武威漢簡‧甲本特牲

Wǔwēi Hàn Jiǎn‧Jiǎ Běn Tè Shēng 武威漢簡‧甲本特牲

Wuwei Han Bamboo Slips — Version A: Sacrifice of a Single Animal

Excavated text; no attributed author.

About the work

This text is the transcription (shìwén 釋文) of Version A (甲本 jiǎ běn) of the Tè shēng kuì shí lǐ 特牲饋食禮 (“Rite of Offering Food with a Single Sacrificial Animal”) as preserved on bamboo slips from the Mózuǐzǐ 磨嘴子 tomb 6 excavation, Wūwēi 武威, Gānsù (1959). The final colophon records the chapter length as 凡三千四百𠦜字 (“a total of three thousand four hundred-odd characters”), making this one of the longer Wuwei Yili chapters. Part of the broader Wuwei Han bamboo slips (Wǔwēi Hànjian 武威漢簡) corpus.

Abstract

The Tè shēng kuì shí lǐ 特牲饋食禮 is chapter 15 of the received Yílǐ 儀禮. It describes the shì 士 officer’s annual ancestral sacrifice using a single pig (tè shēng 特牲, “a single [sacrificial] animal”). The ritual is the most elaborate of the three levels of sacrificial offering in the Yili and encompasses: divination by milfoil to fix the auspicious date, inviting the ritual impersonator of the ancestor (shī 𡰣 [尸]), the formal invitation of guests (bīn 賓), the sacrifice itself with its complex sequence of libations, presentations of meat cuts, toasts, and rounds of drinking, and finally the withdrawal procedures. The chapter culminates in a detailed specification of the meat portions allotted to the various participants (the impersonator, the invoker zhù 祝, the household head, the household mistress, the assistants, and the guests).

The Wuwei text opens: 特牲餽食之禮：不詛日。及筮日，主人冠端玄，即位于門外，西面 (“The rite of offering food with a single animal: [One does] not set a day [by prayer]. When divining the date, the master of the household wears a court cap with dark-colored [clothes] and takes his position outside the gate, facing west”). The text proceeds in meticulous procedural detail through the many sub-rites.

The colophon 凡三千四百𠦜字 is explicitly preserved in the final slips of this manuscript, providing a rare count of the chapter length in the Wuwei version. Comparison of this figure with the received Yili text is one basis for evaluating the degree of textual completeness of the Wuwei copy.

The Wuwei Tè shēng preserves variant character forms and occasional textual differences from the Shísān jīng zhùshū received text. The chapter is significant for the history of Han ancestral cult practice and for the reconstruction of early Yili transmission.

Translations and research

• Steele, John, tr. The I-li, or Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial. 2 vols. Probsthain, 1917. Covers the Tè shēng kuì shí lǐ in vol. 2.
• 陳夢家 Chén Mèngjiā, ed. 《武威漢簡》. 文物出版社, 1964; repr. 中華書局, 2005.
• Loewe, Michael. “I-li.” In Michael Loewe, ed. Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide. SSEC/IEAS, 1993, pp. 234–43.
• Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China. Princeton University Press, 1991. For the long-term influence of the Yili sacrificial chapters on later family ritual.

Links

• Wuwei Han bamboo slips — Wikipedia
• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §59.7.2 (III Wuwei, #2).