Cǎoshū zhuàng 草書狀
Description of Cursive Script by 索靖 (Suǒ Jìng, 239–303, 西晉, zhuàn 撰)
About the work
A short rhapsody (fù-style descriptive text) on cǎoshū 草書 (cursive script) by Suǒ Jìng 索靖 (239–303) of Dūnhuáng — Western-Jìn senior official, Imperial Secretariat colleague of Wèi Guàn 衛瓘 (the pair styled Yītái èr miào 一臺二妙), maternal grand-nephew and principal heir of Zhāng Zhī 張芝 the “Sage of Cursive” 草聖. The piece is preserved entire in Jìn shū 60 (Suǒ Jìng biography) and excerpted in Tàipíng yùlǎn 卷 747; the Yìwén lèijù of Ōuyáng Xún 歐陽詢 cites the central section from gài cǎoshū zhī wéi zhuàng yě down to zhāng shè yá jù but omits the two zhīcǎo lines (so noted in the editor’s colophon to the present Kanripo recension). The text is one of the half-dozen earliest surviving Chinese theoretical statements on calligraphy, and the earliest extended encomium of cursive script as a high art-form.
Abstract
The Cǎoshū zhuàng opens with a cosmogonic frame — the sage-emperors of high antiquity, Cāng Jié’s 倉頡 invention of writing, the script-types running from kēdǒu 科斗 (tadpole script) and niǎozhuàn 鳥篆 (bird-and-seal script) down to the abbreviation of the lìcǎo 隸草 — and then breaks into a sequence of paired lines describing the appearance of cursive script through animal and natural metaphors: cursive characters are wǎn ruò yíngōu 婉若銀鉤 (graceful as silver hooks) and piāo ruò jīng luán 漂若驚鸞 (drifting like a startled phoenix), with strokes resembling coiled snakes, fighting bears on the mountains, and swallows pursuing each other. The closing section names Dù Dù 杜度 and Bóyīng 伯英 (i.e. Suǒ’s great-uncle Zhāng Zhī, zì Bóyīng) as the masters whose hands and wrists realised the juéshì 絕勢 (“unsurpassable forces”) of the script and “set down the unique sights of a hundred generations on plain silk.” The work is foundational both as the earliest first-person calligraphic fù and as the source of the standard catalogue of cursive-script analogies (silver-hook, startled phoenix, coiled snake, pursuing swallows) that runs through all subsequent Chinese calligraphic discourse, including the much-better-known Bǐzhèn tú 筆陣圖 (KR3h0093) and Sūn Guòtíng’s 孫過庭 Shū pǔ 書譜 of the early Táng. Because Suǒ was a working senior official rather than a courtier-litterateur, the Cǎoshū zhuàng is also the earliest evidence that cǎoshū — originally a clerk’s shortcut script — had by the late third century achieved full status as a high cultural form. The text is unusually well-attested for its period: it is cited in early-Táng anthologies (Yìwén lèijù of 624; Jìn shū of 648; Tàipíng yùlǎn of 983) and is therefore not subject to the usual Sòng-and-later transmission doubts that attach to other early calligraphic statements such as the Bǐzhèn tú.
Translations and research
- Barnhart, Richard M. “Wei Fu-jen’s Pi Chen T’u and the Early Texts on Calligraphy.” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 18 (1964): 13–25. [Fundamental for placing the early texts on calligraphy in their transmission setting; treats Suǒ Jìng’s Cǎo-shū zhuàng alongside the Bǐ-zhèn tú.]
- Ledderose, Lothar. Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. [Standard Western reference for the line of texts to which the Cǎo-shū zhuàng belongs.]
- McNair, Amy. The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
- Cuī Ěr-píng 崔爾平 (ed.). Lì-dài shū-fǎ lùn-wén xuǎn 歷代書法論文選. Shàng-hǎi shū-huà chū-bǎn-shè, 1979 (rev. 2014). [The standard modern Chinese collation of historical calligraphic theory; Cǎo-shū zhuàng is the second item.]
- Jìn shū 晉書 (Fáng Xuán-líng et al., 648), juàn 60 (biography of Suǒ Jìng) is the principal textual witness.
Other points of interest
The Cǎoshū zhuàng together with Cuī Yuàn’s 崔瑗 Cǎoshū shì 草書勢 (preserved by Wèi Héng in KR3h0092 Sìtǐ shūshì) and Zhào Yī’s 趙壹 Fēi cǎoshū 非草書 form the trio of earliest Chinese statements specifically on cursive script — composed within a single century (mid-2nd to early-4th c.) and together documenting the rapid late-Hàn / WèiJìn elevation of cǎo from a clerk’s expedient to a connoisseur’s art.