Mínlì pùzhù jiěhuò 民歷鋪註解惑
Resolving Doubts on the Annotations of the Civil Calendar by 湯若望 (撰)
About the work
The Mínlì pùzhù jiěhuò 民歷鋪註解惑, in three juàn, is the German Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell’s (湯若望, 1591/2–1666) defensive apologia for the editorial procedure he applied to the pùzhù 鋪註 — the dense day-by-day hemerological glosses (auspicious/inauspicious activities, jiànchú 建除, qíshén fāngwèi 奇神方位 etc.) printed alongside the official Mínlì 民歷 / Shíxiàn lì 時憲曆 civil almanac of the early Qīng. Cast as a dialogue (客問 / 余應 — “the guest asks / I reply”), the work answers a wave of critical Chinese voices — among them the Yíxīng 宜興 faction that would coalesce, after Schall’s death, in the Yáng Guāngxiān 楊光先 anti-Western prosecution of 1664–65 — that the pùzhù in their reformed form were unauthorised Western innovations.
Abstract
The opening of juàn 1 is the dialogic preface that states the work’s occasion and method. The guest asks: are the pùzhù part of the Western methods? And are the strictures of the Yíxīng critic fair? Schall replies that the pùzhù are not Western in origin — Jìn Chén 進陳 had already memorialised the throne acknowledging this and noting that the pùzhù had been printed alongside the calendar for many years before the Shíxiàn reform — and proceeds to defend his editorial decisions item by item.
The work develops a sustained metaphor of “candle and lantern”: the meaning lies outside the words, just as the light of a lantern shines outside the lantern; conservative critics who attack the literal text without grasping its principles “shame the ancients and mislead the new students” (羞前古而誤後學). Specific topics include the proper handling of the jiànchú selectors, the qíshén fāngwèi, the shénshà 神煞 system, and the relation of the pùzhù to the empirical predictions of the calendar proper. The polemical thrust is to draw a firm distinction between the Shíxiàn lì itself (Western-derived, mathematically rigorous, demonstrably more accurate than its predecessors) and the pùzhù (a Chinese hemerological inheritance which the Bureau merely administers but did not invent), and to insist that conservative attacks conflating the two miss their target.
Composition belongs to the period of Schall’s directorship of the Qīntiānjiān, after the Manchu adoption of the Shíxiàn lì in 1645 and before his death under house arrest in 1666 — most plausibly in the late 1650s or early 1660s, before Yáng Guāngxiān’s 1664 Bùdéyǐ 不得已 attack triggered the formal prosecution. CBDB returns Schall at c_personid 125087 with birth year 1591 (a Julian-calendar-based figure; modern scholarship prefers 1592, computed in the Gregorian).
Translations and research
- Väth, Alfons. 1933 / repr. 1991. Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J.. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series. — The standard Schall biography.
- Malek, Roman, ed. 1998. Western Learning and Christianity in China, 2 vols. Sankt Augustin: Steyler-Verlag. — Comprehensive collection of essays on Schall and the Jesuit mission.
- Standaert, Nicolas, ed. 2001. Handbook of Christianity in China, Vol. 1: 635–1800. Leiden: Brill. — Essential reference for the Schall era.
- Jami, Catherine. 2012. The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Chang Ping-ying. 2023. The Chinese Astronomical Bureau, 1620–1850. London: Routledge. — The most recent treatment of the Bureau under Schall and his successors.
- Chu Pingyi 祝平一. Multiple articles on the Ming-Qing calendrical politics and hemerological controversy.
- 黃一農 Huáng Yī-nóng. Several Chinese-language articles on the pù-zhù controversy and Schall’s role in it.
Other points of interest
The work belongs to the very particular moment in early-Qīng Sino-Jesuit history when Schall enjoyed the personal favour of the Shùnzhì emperor (who titled him Tōngxuán Jiàoshī 通玄教師 / “Teacher of the Penetrative-Mystery”) but was already under sustained polemical attack from the Yíxīng faction. The Mínlì pùzhù jiěhuò is one of Schall’s principal Chinese-language doctrinal-defensive writings — alongside the Lìfǎ Xīchuán 厯法西傳 and the Xīnfǎ biǎoyì 新法表異 (which are appended to KR3f0013 in the Sìkù) — and is a primary document of the seventeenth-century Sino-Jesuit hermeneutic of “translation” (i.e. the Jesuit project of adapting Western technical content into Confucian-respectable Chinese-language forms).
Links
- Parent astronomical compendium: KR3f0013 Xīyáng xīnfǎ suànshū 西洋新法算書.
- Schall’s tomb at Zhalan in Beijing carries a trilingual Latin–Chinese–Manchu inscription, one of very few from the early Qīng.