Hǎiyuè míngyán 海嶽名言
Sayings of Hǎiyuè (Mǐ Fú) by 米芾 (Mǐ Fú, 1051–1107, 宋, zhuàn 撰)
About the work
A short single-juàn collection of Mǐ Fú’s most-cited dicta on calligraphy, originally circulating in Zuǒ Guī 左圭’s Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海 anthology and then bound by the Sìkù editors at the end of the KR3h0023 Bǎozhāng dàifǎng lù. The piece consists of Mǐ’s reflections on the ancient calligraphers, his own practice, and his pungent criticisms of contemporaries — including his famous dismissals of Ōuyáng Xún and Liǔ Gōngquán (“the ancestor of ugly and unbalanced calligraphy”), of Xú Hào (“plump and vulgar, without bone-strength”), of Xuē Jì’s large script (“brushed like a steamed-bun”), of Yán Zhēnqīng’s regular script (“verges on the vulgar”), and his cutting remarks against Cài Xiāng, Shěn Liáo, Huáng Tíngjiān, Sū Shì, Cài Jīng and Cài Biàn in his audience-conversation with Huīzōng. The piece is the central source for Mǐ Fú’s calligraphic doctrine and for the high-Sòng concept of fēnggǔ 風骨 in calligraphy.
Tiyao
We have respectfully examined: Hǎiyuè míngyán in one juàn, by Mǐ Fú of the Sòng. It is all his everyday discourse on calligraphy. Toward the ancients he is mostly censorious. He calls Ōuyáng [Xún] and Liǔ [Gōngquán] “the ancestors of ugly, unbalanced and bad script”; Xú Hào “plump and vulgar, with no bone-strength”; Xuē Jì in his large characters uses the brush “as if making a steamed-bun”; Yán Lǔgōng’s regular script “verges on the vulgar grade” — all deeply hostile. His record of what he said in audience to Huīzōng on Cài Xiāng, Shěn Liáo, Huáng Tíngjiān, Sū Shì, Cài Jīng and Cài Biàn — heaping abuse on them all — is especially without restraint. The histories say that Mǐ Fú gained the brush-spirit of Wáng Xiànzhī, yet on Xiànzhī’s hand the book offers no remark, saying instead: “My script takes the strong points from many and combines them; if a man sees it, he does not know what to call its ancestor.” This is unmistakeably a piece of self-display and conceit. Yet his attainment was deep; what he says of brush-management and structural composition does in fact escape the trodden paths and uniquely reaches the subtlest place — it is rightly to be probed by all who would take up the brush. The book was originally entered into Zuǒ Guī’s Bǎichuān xuéhǎi; since the chapter-length is too short to circulate alone, we have here categorised it and appended it to the KR3h0023 Bǎozhāng dàifǎng lù, the whole forming a single volume. Respectfully collated, Qiánlóng 46 (1781), ninth month. Chief compilers: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì.
Abstract
The Hǎiyuè míngyán (the title from Mǐ’s self-designation Hǎiyuè wàishǐ 海岳外史) is short — under 2,000 characters — but central to Mǐ Fú’s calligraphic thought. The piece begins with a programmatic dismissal of the old metaphor-laden criticism (“dragons leaping at heaven’s gate, tigers couched at the phoenix-pavilion — what kind of language is that?”) in favour of direct doctrinal instruction; and it ends with the doctrine that one’s mature script internalizes the strong points of the ancients without exhibiting their separate traces — a doctrine that became central to all later literati discussions of bù-zhi-suǒ-zǔ 不知所祖. The work transmits much of Mǐ’s “ugly cursive” iconoclasm and his polemical re-evaluation of the WèiJìn canon at the expense of Táng. It is uniformly placed alongside the KR3h0021 Huàshǐ, KR3h0022 Shūshǐ and KR3h0023 Bǎozhāng dàifǎng lù as one of the four canonical Mǐ Fú treatises.
Translations and research
- Ledderose, Lothar. Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 (treats this work systematically).
- Sturman, Peter Charles. Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
- McNair, Amy. The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998 (esp. on Mǐ’s anti-Yán polemic).
- Cao Baolin 曹寶麟. Mǐ Fú píngzhuàn 米芾評傳. Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 1997.