春秋屬辭

Chūnqiū shǔcí 春秋屬辭

Linking the Wording of the Spring and Autumn Annals

by 趙汸 (撰)

About the work

The Chūnqiū shǔcí 春秋屬辭 in fifteen juan is the methodological masterwork in Zhào Fǎng’s 趙汸 five-work Chūnqiū corpus (KR1e0066–KR1e0070). Composed in Zhìzhèng 17 (1357), after the Chūnqiū jízhuàn (KR1e0066) had reached its first complete draft, the Shǔcí sets out the eight-category framework — bā tǐ 八體 — that organizes Zhào’s reading of the classic. The title comes from a Lǐjì jīngjiě 禮記·經解 dictum: “shǔcí bǐshì, Chūnqiū zhī jiào 屬辭比事，春秋之教 (“link the wording, associate the events — this is the teaching of the Chūnqiū”), which Zhào takes as the methodological foundation. The fifth and final cluster-work in the five-work Zhào Fǎng Chūnqiū corpus.

The Eight Categories (bā tǐ 八體)

1. cún cèshū zhī dàtǐ 存策書之大體 — preserving the main outline of the historian’s tablet-record;
2. jiǎ bǐxuē yǐ xíng quán 假筆削以行權 — using the editorial pen to exercise judgment;
3. biàn wén yǐ shì yì 變文以示義 — varying the wording to display the meaning;
4. biàn míngshí zhī jì 辨名實之際 — discriminating the line of name-and-reality;
5. jǐn nèiwài zhī biàn 謹內外之辯 (also given as jǐn huáyí zhī biàn 謹華夷之辨) — observing strictly the distinction of inside-and-outside (i.e. Chinese and barbarian);
6. tèbǐ yǐ zhèng míng 特筆以正名 — using the special pen to fix names;
7. yīn rìyuè yǐ míng lèi 因日月以明類 — by day-and-month notations clarifying categories;
8. cí cóng zhǔrén 辭從主人 — wording deferred to the principal (i.e. to the Lǔ historian’s wording where the sage did not edit).

Tiyao

The Sìkù editors respectfully note: The Chūnqiū shǔcí in fifteen juan is by Zhào Fǎng of Yuán. Fǎng’s labor on the Chūnqiū is exceptionally deep. In Zhìzhèng dīngyǒu 至正丁酉 (1357), having settled the first draft of the Jízhuàn, he was led by a Lǐjì jīngjiě phrase to recognize that the Chūnqiū’s meaning lies in bǐshì shǔcí — and so further pressed the meaning of the bǐxuē and produced this work. Its categories are eight: (1) preserving the cèshū’s main outline; (2) using the bǐxuē to exercise judgment; (3) varying the wording to display meaning; (4) discriminating name-and-reality; (5) observing inside-and-outside; (6) special pen to fix names; (7) day-and-month to clarify categories; (8) wording deferred to the principal. The thesis takes Dù Yù’s Shìlì and Chén Fùliáng’s Hòuzhuàn as foundation, but corrects them in many places.

Zhào’s Dōngshān jí 東山集 includes a letter to Zhū Fēnglín 朱風林 saying: “That the Chūnqiū operates by the editorial pen ad hoc and decidedly has no general categories — predecessors had said this, with much justice. By Dānyáng Hóng’s [Hóng Xíngzhī 洪興祖] argument, the case is closed. He says: ‘The Chūnqiū originally has no categories; scholars take the traces of the events as categories — like Heaven originally having no degree of arc, the calendrical experts taking the days of the year as the degree.’ The argument is exact. Master Huáng [Huáng Zé 黃澤] then says: ‘The Lǔ history has categories, the sage’s classic does not — yet not having categories simply means the categories are encoded as meaning, hidden and unmanifest.’ This is finer still. What I have now compiled here is the bǐshì shǔcí method; in this material, agreement and difference, detailed and concise, are connected through events into doctrinal categories — spontaneously formed; quite unlike what the predecessor’s compilations and explications produced. Once one understands this, one knows that to use categories to explain the classic is insufficient to know the sage; and that those who give up categories altogether and proceed by ad-hoc explanation, rambling without system, are also insufficient to discuss the Chūnqiū. So I have named the work simply Shǔcí.”

He also has a letter to Zhào Bóyǒu 趙伯友 saying: “Receiving your letter — that you used the xíngzhuàng of the bǐxuē to write the biography of Master [Huáng], I have the honor to send you, attached, one copy of the Shīshuō and one of the Shǔcí. Once you have studied the xíngzhuàng and read the Shīshuō, the difficulty by which the Six Classics’ return-to-antiquity has been struggled-for will be visible to you in outline; thereafter, finely examining the Shǔcí one round, you will know that to insist on this for twenty-odd years was not to indulge in addiction, nor to attach myself to the commentator-school for the sake of stealing reputation in this generation.”

His arguments on doctrinal categories are fairly exact, his self-evaluation is also high. Now examining the work: it cuts away the tedious-and-fussy and divides into eight gates; compared with the various commentators it has order. Yet his categories with many sub-items lapse into entanglement, and those with few sub-items lapse into forced fitting; the defects are roughly equal. The day-and-month category does not escape the rut of Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng and is especially convoluted — it is on this that Zhuó Ěrkāng 卓爾康 takes him to task in his Chūnqiū biànyì 春秋辯義 (KR1e0089). Speech, alas, is easy; doing is hard.

That said: the work is broadly-reading and through-running; it derives the classic by tracking the zhuàn, much based on philological evidence — and this is finally not like the speculative theories of other schools. So while accommodation and over-reading are not entirely avoided, the work’s broad outline and great thesis stand up well. The work has Sòng Lián’s 宋濂 preface at the head; his discussion of the Chūnqiū’s five transformations (五變) cuts to the heart of the disease of those who speculate empty-bellied — we therefore reproduce it here, that those reading the classic by speculation may know that the symptoms cannot be hid.

Respectfully presented, Qiánlóng 46 / 11 (November 1781).

— Editors-in-chief: Jǐ Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Editor-of-Collation: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Chūnqiū shǔcí is the methodological treatise that organizes Zhào Fǎng’s entire Chūnqiū program. It is also the work in which the late-Yuán Confucian methodological self-understanding reaches its most articulate expression. The bā tǐ — eight-category framework — constitute the most rigorous Yuán-period attempt to provide a systematic vocabulary for Chūnqiū exegesis without committing to the Gōngyáng / Gǔliáng doctrine of one-character praise-and-blame (yī zì bāobiǎn) on the one hand, or to the fèizhuàn refusal to engage the classic’s doctrine on the other.

The composition date is precise from the source: Zhìzhèng 17 / dīngyǒu (1357), as recorded in the Jízhuàn colophon and Zhào’s own letter to Zhū Fēnglín reproduced in the tíyào. The bracket 1357–1357 is exact. The Shǔcí is therefore the anchor work by date in the Zhào cluster: the Jízhuàn (1348 first draft, 1369 posthumous completion), the Shīshuō (post-1346), the Bǔzhù and the Jīn-suǒ-shi (undated within Zhào’s lifetime) all stand in known temporal relation to the Shǔcí.

The work’s reception is unusually strong for a Yuán Chūnqiū commentary. Sòng Lián’s preface (reproduced in the source) is significant evidence of the work’s standing among the founding-Míng Confucian elite; Zhào’s bātǐ framework was widely cited in Míng Chūnqiū discussions; the early-Qīng kǎojù tradition of Gù Yánwǔ 顧炎武 (KR1e0096) and Huì Dòng (KR1e0116) explicitly continues Zhào’s program. The Sìkù editors’ guarded judgment — gōngyán hóngzhuàn (broadly-reading and through-running), jùzhuàn qiújīng (deriving the classic from the zhuàn), zhōng bù sì tājiā zhī yìshuō (finally not like the speculation of other schools) — is one of the most positive tíyào judgments in the entire Yuán Chūnqiū corpus.

Sòng Lián’s preface is itself a major theoretical document. His enumeration of the Chūnqiū’s five transformations (wǔ biàn 五變) — first the school-by-school dogmatic period (Hé Xiū, Fàn Níng, et al.); second the irenic-synthetic period; third the discriminating-and-rejecting period; fourth the jízhuàn / jíyì compendium period (corresponding to Lǐ Lián 李廉, among others); fifth the recent contrarian-iconoclastic period that breaks editorial-method and forces Yì-style symbolic readings — is a sharp diagnostic survey of the SòngYuán Chūnqiū commentary tradition into which the Shǔcí offers itself as the cure.

Translations and research

• Wú Wánjū 吳萬居, Zhào Fǎng Chūnqiū-xué yánjiū (Tāiběi 1992) — extensive treatment of the Shǔ-cí and the bā tǐ framework.
• Sūn Wěimíng 孫衛明, Sòng dài Chūnqiū xué yánjiū (Bēijīng 2009).
• Hóu Měizhēn 侯美珍, articles on Yuán-Míng Chūnqiū methodology.
• No dedicated Western-language monograph located; mention in passing in some Yuán-history surveys (e.g. Frederick W. Mote, Denis Twitchett, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368).

Other points of interest

The Shǔcí’s bā tǐ framework is the principal methodological inheritance that Zhào Fǎng passed to early Míng Chūnqiū studies. The Hóngwǔ-period Chūnqiū curriculum and the early-Míng Confucian-academy teaching followed its categories, even if Zhào’s actual program (recovery of the Zuǒzhuàn, refusal of yīzì bāobiǎn) was sometimes diluted in later transmission. The early-Qīng kǎojù school’s recovery of Zuǒ studies — Gù Yánwǔ, Huì Dòng, Gù Dònggāo, Mǎ Sù — is in direct genealogical continuity with Zhào’s program, even when the early-Qīng masters do not credit him explicitly.

Sòng Lián’s notice that Zhào “alone of his generation could distinguish [the chronicle and the editorial method]” (dú néng biébái èrzhě) is the principal contemporary judgment of Zhào’s Chūnqiū standing. Together with Zhào’s own zìjì 自記 colophon at the end of the mùlù (table of contents), it sets out a writer’s own self-understanding of the work as a salvage of Confucian methodology against the Yì-style symbolic and the iconoclastic over-reading that Sòng Lián’s five transformations trace.

Links

• Sìkù tíyào, Zhào Fǎng’s preface, Sòng Lián’s preface, and the detailed table of contents: from KR1e0070_000.txt in source.