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新書

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Text ID
KR3a0005
Date
-178–-168
Dynasty
漢

Xīnshū 新書

The New Book by 賈誼 (Jiǎ Yì, 200–168 BCE, 漢)

About the work

The collected prose of Jiǎ Yì 賈誼 — the early-Hàn polymath, Tàifù of Chángshā and Liáng, and Wéndì’s brilliant young political analyst — in ten juan, fifty-six 篇 plus one 篇 listed in the table of contents but lost in the body (“Wèn Xiào” 問孝). The Hàn shū yìwén zhì records “Jiǎ Yì, fifty-eight 篇” under Rújiā, and the Chóngwén zǒngmù says the original was seventy-two 篇 reduced to fifty-eight by Liú Xiàng 劉向. The received text is in significant part a re-cut version of materials also preserved in Jiǎ Yì’s Hàn shū biography (Hàn shū j. 48), with chapter divisions and titles imposed in late Táng or Sòng times — Zhū Xī 朱熹 considered it a “miscellany of drafts” (záijì zhī gǎo 雜記之稿) and Chén Zhènsūn 陳振孫 dismissed any portion not in the Hàn shū as later padding. The SKQS tíyào takes a more balanced position: the bulk is genuine, the text is incomplete, the chapter divisions are post-original, and certain passages (the “Qīngshǐ shì zhī jì” 青史氏之記 on prenatal education, the “Xiūzhèng yǔ” 修政語 上/下, the “Bǎofù” 保傅 and “Róngjīng” 容經 chapters) preserve material of independent value not duplicated in the standard histories.

Tiyao

The Xīnshū in ten juan — current circulating recension (通行本).

Composed by Jiǎ Yì of the Hàn. The Hàn shū yìwén zhì under Rújiā gives “Jiǎ Yì, fifty-eight 篇”. The Chóngwén zǒngmù states: “originally seventy-two 篇, Liú Xiàng having pared it to fifty-eight.” The Suí and Táng bibliographies all give nine juan; an alternate recension is in ten juan. But on inspection the present Suí and Táng bibliographies all read “ten juan” and give no sign of the nine-juan reading — surely the editors of the Suí shū and Táng shū simply had not seen the Chóngwén zǒngmù and emended back to the present text. Míng-period reprintings of ancient books are full of such tampering.

The present text however has only fifty-six 篇, and the “Wèn Xiào” 問孝 chapter is in the table of contents without text — only fifty-five extant. So already not the Northern Sòng recension. Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí furthermore says the head of the work was the Guò Qín lùn and the tail the Diào Xiāng fù 弔湘賦, with an abridgement of the Hàn shū biography at juan eleven. The present text does indeed open with the Guò Qín lùn but lacks the Diào Xiāng fù at the end and lacks the eleventh-juan appendix — it is not even the Southern Sòng recension. The work draws much from material in the Hàn shū biography of Jiǎ Yì, breaks up its sentences, transposes the order, and applies titles, with rather chaotic results.

The Zhūzǐ yǔlù says: “Of the Xīnshū, leaving aside what is in the Hàn shū, the rest is hard to find anything pure in. It looks like nothing more than Jiǎ Yì’s miscellaneous notebook draft, with this and that of substance scattered through it.” Chén Zhènsūn likewise says that what is not in the Hàn shū is shallow and refutable, certainly not Jiǎ Yì’s authentic book. But on examination: the zàn 贊 to the Hàn shū biography says “of his writings altogether, fifty-eight 篇” and that what was “pertinent to the affairs of the world” was selected for the biography. Yìng Shào’s 應劭 Hàn shū note glosses “Guò Qín lùn” as “the title of the first 篇 of Jiǎ’s book” — so what the Hàn shū preserves is among the fifty-eight 篇, conclusive evidence. The same zàn further says that the “three-displays-five-baits” stratagem (三表五餌) was for binding the Xiōngnú 單于; Yán Shīgǔ’s note cites Jiǎ’s book and matches the present text. The Wéndì běnjì note also cites the Jiǎ shū on “the Wèi marquis attending court at Zhōu, the Zhōu Hàngrén 行人 inquiring his name” — also matching the present text. So the present text is what the Táng commentators saw — also conclusive.

Yet there is no rule that one would extract a single passage and constitute it a 篇, nor any rule that one would conjoin a dozen 篇 into a single court memorial submitted as one. The hypothesis must be: passages like the Guò Qín lùn and Zhì’ān cè were originally each a single 篇 of the fifty-eight; the original later went to pieces; an interested party then took the existing 篇 of the Hàn shū biography, cut up the prose, gave each fragment its own title, and so reached the count of fifty-eight 篇 — hence the patchwork. The book is neither wholly authentic nor wholly forged. Zhū Xī’s “miscellaneous notebook draft” is not exact; Chén Zhènsūn’s “certainly not Jiǎ’s book” is even less just.

What is in the work but not in the Hàn shū is often Shuōyuàn / Xīnxù / Hán shī wàizhuàn in style. But the “Qīngshǐ shì zhī jì” 青史氏之記 fully sets out the ancient ritual of prenatal education; “Xiūzhèng yǔ” 修政語 upper and lower preserve much of the bequeathed precepts of the early sage-kings; the “Bǎofù” 保傅 and “Róngjīng” 容經 chapters expound ancient ritual systems with sources; the explanations of the Shī’s “Zōuyú” 騶虞 and the Yì’s “Qiánlóng” 潛龍 / “Kànglóng” 亢龍 are deeply consonant with classical hermeneutics. So one cannot dismiss the whole as shallow and impure. Defective and disordered as it is, it is not a thing to be discarded as ruined leaves.

Abstract

Jiǎ Yì wrote in two distinct media: the formal court memorials and fù preserved in his Hàn shū biography (Hàn shū j. 48), and the broader corpus of fifty-eight 篇 catalogued by Liú Xiàng under the Rújiā class of the Hàn shū yìwén zhì. The Xīnshū in its received form is the partial textual remains of the latter: a ten-juan, fifty-six-篇 collection (with one further 篇 lost from the body), assembled at some point between the early Táng and the Northern Sòng — by which time, as the Chóngwén zǒngmù attests, fifty-eight 篇 were still extant. The Sòng dynasty had a recension headed by Guò Qín lùn and tailed by Diào Xiāng fù with an appendix of biographical material; the SKQS-base text has lost both the appendix and the closing fù. In the SKQS editors’ considered judgment, the cutting up of long memorials into separately titled 篇 represents post-Hàn editorial intervention rather than fabrication; the substance is largely Jiǎ Yì’s, the structure is not.

The composition window is roughly Jiǎ Yì’s mature working life. He was tutor at Chángshā from 174 BCE and at Liáng from 173 BCE; the Guò Qín lùn and the major memorials cluster in Wéndì’s middle reign, ca. 178–169 BCE. The frontmatter dating bracket -178 to -168 reflects this composition window for the bulk of the original fifty-eight-篇 corpus; the catalog meta’s -200 to -168 are author lifedates.

The chapters of independent textual interest, beyond those duplicating the Hàn shū biography, are: “Bǎofù” 保傅 (on the institutional education of the heir); “Róngjīng” 容經 (on ritual deportment); “Qīngshǐ shì zhī jì” 青史氏之記 (on prenatal education, citing the otherwise lost “Qīngshǐzǐ” 青史子); “Xiūzhèng yǔ” 修政語 上/下 (collected sayings of the early sage-kings, paralleling the YìZhōu shū 逸周書 tradition); and “Dào shù” 道術. The Bǎofù, in particular, is a major early-Hàn ritualised pedagogical text and is independently received in Dà Dài lǐjì 大戴禮記. Its parallel transmission in two distinct corpora is one of the cleaner cases for a genuine pre-textual circulation.

The bibliographic record is at Hàn shū yìwén zhì (賈誼 五十八篇, Rújiā); Suí shū jīngjí zhì, Jiù Táng zhì, Xīn Táng zhì (all 10 juan, with the tíyào’s reservation); Chóngwén zǒngmù (note on Liú Xiàng’s reduction); Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí (Sòng note on opening with Guò Qín lùn and tailing with Diào Xiāng); and at the SKQS Zǐbù — Rújiā lèi.

Translations and research

  • Charles Sanft, Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty, SUNY Press, 2014 — major use of Guò Qín lùn as primary source for early-Hàn imperial discourse on Qín.
  • Yán Zhènyì 閻振益 and Zhōng Xià 鍾夏, Xīnshū jiàozhù 新書校註, Běijīng: Zhōnghuá Shūjú (Xīn biān zhūzǐ jíchéng), 2000. The standard scholarly edition.
  • Wáng Zhōulín 王洲林, Jiǎ Yì jí jiàozhù 賈誼集校註, Běijīng: Rénmín Wénxué Chūbǎnshè, 1996. Comprehensive treatment combining Xīnshū with the Hàn shū prose and fù.
  • Wú Yúnshēng 吳雲生 and Lǐ Chūntái 李春台, Jiǎ Yì jí jiào zhù 賈誼集校注, Tianjin: Tiānjīn Gǔjí Chūbǎnshè, 2010.
  • Michael Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993, s.v. “Hsin shu”, 161–166 (entry by Charles Sanft).
  • Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China — Han Dynasty I, Columbia University Press, 1961, contains the canonical Hàn-period biography in English.

Other points of interest

The “Bǎofù” 保傅 chapter is partially shared with Dà Dài lǐjì j. 3 (“Bǎofù”) and the parallel transmission has been used since the Qīng (Wáng Pèizhèng 王聘珍 et al.) as control for the textual reliability of the chapter — one of the cleanest pre-Wèi cases. The “Qīngshǐ shì zhī jì” passage is the principal extant fragment of the lost early-Hàn ritual treatise Qīngshǐzǐ 青史子 and has been repeatedly cited in 20th-c. work on Chinese pedagogical history (e.g. by Yú Yīngshí 余英時 and by Liú Wényīng 劉文英).

Jiǎ Yì’s prose style — taut, antithetical, carrying a heavy fù register into political memorial — is one of the durable models of Hàn-style political prose, much imitated in the Wénxuǎn tradition and in late-imperial gǔwén manuals.

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