Gǔ wēi shū 古微書
The Subtle Books of Antiquity by 孫瑴 (編)
About the work
A 36-juàn late-Míng compendium of fragmentary chènwěi 讖緯 (apocryphal) literature edited by Sūn Jué (Zǐshuāng) of Huáróng, gathered from quotations preserved in the zhùshū, dynastic histories, and lèishū corpora. The work is the principal pre-modern compendium of Hàn-period apocryphal fragments — Shàngshū wěi (11 titles), Chūnqiū wěi (16), Yì wěi (8), Lǐ wěi (3), Yuè wěi (3), Shī wěi (3), Lúnyǔ wěi (4), Xiàojīng wěi (9), Hé tú (10), Luò shū (5). The Sìkù compilers placed the work as an appendix (fù lù) to the Wǔ jīng zǒng yì category — a programmatic editorial decision: the chènwěi literature is acknowledged as evidentially valuable but methodologically suspect.
Tiyao
Your servants having respectfully examined: the Gǔ wēi shū in 36 juàn was edited by Sūn Jué of the Míng. Jué’s style name was Zǐshuāng; he was a man of Huáróng. Examining: Liú Xiàng’s Qī lüè does not list any wěi (apocryphal) books; but private transmission existed among the people from the Qín onwards — not only Lú Shēng’s submission to the First Emperor (per Shǐjì Qín běn jì); even Lǚ Bùwéi’s Shí èr yuè jì’s “such command failure brings such disaster” formula, and the Hóng fàn wǔ xíng zhuàn of Fú Shēng’s “such matter failure brings such omen” formulae — are chènwěi doctrine. The Hàn shū Rúlín zhuàn’s “Mèng Xǐ obtained the Yì jiā hòu yīnyáng zāibiàn book” is even clearer evidence. Xún Shuǎng’s claim that the chènwěi arose under Āidì and Píngdì is — according to its period of greatest flourishing only.
The Suí zhì records 81 piān; after the burnings, much was lost. At present surviving cuts include — per Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo — only the Yì Qián záo dù, Qián kūn záo dù, and the Lǐ hán wén jiā; per Gù Yánwǔ’s Rì zhī lù, also the Xiàojīng yuán shén qì. But the Lǐ hán wén jiā is a Sòng work by Zhāng Shīyǔ 張師禹, not the original; and the Xiàojīng yuán shén qì has not been catalogued since the Sòng — Gù Yánwǔ’s mention of it is probably a momentary error and there is no such book. So those surviving in the world are only the Qián záo dù and the Qián kūn záo dù.
His Majesty the Emperor — illuminating literary government, opening the Sìkù and its Èr yǒu secret holdings — has retrieved from the Yǒnglè dàdiàn the Yì wěi jī lǎn tú, the Tōng guà yàn, the Kūn líng tú, the Shì lèi móu, the Biàn zhōng bèi, the Qián yuán xù zhì jì — six books that for several hundred years no scholar of the broad-gathering school had seen. The remainder is still beyond investigation; the lost is roughly nine of every ten extant.
Jué earlier had compiled a comprehensive Wēi shū: (i) Fán wēi 樊微 — pre-Qín lost sayings; (ii) Xiàn wēi 線微 — HànJìn footnotes; (iii) Què wēi 闕微 — material on the 72 ancient pre-Hàn dynasties; (iv) Shān wēi 删微 — the present compendium. The other three works are lost, only this surviving — and it has therefore inherited the Wēi shū title although it is in fact only one of the four.
What he has gathered: Shàngshū 11 titles, Chūnqiū 16, Yì 8, Lǐ 3, Yuè 3, Shī 3, Lúnyǔ 4, Xiàojīng 9, Hé tú 10, Luò shū 5. Compared with the surviving complete books, his treatment is at best a rough sketch. Furthermore, the Kāi yuán zhàn jīng of Qútán Xīdá of the Táng — not far from the Suí — cites the various wěi including the Hé tú shèng qià fú, the Xiàojīng cíxióng tú, etc., with a hundred-plus entries each in the major works and several dozen each in the lesser; Jué did not see this book and missed many entries. He also extracted from Fú Shēng’s Shàngshū dà zhuàn the Hóng fàn wǔ xíng zhuàn one piān and styled it the work of shén Yǔ (the Divine Yu), which is sheer fabrication.
But his gathering and stitching enabled scholars born a thousand years later to see the surviving texts of pre-Eastern-Hàn antiquity, and to use them as evidential reference. The Jīngyì kǎo’s Bì wěi category cites his book in eight or nine of every ten cases. His effort is also diligent.
The wěi and the jīng are nominally complementary but in fact each is its own book. The guà qì (cosmological hexagram-cycles) doctrine — Mèng Xǐ first used it to gloss the Yì; He Xiū and Zhèng Xuán cite it especially copiously. Sòng’s Ōuyáng Xiū’s memorial requesting a comprehensive editing of the Wǔ jīng sought entirely to delete it from the zhùshū, but the proposal was not adopted; Wèi Liǎowēng’s Jiǔ jīng zhèng yì did fully delete it — this is the strict-method position of the canonical scholar, and is different in kind from Sūn Fù’s (孫復) Chūnqiū deleting the commentaries or Zhèng Qiáo’s Shī deleting the preface — those were merely rhetorical excesses to be in opposition to Hàn xué.
But while doctrine should follow the orthodox track, evidential investigation should not refuse the side-evidence. As Zhèng Xuán’s annotations on the Lǐ — “the Five Heavenly Lords each having name” — this is no different from Daoist talismans, and the Sòng Confucians’ rebuttal is sound. But take Cài Shěn’s Shū jí zhuàn on “the heavenly cycle is 365 1/4 degrees” — this is in fact the text of the Luò shū zēng yào dù and the Shàngshū kǎo líng yào. Take “the hēi path goes 2 northward of the huáng path; the chì path 2 southward of the huáng; the bái path 2 westward; the qīng path 2 eastward” — this is in fact the Hé tú dì lǎn xī text. Take Zhū Xī’s annotation of the Chǔ cí’s Kūnlún zhě dì zhī zhōng yě, dì xià yǒu bā zhù xiānglián — this is in fact the Hé tú kuò dì xiàng text. The “three-footed crow is the yáng essence” — the Chūnqiū yuán mìng bāo text. (Note: these four items are all in Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo’s saying.) Even qī rì lái fù — from Wáng Bì onwards used the “six-day-seven-fraction” reading; Zhū Xī’s Yì běn yì could not change it — this is the Jī lǎn tú text. The Luò shū’s 45 dots — Shào Yōng and onwards held to be the secret key; the system derives from the Tài yǐ jiǔ gōng — this is in fact the Yì Qián záo dù text. The Sòng Confucians could not entirely abandon them. So Jué’s editing of this volume is no small benefit to canonical learning. We may not entirely censure it as fondness for the rare. We accordingly retain it, as an appendix (附錄) to the closing of the Wǔ jīng zǒng yì category. Respectfully collated and submitted in the tenth month of the forty-fifth year of Qiánlóng (1780). — Editors-in-chief: your servants Jǐ Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. — Chief proof-reader: your servant Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
The Gǔ wēi shū is the principal pre-modern compendium of Hàn-period chènwěi (apocryphal) fragments and the foundational source for any study of the corpus. Three points of distinction:
(1) The chènwěi corpus. The chènwěi are the apocryphal-cosmological literature that grew up alongside the canonical jīng in the Western and Eastern Hàn — texts like Yì wěi Qián záo dù, Hé tú dì lǎn xī, Luò shū zēng yào dù, Chūnqiū yuán mìng bāo. They were treated by the Eastern-Hàn court as semi-canonical (and by Wáng Mǎng as fully canonical); systematically suppressed under the Sòng Ōuyáng Xiū / Wèi Liǎowēng program of removing chènwěi citations from the zhùshū; and as a result, surviving only as fragments in earlier texts.
(2) The Sìkù compilers’ programmatic position. The tíyào articulates a doctrine of “*orthodoxy in doctrine, but no refusal of side-evidence in kǎozhèng” — and demonstrates by example: even Cài Shěn’s Shū jí zhuàn and Zhū Xī’s Chǔ cí annotation cite chènwěi texts, despite their general doctrinal hostility. The fragments are evidentially valuable, even if doctrinally suspect — a sophisticated meta-position on the relation between methodological and doctrinal commitments.
(3) The categorical placement. Sūn’s work is placed not within Wǔ jīng zǒng yì proper but as an appendix (附錄) to it — a programmatic editorial decision marking the chènwěi corpus as a textual resource that the canonical scholar can consult but should not allow to drift back into the canonical position it lost in the Sòng-Confucian rejection.
The dating bracket: Sūn’s work was substantively complete by the 1620s–1630s (the self-preface gives no date but internal evidence places composition in the late Wànlì or early Chóngzhēn era). The work was first cut around 1640 and was incorporated into the Sìkù in 1780. The Sìkù recovery of six additional Yì wěi fragments from the Yǒnglè dàdiàn — preserved in the source text — illustrates how the Sìkù project itself contributed to the recovery of chènwěi literature.
Translations and research
- Dull, Jack L. “A Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Ch’an-wei) Texts of the Han Dynasty.” PhD diss., U Washington, 1966. The standard English-language treatment of the corpus.
- Yasui Kōzan 安居香山 and Nakamura Shōhachi 中村璋八. Chōshū isho shūsei: tsuketari kōkan sakuin 重修緯書集成. 6 vols. Tokyo: Meitoku shuppansha, 1971–1992. The standard modern critical edition of the apocryphal corpus, building on Sūn’s recovery.
- Lu Zongli. Power of the Words: Chen Prophecy in Chinese Politics, AD 265–618. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003. Background on the political reception of the corpus.
- Van Ess, Hans. “The Apocryphal Texts of the Han Dynasty and the Old Text/New Text Controversy.” Toung Pao 85 (1999): 29–64.
- Lu, Zongli. 2021. Chen Prophecies and Prophetic Rhymes. Wee Kek Koon, tr. Cambridge UP, 169–245.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù compilers’ methodological-doctrinal distinction (orthodoxy in doctrine, openness in kǎozhèng) — articulated through the placement of this chènwěi compilation as an appendix to the Wǔ jīng zǒng yì category — is one of the more sophisticated programmatic statements in the entire Sìkù tíyào. The work’s continuing scholarly importance is shown by the Yasui Kōzan / Nakamura Shōhachi standard modern critical edition, which builds directly on Sūn’s recovery work plus subsequent additions.