Fúzǐ 苻子
The Master Fú by 苻朗 (Fú Lǎng, d. 389, 前秦, 撰)
About the work
A fragmentary Daoist-philosophical treatise originally composed in the late 4th century by Fú Lǎng 苻朗, nephew of the Former-Qín emperor Fú Jiān, who surrendered to Eastern Jìn after the Féishuǐ disaster (383) and was executed at Jiànkāng in 389. The Jìn shū (j. 114) credits him with a Fúzǐ in “several tens of piān”; the integral work was lost by the late Táng or early Sòng. The text as transmitted in the present compilation is a reconstruction (輯佚) assembled from quotations preserved in Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽, Běitáng shūchāo 北堂書鈔, Lùshǐ hòujì 路史後紀 (with Luó Píng’s 羅泌 / 羅苹 commentary), Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚 and similar Táng–Sòng encyclopedic sources, each fragment carrying its source citation. The placement in KR3b 兵家 follows the source corpus’s CHANT classification; substantively the work belongs to the zhūzǐ (philosophical) tradition rather than to military strategy.
Abstract
The Fúzǐ is one of the most important Daoist philosophical works to survive — only fragmentarily — from the chaotic last decades of Former Qín. Fú Lǎng was identified by his contemporaries as a xuánxué literatus whose tastes (gastronomy, music, a polished aloofness) and writings reflected the high Eastern-Jìn intellectual climate as much as anything in his northern milieu. The surviving fragments are short anecdotal-philosophical units in the standard zhūzǐ manner: dialogues among legendary or semi-legendary figures (Tàigōng Juān 太公涓, Lǔ Lián 魯連, Xǔ Yóu 許由, Yáo 堯, Zhǎn Qín 展禽, Bàopǔzǐ 抱朴子) framing meditations on retreat, non-action, the futility of striving, and the Daoist ideal of the yǐn (recluse). One striking fragment explicitly puts Fú Lǎng’s name into the text: 苻朗 casts away a thousand-gold sword to embrace the Fúzǐ, while 抱朴子 inquires why he prefers the small to the great — a self-referential authorship-frame typical of late Six-Dynasties philosophical writing.
The bibliographic record: Jìn shū j. 114 (notice of composition); Suí shū jīngjí zhì (lost or partial); citations in Yìwén lèijù (Táng), Běitáng shūchāo (Táng), Tàipíng yùlǎn (Sòng); reconstructed in the Qīng by Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰 in Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū 玉函山房輯佚書 and by Yán Kějūn 嚴可均 in Quán Jìn wén 全晉文 (c. early–mid 19th c.). The composition window is bracketed to Fú Lǎng’s productive years before his 389 execution; the form in which the work is read today is, however, a Qīng jíyì compilation — the underlying fragments are bona fide Six-Dynasties material, transmitted via Táng–Sòng lèishū.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature on the Fú-zǐ located. The work is treated cursorily in handbooks of Daoism (e.g., Kohn, The Daoist Encyclopedia) but lacks a critical edition or translation outside the Qīng jí-yì tradition.
- 馬國翰 (Mǎ Guó-hàn) 玉函山房輯佚書 — base edition for almost all subsequent reprints.
- 嚴可均 (Yán Kě-jūn) 全晉文, j. 154 — parallel reconstruction.
Other points of interest
The CHANT-corpus placement of Fúzǐ under the 兵家 division is anomalous: the work is patently philosophical-Daoist, not military, and earlier traditional bibliographies (whenever they record it) class it among the zǐ / Dàojiā. Readers should not infer any military content from the divisional placement.
Links
- Jìn shū 晉書 j. 114 (Fú Jiān biography appendix, mentioning Fú Lǎng and his Fúzǐ).
- 馬國翰, 玉函山房輯佚書 — http://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&res=87567 (ctext index).
- Wikidata (work)
- CHANT (Chinese Ancient Texts) database