Chūnqiū jiū yí 春秋究遺
Investigations of What the Spring and Autumn Annals Have Bequeathed by 葉酉 (撰)
About the work
A Chūnqiū commentary in 16 juǎn by Yè Yǒu 葉酉 (mid-eighteenth century), arranged in the canonical twelve-duke sequence, by Fāng Bāo’s 方苞 disciple in the Tóngchéng school. The title is taken from Hán Yù’s poem to Lú Tóng — “the Three Traditions stacked high on the shelf, alone embracing the bequeathed canon, investigating beginning and end” (春秋三傳束高閣，獨抱遺經究終始) — signalling Yè’s commitment to canon-internal reading. The book follows Yè’s teacher Fāng Bāo’s Chūnqiū tōng lùn (KR1e0110) closely while supplementing the tōng lùn’s thinly-treated detail; in his own fán lì (printed in the Sìkù edition) Yè says explicitly that Fāng’s tōng lùn gave the great frame but not the entry-level detail, which the present work aims to fill in.
Tiyao
Imperially edited Sìkù quánshū, Classics, Chūnqiū category. Chūnqiū jiū yí in 16 juǎn. Composed in the present dynasty by Yè Yǒu, zì Shūshān, hào Huānán, native of Tóngchéng. Qiánlóng jǐwèi (1739) jìnshì; rose to Left Adjutant Tutor of the Heir-Apparent’s Household (左春坊左庶子).
This volume largely follows his teacher Fāng Bāo’s Chūnqiū tōng lùn, with some divergences. The title “Jiū yí” alludes to Hán Yù’s poem to Lú Tóng. He sweeps clear the Húzhuàn’s harshness and the Gōng / Gǔ’s speculative compoundings; in Zuǒshì too he has many corrections. But sometimes he goes so far as to question the events themselves: at the very opening, on Zhòngzǐ — Yè argues that Lord Huì violated ritual by marrying again, and that if he was going to marry again, he might at least have used the proper ritual of a zhèngshì engagement; from this Yè extracts the rule that feudal lords may marry twice. — But Wèi Lord Zhuāng married Zhuāng Jiāng, then while she was still alive married again from Chén — Lì Guī of Chén had a younger sister Dài Guī, all of them named zhèng (proper) — does Yè then conclude that the rite of the feudal lords could establish two simultaneous wives? — Likewise, his rule that “Zhòngzǐ’s shrine: it was built where it ought to have been built, hence recorded as ‘completed’ but not as ‘set up’” — on what ritual book is this based?
The battle of Láng was 10 years after Lord Huán took the throne; Yè says the three states came to punish the regicide of Lord Yǐn, and the Zuǒ zhuàn claim that the rank-order of the Zhōu enfeoffment placed Zhèng later (周班後鄭) is fictitious. The case of Zēng’s Jìjī: Zuǒshì says she had returned home (歸寧) and was detained — close to ordinary reasoning; Gōngyáng says she chose her own husband — already hard to credit; Yè concludes that Jìjī had already been promised to the lord of Zēng, but Lord Xī regretted the betrothal, so Jìjī, refusing to remarry, met the lord of Zēng privately. — The Lord Wén 12 Zǐ ShūJī and the Lord Wén 14 Zǐ ShūJī Yè takes as twin daughters; this is already speculation. He further treats the Zǐ ShūJī seized by Qí as the wife of Shě, with the zhuàn mistakenly making her his mother; and treats the Zǐ ShūJī married to Gāozǐ of Qí in Lord Xuān 5 as identical with the Shě’s wife — refusing to distinguish two persons. He insists shū must mean a single individual, not knowing that women’s zì among the bózhòngshūjì sequence was at most four characters; with the addition of mèng (eldest concubine-line) it is at most five; if a couple had six daughters, what then? Plainly: before the jī (hairpin) ceremony each daughter was distinguished by personal name; after the jī they took the zì, and the zì could repeat. Yè’s refusal to accept this leads him to refute the zhuàn across many entries — and so manufactures additional difficulties.
At “the Jǔ extinguished Zēng” — the zhuàn says (Zēng) trusted to its bribes; Yè says by Lord Xiāng 5 Zēng was no longer a Lǔ subordinate, and so the zhuàn notice is false. But the next entry, “Jì Sūn Sù went to Jìn”, citing the zhuàn “Jìn came to punish for Zēng’s sake — why have you let Zēng be lost?” — if Zēng was no longer Lǔ’s, what concern was its loss to Lǔ? Yè’s two readings contradict.
Other points: on “the king is not titled with Tiān” and “Lord Huán has no royal” — old readings he simply repeats unchanged; and citing Zhào Qí’s Mèngzǐ gloss “Cáo Jiāo, the Cáo lord’s younger brother” against the Zuǒ zhuàn Lord Āi 8 “Sòngrén extinguished Cáo” (i.e. claiming the zhuàn is wrong because at the time of Mèngzǐ a Cáo lord still existed) is positively backwards. Even so, his general aim is to reason from circumstance and to reach the canon’s actual meaning — much of the time he succeeds. His scheme of biàn lì (variant principles), tè wén (pointed wording), yǐn wén (covert wording), and quē wén (lacuna wording) is more orderly than that of other commentators. Likewise, his use of the Hàn shū dì lǐ zhì to demonstrate that the Róng’s attack on Fán Bó’s Chǔqiū was not in Wèi territory; his use of the Shǐ jì to show that Yí Jiāng was the wife of Wèi Lord Xuān, not the zhēng (incest-with-father’s-concubine) victim; his use of Lord Xuān 5 canon-text “spring, royal first month, the jiāo sacrifice ox’s mouth was injured, divined again, ox died, then no jiāo” to demonstrate that Lǔ’s overreach was not limited to the qí gǔ (prayer-for-grain) jiāo — these are all proper kǎozhèng. Taken whole, the work’s flaws do not eclipse its merits. Submitted on the Qiánlóng 43rd year, 3rd month (= 1778, April). Editors-in-chief: Jǐ Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. Chief proofreader: Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
Chūnqiū jiū yí is the principal Chūnqiū commentary of the second-generation Tóngchéng school and the immediate continuation of Fāng Bāo’s Chūnqiū tōng lùn. Yè Yǒu’s fán lì explicitly orients the work as a fill-in of his teacher’s high-altitude tōng lùn: where Fāng addressed the great judgements only, Yè aims at jiémù — the entry-by-entry detail. The methodological program is the Tóngchéng-school distinctive: read the canon by canon-internal evidence, refuse the harsh-moralist Hú zhuàn line and the speculative-correlative Gōng / Gǔ line, organize by topical-categorical bǐ lì with sub-types for biàn lì, tè wén, yǐn wén, quē wén.
The Sìkù tiyao is unusually frank about Yè’s overreaches: his “twin daughters” reading of the two Zǐ ShūJī entries, his self-contradicting reading of the Jǔ-extinguished-Zēng case, his attempt to derive a liǎng zhèngshì (two simultaneous wives) rule from the Zhòngzǐ entry. But on the philological-historical points the editors credit him: his Hàn shū dì lǐ zhì-based correction of the Róng-attacked-Fán-Bó toponym, his Shǐ jì-based correction of the Yí Jiāng case, his canon-text-based correction of the jiāo-overreach question. The book is bracketed by Yè’s 1739 jìnshì and the Sìkù’s 1778 reception.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. For the second-generation Tóngchéng school’s Chūnqiū output see the chapter on Yè Yǒu and Fāng Bāo lineage in Yáng Zhàoguì, Qīng dài Chūnqiū xué yán jiū (Wǔnán, 2010); Theodore Huters’s work on the Tóngchéng-pài’s literary theory bears tangentially.
Other points of interest
The reference to Hán Yù’s “alone embracing the bequeathed canon, investigating beginning and end” is a rare instance of a Chūnqiū commentary self-titled by literary allusion; in conjunction with Yè’s status as a Tóngchéng gǔwén practitioner this signals the school’s commitment to Chūnqiū as a literary-historiographical, not merely classical-exegetical, object.
Links
- ctext.org: Chūnqiū jiū yí (Sìkù WYG facsimile)