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孔叢子

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Text ID
KR3a0003
Date
200–300
Dynasty
漢

Kǒng cóngzǐ 孔叢子

The Kǒng-Family Anthology attributed to 孔鮒 (Kǒng Fù, zì Zǐyú 子魚, ca. 264–208 BCE, 秦, attributed)

About the work

A three-juan, twenty-one-篇 collection of dialogues and short prose pieces purporting to record the words and deeds of Confucius and successive generations of his lineage — Zǐsī 子思 (Kǒng Jí 孔伋), Zǐshàng 子上, Zǐgāo 子高, Zǐshùn 子順 (= Kǒng Shùn) — closing with material on Kǒng Fù himself. Appended at the end is the Liáncóngzǐ 連叢子, two short pieces (a fù 賦 and a letter) ascribed to the mid-Hàn marquis Kǒng Zāng 孔臧, often counted as part of the same work. The traditional attribution of the main text to Kǒng Fù has been rejected since the Sòng (Chén Zhènsūn 陳振孫, Zhū Xī 朱熹), and the work is now generally regarded as a Late Hàn / WèiJìn compilation by descendants of the Kǒng family, drawing on older lineage materials. Within KR3a it occupies the ground after the Kǒngzǐ jiāyǔ and shares with that text both the literary technique of free composition of “Confucian” dialogue and the specific suspicion of having been composed in similar circles in the third century CE.

Tiyao

The Kǒng cóngzǐ in three juan — copy from the Inner Storehouse (內府藏本).

The old recension titles it as composed by Kǒng Fù. It contains the words and deeds of Confucius and, in succession, Zǐshàng, Zǐgāo and Zǐshùn — twenty-one 篇 in all — followed at the end by Kǒng Zāng’s two appended pieces, a fù and a letter, separately titled Liáncóngzǐ. Fù, zì Zǐyú, was an eighth-generation descendant of Confucius. He took service under Chén Shè 陳涉 as Erudite. Zāng was the son of Kǒng Jù, a founding merit-follower of Hàn Gāozǔ, inherited the title Marquis of Liǎo, and held office under Wǔdì as Grand Master of Ceremonies.

The Wénxiàn tōngkǎo gives the work as seven juan; the present text is in three. By whose hand it was conflated is unknown. Cháo Gōngwǔ’s Dúshū zhì says: “the Hàn zhì has no Kǒng cóngzǐ; in the Rújiā it lists Kǒng Zāng in ten 篇, and in the Záijiā a Kǒng Jiǎ pányú shū 孔甲盤盂書 in twenty-six 篇. In the ‘Dúzhì’ 獨治 chapter [of the Kǒng cóngzǐ] Fù is sometimes called Kǒng Jiǎ. Possibly the Kǒng cóngzǐ is the Kǒng Jiǎ pányú and the Liáncóngzǐ is the Kǒng Zāng.” But in the Hàn zhì Yán Shīgǔ’s note holds that the Kǒng Jiǎ in question is either the Yellow Emperor’s scribe Kǒng Jiǎ or the Xià king Kǒng Jiǎ — neither of which fits — so Kǒng cóngzǐ is not the Pányú. Furthermore, the Hàn zhì lists the Kǒng Zāng under Rújiā in ten 篇, and separately in the Cífù class lists Kǒng Zāng fù in twenty 篇. The present Liáncóngzǐ contains a fù, so it is also not the Rújiā Kǒng Zāng. Cháo Gōngwǔ has not escaped the temptation of forced identifications.

The Zhūzǐ yǔlèi 朱子語類 says: “the language of Kǒng cóngzǐ is soft in style, not like Western Hàn writing — surely a compilation made by the descendants from miscellaneous family relics.” Chén Zhènsūn 陳振孫’s Shūlù jiětí 書錄解題 likewise observes: by the Hàn shū “Kǒng Guāng zhuàn”, Kǒng Fù — eighth-generation descendant of Confucius and son of the Wèi minister Shùn — was Erudite under Chén Shè and died at Chén; he was not a Hàn-period figure, and the present book records the death of Fù — so how can it be by Fù? The argument is decisive.

The Suí shū jīngjí zhì puts a Kǒng cóng in seven juan in the Lúnyǔ class, with the note: “composed by Kǒng Fù, Erudite of Chén Shèng.” The preface there (xùlù) calls the Kǒng cóng and the Jiāyǔ “what the Kǒng family has transmitted of Confucius’s teaching.” But the Jiāyǔ came out of Wáng Sù’s hand; the Suí zhì is already wrong to take it as authentic, and the placement of the Kǒng cóng “from what the Kǒng family transmitted” is therefore not solid evidence either. The doubts of Zhū Xī are not unfounded. Compare for instance the explanation, in the chapter glossing the “禋于六宗” of the “Shùndiǎn” 舜典 of the Shàngshū, where the master replies: “the six things venerated, all sacrificed to in purification”: offering at Tàizhāo for the seasons, at Kǎntán for cold and heat, at the suburb shrine for the sun, at Yèmíng for the moon, at Yōuyíng for the stars, at Yúyíng for water and drought — exactly the same explanation as in the spurious KǒngĀnGuó preface and the spurious Jiāyǔ. This too is a clear sign of a late origin.

The eleventh篇 [of the Kǒng cóngzǐ] is what the world transmits as the Xiǎo Ěryǎ 小爾雅. Commentators frequently cite it, but always from the Jìn or Sòng [南朝宋] period onward; only in the Gōngyáng zhuàn sub-commentary citing Jiǎ Kuí 賈逵 do we read that vulgar Confucians take six liǎng as one liè — which does indeed come from this book. But “vulgar Confucians” excludes its being the Xiǎo Ěryǎ of the Hàn yìwén zhì. Furthermore, the Shuǐjīng zhù 水經注 cites a Kǒng cóngzǐ passage on the topography of Confucius’s tomb — a square li north of the city of Lǔ on the Sì 泗 River, with over fifty Kǒng-family burials around it, the placements no longer identifiable, three inscribed stelae and a complete set of stone beasts — none of which is in the present text. The book is apparently incomplete. But the passage does not match the rest of the work in style and is unlike Kǒng-family idiom; possibly Lì Dàoyuán 酈道元 misattributed, or scribal error has wrongly mislabelled material from another book as Kǒng cóngzǐ.

Abstract

The textual situation is closely analogous to that of the Kǒngzǐ jiāyǔ. The traditional attribution to Kǒng Fù was already rejected by Chén Zhènsūn on the unanswerable point that the book records its supposed author’s death. Zhū Xī’s stylistic argument — too soft for Western Hàn — is widely accepted. The current scholarly consensus is that the Kǒng cóngzǐ is a Wèi-Western Jìn compilation by descendants of the Kǒng house, partly preserving older lineage tradition but in its received form a third- to fourth-century CE work. The frontmatter dating bracket (200–300 CE) reflects this received-recension consensus rather than the catalog meta’s indefensible Qín date for the named author.

The Liáncóngzǐ 連叢子 appended at the end has its own crux: the Hàn yìwén zhì lists a Kǒng Zāng work under the Rújiā and (separately) a fù corpus by a Kǒng Zāng under the Cífù, and as the tíyào notes, the inclusion of a fù in the Liáncóngzǐ indicates that the appended material — if genuinely Kǒng Zāng’s — must be from the Cífù tradition rather than the Rújiā one. Whether the appendix is in fact early Hàn or, like the main text, a later compilation under his name, remains uncertain; recent specialist work tends to treat it as part of the same later compilation.

The eleventh篇 of the Kǒng cóngzǐ, traditionally identified with the Xiǎo Ěryǎ 小爾雅 (a glossographic appendix to the Ěryǎ), is itself a complicated case: it is anciently cited in the Gōngyáng sub-commentary (citing Jiǎ Kuí) and is the most secure pre-Wèi witness to the work’s nucleus. Catalog records: Suí shū jīngjí zhì (in the Lúnyǔ class, 7 juan); Jiù Táng shū jīngjí zhì; Xīn Táng shū yìwén zhì; Wénxiàn tōngkǎo (7 juan); Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì. The reduction from seven juan to three appears to be post-Sòng and pre-SKQS; by whose hand is unrecorded.

Translations and research

  • Yoav Ariel, K’ung-ts’ung-tzu: A Study and Translation of Chapters 15–23 with a Reconstruction of the Hsiao Erh-ya Dictionary (Sinica Leidensia 26), Leiden: Brill, 1989. The most influential Western critical study; argues for a Wèi-Jìn date of compilation and treats the Xiǎo Ěryǎ embedded in chapter 11 separately.
  • Yoav Ariel, K’ung-ts’ung-tzu: The K’ung Family Masters’ Anthology — A Study and Translation of Chapters 1–10, 12–14, Princeton University Press, 1989. Companion volume; the standard English translation of the bulk of the text.
  • Sūn Shàohuá 孫少華, Kǒng cóngzǐ yánjiū 孔叢子研究, Běijīng: Zhōnghuá Shūjú, 2011. Comprehensive recent monograph.
  • Fù Zǎnzǎn 傅亞庶, Kǒng cóngzǐ jiàoshì 孔叢子校釋, Běijīng: Zhōnghuá Shūjú (Xīn biān zhūzǐ jíchéng 新編諸子集成), 2011.
  • Hú Yìnglín 胡應麟, Sì-bù zhèng-é 四部正譌 (Míng) — early systematic argument for the work’s spuriousness.
  • For Xiǎo Ěryǎ specifically: Hu Chengxun 胡承珙, Xiǎo Ěryǎ yìzhèng 小爾雅義證 (Qīng); Hú Pǔ’ān 胡樸安, Xiǎo Ěryǎ huì biān 小爾雅彙編.

Other points of interest

The Sòng commentator Sòng Xián 宋咸 supplied a commentary completed in Jiāyòu 嘉祐 3 (1058), with an attached “進孔叢子表” (memorial submitting the Kǒng cóngzǐ) preserved in the SBCK base (KR3a0003_000.txt) — see the preface and the dated colophon. Sòng Xián’s preface is the standard premodern argument for the text’s authenticity, which the SKQS editors and post-Zhū-Xī scholarship reject.

The relationship between the Kǒng cóngzǐ and the Kǒngzǐ jiāyǔ — both apparent Wèi-Jìn-era expansions of Kǒng-family lore — is one of the cleanest examples in the Confucian zǐ-bibliography of paired pseudepigrapha; modern scholarship sometimes treats them together as evidence for third-century Kǒng lineage cultural production.

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