision. The Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì alone gives “Liú Chǎng’s Shuō lì in eleven juan” — likely a transcription error of “11” for “1,” or perhaps the original 11 piān were taken as 11 juan.

Liú’s zhuàn, Quán héng, and Yì lín trio were cut by the Tōngzhìtáng jīngjiě; the Wén quán and Shuō lì survived only by name, with no transmitted exemplar. Now examining the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, we find scattered citations of the Shuō lì prose. We have carefully gathered them and arranged them in one juan. Per the Shū lù jiětí, the Shuō lì totalled 49 items; what we have gathered is only 25 — half the total — and many of them are partial entries or broken phrases, not complete texts.

Only the seven items — “Lord’s accession” (gōng jí wèi lì 公卽位例), “Yǐ and lái messengers” (lì shǐ lái lì 例使來例), “host marching” (shī xíng lì 師行例), “great-officer fleeing” (dàfū bēn lì 大夫奔例), “killing of a great-officer” (shā dàfū lì 殺大夫例), and “fú bù / non-non-distinction” (fú bù lì 弗不例) — preserve the original headings; the rest have the explanation but lost the heading. We have explained all the surviving texts and supplemented and collated them on the model of the items with surviving headings.

The various sources all call the work Chūnqiū shuō lì; only the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn adds the character zhuàn 傳 to give Chūnqiū chuán shuō lì. Now this work develops its argument by juxtaposing parallel cases, which is the method of zhuàn-text praise-and-blame; the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn arrangement is presumably the Sòng original, and we have followed it.

Liú’s Chūnqiū readings are in places strikingly new, while his prose mostly imitates the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng commentary tradition; this is true throughout his works, but particularly so here, where the prose is exceptionally archaic and concise. Only the entry “great-officer leading the host” (dàfū shuài shī lì 大夫帥師例), saying “Lǔ should not have had three armies” and dismissing the Zhōulǐ relevant statement as “later attribution,” is one-sided. Again, on Xuān 18 (“Guī Fù 歸父 returned from Jìn”), Liú’s zhuàn follows the Zuǒ in reading “[arrived at] Shēng 笙,” but the Shuō lì follows the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng in reading “[arrived at] Chēng 檉” — a self-contradiction. The remainder is on the whole precise and well-considered, capturing the jīng’s sense, but SòngYuán Chūnqiū commentators rarely cite it — it must already have been hard to find from the Sòng onward. That its outline survives by good fortune is therefore precious to Chūnqiū scholars.

Abstract

The Sìkù tíyào makes the principal points: that this is the regulatory-item handbook completing Liú’s Chūnqiū programme, on the model of Dù Yù’s Shì lì but built on Liú’s own eclectic regulations rather than Dù’s; that the work was nearly lost between the Sòng and the Qīng — SòngYuán commentators did not cite it after the early Southern Sòng; that the Qīng Yǒnglè dàdiǎn recovery preserves only about half of the 49 original items; that there is one self-contradiction with the zhuàn (on Guī Fù’s Shēng / Chēng) and one over-reaching position (on the Zhōulǐ and three armies of Lǔ).

Translations and research

See KR1e0021.

Other points of interest

Liú Chǎng is one of the Northern-Sòng Chūnqiū scholars whose work most needed Qīng Yǒnglè dàdiǎn recovery to survive into the modern period. The Quán héng and zhuàn survived in printed form because of the Tōngzhìtáng jīngjiě; the Yì lín by association; the Shuō lì survived only via the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, and the Wén quán did not survive at all.

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