Jīngdiǎn shìwén 經典釋文
Phonetic and Philological Glosses on the Classics and Canonical Texts by 陸德明 (撰)
About the work
A thirty-juàn corpus of yīnyì 音義 (sound and meaning) glosses on the canonical and quasi-canonical books of the medieval Chinese tradition, compiled by Lù Démíng 陸德明 in the late Chén and early Táng. It is the single most consequential textual-critical apparatus of the pre-Sòng era: virtually every variant reading and Hàn–Six Dynasties commentary citation in the standard Shísān jīng zhùshū 十三經注疏 recension descends from it. The KRP source for this entry is the Sìbù cóngkān (SBCK) facsimile of the Tōngzhìtáng 通志堂 cut, which preserves the work’s original arrangement (separate from the zhùshū layer) — closer to Lù’s original than the post-Sòng interlinear recensions.
Tiyao
The KRP source file KR1g0003_000.txt reproduces the SBCK colophon and a Sòng prefatory list of editorial officials, not the WYG 提要. The WYG tíyào is recovered here from the Kyoto University Zinbun digital Sìkù tíyào 四庫提要 (Inner Court repository copy):
By Lù Yuánlǎng of the Táng. Yuánlǎng’s style name is Démíng — by which name he is known. He was a man of Wú. In the Zhēnguān era he served as Erudite of the Directorate of Education (國子博士) and concurrently Junior Mentor to the Heir Apparent (太子中允). His career is given in detail in his biography in the Tángshū. This work has a self-preface, which says: “In the year guǐmǎo 癸卯, I held office at the upper academy. Therefore I compiled the sound-glosses on the Five Canons, the Xiàojīng, the Lúnyǔ, the Lǎozǐ, the Zhuāngzǐ, the Ěryǎ, and the rest. I record both ancient and modern; the canonical text and its annotations are both spelled out in detail; the xùn and the yì layers are both distinguished. Hereby I transmit the learning of one school.” But guǐmǎo is the first year of the Zhīdé era of the latter ruler of Chén (= 583 CE) — could Démíng, who at that time would barely have come of age, have already produced something so all-encompassing? Or perhaps after the long completion of the work he wrote in retrospect of the time of its first drafting.
The opening juàn is the Xùlù 序錄 (preface and bibliographic outline). After it: Zhōuyì in 1 juàn; Gǔwén Shàngshū in 2; Máoshī in 3; Zhōulǐ in 2; Yílǐ in 1; Lǐjì in 4; Chūnqiū Zuǒshì zhuàn in 6; Gōngyáng in 1; Gǔliáng in 1; Xiàojīng in 1; Lúnyǔ in 1; Lǎozǐ in 1; Zhuāngzǐ in 3; Ěryǎ in 2. That he places the Lǎozǐ and Zhuāngzǐ among the canonical texts but does not include the Mèngzǐ is hard to explain — but in the period before the Northern Sòng the Mèngzǐ was not yet ranged among the jīng, while from the Western Jìn onwards the Lǎo and Zhuāng had been esteemed by the literate elite; Démíng was born at the end of the Chén and was still riding the residual current of the Six Dynasties.
His method throughout the canonical works is to extract the character one wishes to gloss and supply its sound; only for the Xiàojīng (where it serves as the beginner’s primer) and the Lǎozǐ (where the various transmissions vary widely) does he extract the whole sentence. His original used black ink for sound-glosses on the canonical text and red ink for sound-glosses on the annotations to mark the distinction; in the present text canonical text and annotations are joined in one register — printers could not provide both inks, and the sentences were too numerous to admit a column-marking scheme as in the Běncǎo’s yīnyáng characters. From the Sòng on the two layers were merged.
It cites the sound-traditions of more than two hundred and thirty Hàn, Wèi, and Six Dynasties masters, and likewise carries the glosses of the various Confucian commentators and the readings of the various recensions. For all subsequent recovery of the ancient meaning, beyond the zhùshū (注疏) corpus, we depend on the survival of this book alone — what is truly meant by “the residual flavour, the surviving fat, that yet ladles bountiful nourishment.” From the Sòng directorate edition onwards it has been split up and distributed at the end of each canonical text; thus the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo records it in many separate categories. Later still, it was scattered into the body of the zhùshū and frequently confused with the annotations themselves, so that the boundary cannot be told. The present text is the Tōngzhìtáng 通志堂 cut, which preserves the original juàn-arrangement. Hé Zhuó 何焯, in his Diǎnxiào jīngjiě mùlù, derided Gù Méi 顧湄’s collation as careless. Yet though the occasional character is mistaken, the overall framework remains intact, and students of the Classics still treat this work as the foundation of all evidential investigation.
Abstract
The Jīngdiǎn shìwén is the philological keystone of the Chinese classical tradition. Its self-preface dates the start of compilation to the guǐmǎo year (583), the first year of the Zhēndé era of Chén Hòuzhǔ; the work was completed under the Suí, with later additions probably continuing into the early Táng. The tíyào author (Jǐ Yún) was right to wonder whether Lù could really have produced something so encyclopaedic at age twenty: most modern scholars (Wáng Yúnwǔ, Pelliot, Mǎ Xùlún) read the preface as “remembering when I first started” — an ageing recollection of an early date — and place the bulk of the work’s compilation closer to the beginning of the Táng. The dating bracket here therefore runs from the preface date (583) to Lù’s death (627).
What Lù gathered is, in functional terms, an apparatus criticus drawn from the Hàn–Six Dynasties Eastern-Jìn–Liang–Chén commentary stream: more than 230 named yīnyì sources, including the early Yìjīng commentaries by Mèng Xǐ 孟喜, Jīng Fáng 京房, Mǎ Róng 馬融, Sòng Zhōng 宋衷, the Sānlǐ sound-glosses by Liú Chāng 劉昌, the Zuǒzhuàn glosses by Jiǎ Kuí 賈逵 and Fú Qián 服虔, etc. The original arrangement (preserved in the WYG and SBCK / Tōngzhìtáng recensions) is by canonical book, with each yīn extracted as a single character; this discipline broke down once the work was split and distributed under the Sòng zhùshū edition. Lù’s inclusion of the Lǎozǐ and Zhuāngzǐ but exclusion of the Mèngzǐ exactly reflects the hybrid Confucian-Daoist canon of the Six Dynasties intellectual world, prior to the Northern-Sòng elevation of Mèngzǐ to canonical status under Wáng Ānshí and Zhū Xī.
The transmitted text descends through two main streams: (a) the integrated zhùshū tradition (incorporated into the Sòng Shísān jīng zhùshū); and (b) the separately printed Tōngzhìtáng recension of Xú Qiánxué 徐乾學 (preserved in the WYG, in SBCK, and in the present source dir). Stream (a) is partial and fragmented; stream (b) is the textual basis for all serious modern study.
Translations and research
- Bernhard Karlgren. Grammata Serica Recensa. Stockholm: BMFEA, 1957. Karlgren’s reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology depends critically on the Jīngdiǎn shìwén’s sound-glosses.
- Pulleyblank, E. G. Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin. UBC Press, 1991.
- Huáng Zhuó 黃焯 and Zhèng Rénjiǎ 鄭仁甲, comp. Jīngdiǎn shìwén suǒyǐn 經典釋文索引 (Index to the Jīngdiǎn shìwén). Beijing: Zhōnghuá, 1997. Indispensable.
- Wú Chéngshì 吳承仕. Jīngdiǎn shìwén xùlù shū zhèng 經典釋文序錄疏證. 1933 (rev. ed. Zhōnghuá 1984). Standard critical edition of the prefatory juàn.
- Coblin, W. South. A Study of the Old Chinese Initial in Lu Deming’s Jingdian shiwen. Sino-Platonic Papers, 1991.
- Schimmelpfennig, Michael. “Lu Deming and the Jingdian shiwen.” Various articles in Journal of Chinese Studies, Asia Major, etc.
Other points of interest
The work is the principal vehicle by which fragments of otherwise lost Hàn-period commentaries (e.g. Mèng Xǐ’s Yì, Sòng Zhōng’s Yì, Mǎ Róng’s Sānlǐ) survive at all. The Tōngzhìtáng cut by Xú Qiánxué (Kāngxī era) restored the original separate arrangement after centuries of dispersion within the zhùshū; the WYG follows the Tōngzhìtáng. The KRP source for this entry is the Sìbù cóngkān facsimile of the Tōngzhìtáng cut.