聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

新語

8 min read

Text ID
KR3a0004
Date
-202–-195
Dynasty
漢

Xīnyǔ 新語

New Discourses by 陸賈 (Lù Jiǎ, ca. 240–170 BCE, 漢)

About the work

A short work in two juan / twelve 篇, framed as an explanation to the founding Hàn emperor of why Qín had lost the empire and Hàn had gained it. The composition is firmly placed by the Shǐjì (j. 97) and Hàn shū (j. 43) within the reign of Gāozǔ 高祖 (202–195 BCE) and at his explicit command, following the famous “horseback” exchange. The work is the earliest sustained piece of imperial-Hàn Confucian political reflection — earlier than Jiǎ Yì’s Xīnshū (KR3a0005), earlier than Dǒng Zhòngshū. Its argument is that conquest and rule require complementary techniques (civil and martial), that ritual-ordered government is the technique of long endurance, and that the failure of Qín lay in xíngfǎ 刑法 unmodulated by rén 仁 and yì 義. Its citations are overwhelmingly from the Shījīng and Lúnyǔ with admixtures from the Chūnqiū tradition. The text has minor late accretions, but on the SKQS editors’ considered judgment the bulk is genuinely pre-Wǔdì.

Tiyao

The Xīnyǔ in two juan — copy from the Inner Storehouse (內府藏本).

The old recension titles it as composed by Lù Jiǎ of the Hàn. The Hàn shū biography of Lù says he composed the Xīnyǔ in twelve 篇. The Hàn shū yìwén zhì under Rújiā lists “Lù Jiǎ, twenty-seven 篇” — counting in his other writings together. The Suí zhì gives the Xīnyǔ in two juan. The juan-count of the present text agrees with the Suí zhì; the 篇-count agrees with the biography; it appears to be the old recension.

But: the Hàn shū Sīmǎ Qiān zhuàn says that Sīmǎ Qiān drew on the Zhànguó cè, ChǔHàn chūnqiū and Lù Jiǎ’s Xīnyǔ for the Shǐjì. The ChǔHàn chūnqiū — Zhāng Shǒujié’s 張守節 Zhèngyì still cites it, but it is now lost beyond reconstruction. The Zhànguó cè furnishes ninety-three matters of Shǐjì, all matching the present text. But the wording of the present Xīnyǔ is nowhere to be found in the Shǐjì. Wáng Chōng’s 王充 Lùnhéng — Běnxìng 論衡 本性篇 cites Lù Jiǎ: “in the engendering of men by Heaven and Earth, with a nature [endowed by] ritual and rightness, when one can examine oneself, then in receiving the mandate one accords; to accord is what is called the Way.” The present text contains nothing of the kind. Furthermore, the Gǔliáng zhuàn came out only in Wǔdì’s reign, and yet the close of the “Dào jī” 道基 chapter [of the present Xīnyǔ] cites the Gǔliáng zhuàn — chronologically out of order. Most likely later hands have added on, and this is no longer Lù’s original.

Examining Mǎ Zǒng’s 馬總 Yìlín 意林, what it cites is in every case in agreement with the present text. The Wénxuǎn commentary of Lǐ Shàn 李善 cites “Xīnyǔ: ‘when Pián 楩 and zǐ 梓 are felled they become the world’s wood’” (in the note to Sīmǎ Biāo’s Zèng Shān Tāo poem); “Xīnyǔ: ‘the sage carries Heaven’s awe; carrying Heaven’s merit, to contend merit with [Heaven] is hard indeed’” (Wáng Càn, Cóngjūn poem); “Xīnyǔ: ‘a hundred-rèn high terrace’” (Lù Jī, Rì chū dōngnányú xíng); “Xīnyǔ: ‘a perverse minister obscuring the worthy is like floating cloud screening sun and moon’” (the first of the Gǔshī); “Xīnyǔ: ‘who establishes great merit in the world will surely hand down a name to ten thousand generations’” (Zhāng Zǎi, Zá shī, the seventh). Cross-checking these against the present text, while wording differs in places between full and abridged forms, the substance corresponds — so the text in something like its present shape was already current in the Táng. But the Yùhǎi says “the Xīnyǔ of Lù Jiǎ now extant in the world has only seven 篇 — Dào jī, Shù shì, Fǔ zhèng, Wú wéi, Zī xián, Zhì dé, Huái lǜ”. The present text has twelve, more than the Sòng version. This is hard to explain. Perhaps later hands took an incomplete recension and patched on five 篇 to bring it up to the biography’s old total.

Considered as it stands, the work’s main bearing exalts the Wáng dào 王道 and dismisses bà technique, returning to xiūshēn 修身 and the yòngrén 用人 of office-holders. The only Lǎozǐ citation is “the highest virtue does not [act as] virtue” (上德不德) in the Sī wù 思務 chapter; otherwise it takes Confucius and the school of Confucius for its master, and its supports are mostly drawn from the Chūnqiū and Lúnyǔ. Among Hàn Confucians, apart from Dǒng Zhòngshū 董仲舒, none is so unmixed in orthodoxy. With long transmission its truth and its forgery may stand together unargued. The matter of “Wèi gōngzǐ Zhuān fleeing to Jìn” agrees with none of the Three Commentaries on the Chūnqiū and its source is unidentified. There are many lacunae, beyond emendation. Stories like “Wéngōng’s planting rice” or “Zēngzǐ’s driving sheep” are quoted whole by Liú Zhòu’s 劉晝 Xīn lùn 新論 and by Mǎ Zǒng’s Yìlín, so the text is not corrupt — but no source for those stories is now traceable. Likewise the phrase “jù lí gé bào” (據犁嗝報) defies glossing. With the loss of ancient books we no longer see the whole; one ought to leave open what one does not know.

Abstract

The Xīnyǔ is the earliest extant sustained piece of imperial-Hàn Confucian political theorising and the founding text of “Hàn-style” Confucian statecraft, predating the Xīnshū of Jiǎ Yì (KR3a0005) and the Chūnqiū fánlù of Dǒng Zhòngshū. The Shǐjì and Hàn shū both record the famous court exchange that elicited the work from Lù Jiǎ at Gāozǔ’s command, fixing the composition unambiguously within Gāozǔ’s reign 202–195 BCE.

The textual situation is not entirely clean. The SKQS tíyào notes two specific points of difficulty: (i) Wáng Chōng (1st c. CE) cites a Lù Jiǎ passage on xìng 性 not in the present text; (ii) the Gǔliáng zhuàn, which only emerged into transmission under Wǔdì (r. 141–87 BCE), is cited by name in the close of the present Dào jī chapter — chronologically anachronistic if Lù Jiǎ wrote the entire received text. The Yùhǎi records that only seven 篇 of the Xīnyǔ were extant in the Sòng, so the recovery of twelve 篇 by the time of the SKQS is hard to explain on a clean transmission. The current consensus, most fully argued by Wáng Lìqì 王利器 in his Xīnyǔ jiàozhù 新語校註 (Zhōnghuá Shūjú, 1986), is that the bulk is genuinely Lù Jiǎ’s but some later additions and conflations have entered the text. The Lǐ Shàn citations in the Wénxuǎn commentary establish that the work was substantially in its present form by the early Táng.

The frontmatter dating bracket -202 to -195 reflects the secure historical window of composition under Gāozǔ. The catalog meta’s -228 to -141 are author lifedates and not work dates.

The work’s argumentative core — that ritual-ordered government is the chángjiǔ zhī shù 長久之術, that Qín fell from over-reliance on xíngfǎ, and that the new dynasty must combine civil and martial — sets the agenda for early Western Hàn court Confucianism and is recognised as such throughout the bibliographic tradition. Bibliographic record: Hàn shū yìwén zhì (陸賈 二十七篇, Rújiā); Suí shū jīngjí zhì (新語 二卷); Jiù Táng shū jīngjí zhì; Xīn Táng shū yìwén zhì; Chóngwén zǒngmù; Yùhǎi 玉海; Wénxiàn tōngkǎo.

Translations and research

  • Mei-kao Ku [Gǔ Mèigāo 顧美高], A Chinese Mirror for Magistrates: The Hsin-yü of Lu Chia, Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1988. The standard English translation and study.
  • Wáng Lìqì 王利器, Xīnyǔ jiàozhù 新語校註, Běijīng: Zhōnghuá Shūjú (Xīn biān zhūzǐ jíchéng 新編諸子集成), 1986. The standard scholarly edition; comprehensive collation, sources, and treatment of the textual problems flagged by the SKQS tíyào.
  • Sòng Hóngbīng 宋洪兵, Lù Jiǎ Xīnyǔ yánjiū 陸賈新語研究, Běijīng: Shèhuì Kēxué Wénxiàn Chūbǎnshè, 2009.
  • Michael Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993, s.v. “Hsin yü”, 171–177 (entry by Roger T. Ames).
  • Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China, SUNY Press, 2006 — uses Xīnyǔ extensively for early-Hàn political-cosmological argument.

Other points of interest

The “horseback” exchange between Lù Jiǎ and Liú Bāng — preserved in Shǐjì j. 97 — is the most quoted passage about the founding of the Western Hàn order, and the Xīnyǔ is its programmatic sequel. The text’s seven-篇 transmission in the Sòng, recovered to twelve 篇 in the SKQS, makes it a useful methodological case in pre-modern Chinese textual recovery: even an imperial-court bibliographic project could not always determine which 篇 were authentic and which patched in.

Graph View

Backlinks