Qī jīng Mèngzǐ kǎo wén bǔ yí 七經孟子考文補遺
Critical Collation of the Seven Classics and Mèngzǐ, with Supplementary Notes by 山井鼎 (撰; Yamai Kanae) and 物觀 (補遺; Mononobe Mitsuyoshi)
About the work
A monumental Japanese-Tokugawa-era critical collation of the Wǔ jīng + Lúnyǔ + Xiàojīng + Mèngzǐ (= Qī jīng + Mèngzǐ), in 199 juàn (the WYG count is 200 — the 199 ostensibly + 1 fán lì; the catalog meta gives 200; the tíyào gives 206), produced by Yamai Kanae at the Ashikaga School in Shimotsuke (modern Tochigi), Japan, completed in draft by 1726, supplemented and printed by Mononobe Mitsuyoshi in 1731. The work draws on the Ashikaga School’s holdings of (i) a Sòng cut of the Wǔ jīng zhèng yì, (ii) old-recension copies (kohon 古本) of multiple classical books, (iii) the Ashikaga-cut moveable-type editions, and (iv) the Míng cuts of 1505, 1545, 1602, and 1631 (the last = the Jígǔgé 汲古閣 cut), with the Jígǔgé cut as the base text and the others used for collation.
The work’s reimport into China in the mid-eighteenth century made it one of the foundational philological resources of the Qing kǎozhèng movement; the Sìkù compilers’ decision to include it in the Sìkù quánshū under Japanese authorship (with the dynasty annotation 日本) is a notable acknowledgement of its status.
Tiyao
Your servants having respectfully examined: the Qī jīng Mèngzǐ kǎo wén bǔ yí in 206 juàn — the original copy attributing the work to “Xītiáo zhǎngshūjì Yamai Kanae” (= Bookkeeper of Saijō, Yamai Kanae), with collation by “Dōngdū jiǎngguān Mononobe” (= Edo Lecturer Mononobe). From Yamai’s preface it is plain that Yamai composed the kǎo wén and Mononobe supplied the bǔ yí. Neither’s exact origin is known. Examining the printing format and paper colour, the work is a Japanese cut. The work consists of: Yì in 10 juàn, Shū in 18 juàn, Shī in 20 juàn, Lǐjì in 63 juàn, Lúnyǔ in 20 juàn, Xiàojīng in 1 juàn, Mèngzǐ in 14 juàn. Setting Mèngzǐ apart from the Seven Classics: Japan opened relations with China only from the Táng, and it perhaps still uses the Táng arrangement.
At the front are the fán lì, which note that “of those held at the Ashikaga School, there is a Sòng cut of the Wǔ jīng zhèng yì in one copy; old-recension Zhōu yì in 3 copies; lüè lì in 1; Máo shī in 2; the Huáng Kǎn Yì shū in 1; old-recension Xiàojīng in 1; Mèngzǐ in 1; an Ashikaga Lǐjì in 1; the Zhōu yì, Lúnyǔ, Mèngzǐ in 1 each; and the Zhèngdé, Jiājìng, Wànlì, and Chóngzhēn cuts of the Shísān jīng zhùshū” — the Chóngzhēn cut being the Jígǔgé cut. The work’s protocol is to give canonical text first, then zhù, then shū, then shìwén — taking the Jígǔgé cut as the base text and collating the others against it. The five categories of entry are: kǎo yì (variants), bǔ què (supplied gaps in the jīngzhù), bǔ tuō (supplied lacunae in the shìwén), jǐn àn (commentator’s note), and zhèng wù (corrected error).
[The tíyào continues with several columns of detailed comparison: the readings the Yamai/Mononobe work calls “Sòng cut” — checked against Máo Jūzhèng’s Liù jīng zhèng wù (KR1g0007) and Yuè Kē’s Jiǔ jīng sān zhuàn yán’gé lì (KR1g0008) — show several discrepancies (Yamai cites Yìjì’s fěn ruò sù bīng 粉若粟氷; the WYG note records Mǎo’s Shàoxīng cut as sù bīng, Jiānběn as sù shuǐ, Xìngguóběn as sù mǐ; Yamai’s “Sòng cut” matches the modern Jígǔgé cut but doesn’t agree with the Mǎo/Yuè-cited Sòng readings on this point). The tíyào enumerates a number of these mismatches, noting they “do not agree with the Sòng cuts cited by Mǎo and Yuè — we don’t know what specific Sòng cut the work was using.”
But on other passages the kǎo wén matches the Sòng readings cited by Mǎo and Yuè exactly: Zhōu yì’s Xiǎo guò 9-4 zhù, bù wéi zé zhǔ 不為責主 — Yamai cites the Sòng cut as guì 貴, matching the Liù jīng zhèng wù’s “shàn běn”; Chūnqiū zhuàn Zhāo 12 xī wǒ xiān wáng Xióng Yì yǔ Lǚ Jí 昔我先王熊繹與吕級 — Yamai cites Sòng Yǒnghuáitáng cut as Jí 伋, matching Liù jīng zhèng wù’s “Xìngguó-cut” reading; etc. The tíyào enumerates seven such matches.
The tíyào notes furthermore that of the 21 Sòng cuts catalogued by Yuè Kē, most do not append the shìwén; the only ones that do are the Jiànběn and the Shǔ dàzìběn. The work shows the Máo shī and Zuǒ zhuàn with appended shìwén — so its base Sòng cut may have been one of these. The “古本” Yamai cites — the kohon — is tested against the Sòng Shū in: at Shùn diǎn zhù on “shǐ gè chén jìn zhì lǐ zhī yán”, the kohon gives lǐ 理 as lǐ 禮; Mǎo’s Liù jīng zhèng wù’s Imperial-Academy cut also gives lǐ as lǐ 禮 — so the kohon readings are not without warrant. The shìwén corrections are mostly cited from “yuán wén” — the original text — but we don’t know what specific cut that means; checking the Tōngzhìtáng cut, every reading matches. So before the Xú [Qiánxué] cut (Tōngzhìtáng), this Jīngdiǎn shìwén had already entered Japan.
Ouyang Xiu’s Rì běn dāo gē (“Song of the Japanese Sword”) says: “When Xú Fú went, the books had not yet been burned; the legacy hundred piān are still extant today.” We now examine the Japanese Shàngshū listed by this work — it is no different from the Chinese cut. And though Fēng Fáng 豐坊 (Míng) faked classics under the title “overseas cut”, we now examine the Yamai work and find no agreement with Fēng’s forgery on a single point — this in itself suffices to put to rest a thousand-year doubt. Respectfully collated and submitted in the seventh month of the forty-third year of Qiánlóng (1778). — Editors-in-chief: your servants Jǐ Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. — Chief proof-reader: your servant Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
The Qī jīng Mèngzǐ kǎo wén bǔ yí is one of the most important critical-textual works on the Confucian canon ever produced — and the most important to be produced outside China. Three points of distinction:
(1) The Ashikaga holdings. The Ashikaga 足利 School in Shimotsuke had — by the time Yamai Kanae arrived there for his three-year leave of absence — accumulated an unparalleled collection of pre-Sòng and Sòng-cut Confucian classics that had been preserved in Japan but lost in China. The kohon (古本) — old-recension manuscript copies of the Zhōu yì, Shàngshū, Máoshī, Lǐjì, Lúnyǔ, Mèngzǐ, Xiàojīng — preserved Táng-period textual states and traditions of yìshū (Huáng Kǎn’s Lúnyǔ yì shū in particular). The Sòng cut of the Wǔ jīng zhèng yì held at Ashikaga is one of perhaps three or four such surviving Sòng cuts in any collection in the world.
(2) The collation method. The kǎo wén protocol — five-category entry classification (kǎo yì, bǔ què, bǔ tuō, jǐn àn, zhèng wù) with the Jígǔgé cut as the base text — is a methodologically sophisticated working philologist’s framework. The five-category scheme anticipates, by half a century, the very similar protocols later articulated by Lú Wénzhāo and Ruǎn Yuán in the Qing kǎozhèng movement.
(3) The reception. When the work was reimported into China — first via the Korean book trade, then directly through the Nagasaki–Ningbo channel — it transformed the Qing kǎozhèng understanding of the Confucian canon. Wáng Niànsūn, Duàn Yùcái, Lú Wénzhāo, Ruǎn Yuán, Wáng Yǐnzhī all drew on it; Ruǎn’s Shísān jīng zhùshū jiào kān jì (1815) cites it on virtually every collation note.
Dating bracket: Yamai’s kǎo wén was completed in draft by 1726 (during his three-year leave); Mononobe’s bǔ yí and the printing came in 1731. The work was reimported to China in the 1740s and was incorporated into the Sìkù quánshū on Qiánlóng’s 1778 imperial collation. The catalog meta gives 200 juàn extent; the tíyào gives 206; the inner counts (10+18+20+63+20+1+14 = 146) plus fán lì and apparatus account for the 199–200 figure — the 206 in the tíyào is probably an editorial slip but is preserved here.
Translations and research
- Imanaka Kanshi 今中寛司. Yamai Kanae kenkyū 山井鼎研究. 1969. The standard Japanese-language monographic study.
- Ruǎn Yuán 阮元. Shísān jīng zhùshū jiào kān jì 十三經注疏校勘記. 1815. Cites the Qī jīng Mèngzǐ kǎo wén bǔ yí on virtually every collation note.
- Lú Wénzhāo 盧文弨. Bào jīng-táng zhī yì cóng shū 抱經堂知一叢書. Cites Yamai-Mononobe extensively.
- Wǔshě Tonosuke 武者小路実厚. Ashikaga gakkō no kenkyū 足利学校の研究. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1985.
- Brokaw, Cynthia. “On the History of the Book in China.” In Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (UC Press, 2005). Background on the Tokugawa-Qing book trade.
Other points of interest
The Ashikaga School kohon materials — to which Yamai had unique access — preserve readings transmitted to Japan in the Táng (when scholarly contact between the Tang court and the Heian court included multiple sets of Confucian classics) and held in unbroken Japanese tradition through the medieval period. The very fact of these readings’ agreement with the Sòng cuts (rather than the Míng cuts) was the empirical evidence that the kohon line was authentically pre-Sòng — independent confirmation of Sòng cuts’ authority and a reciprocal validation of the Ashikaga corpus. The Sìkù compilers’ explicit refutation of Fēng Fáng’s faked-overseas-classics scandal — by demonstrating that not a single Yamai-cited Japanese reading agrees with Fēng’s forgeries — is among the more elegant uses of the work in Sìkù tíyào practice.