Zhāodé xīnbiān 昭德新編
New Compilation from the Zhāo-dé [Ward]
by 晁迥 (Cháo Jiǒng, zì Míngyuǎn 明遠, 951–1034; Northern-Sòng Hànlín Academician and lay Buddhist devotee)
About the work
A short Northern-Sòng zájiā devotional and ethical compilation in two juan, composed in Cháo Jiǒng’s old age after his retirement to the Zhāodé Ward 昭德坊 of the Eastern Capital (Kāifēng), from which the title takes its name. The lower juan contains the Zhǐmí wǔ shuō 指迷五說 (“Five Discourses for Pointing Out the Confused”), Cháo’s signature short essays in which he draws explicitly on both the Confucian (DōngLǔ zhī shū 東魯之書, “writings of the East-Lǔ” — i.e. Confucius) and Buddhist (Xīyù zhī shū 西域之書, “writings of the Western Regions”) traditions, claiming his synthesis “draws the middle from the two and so composes” (zhuó zhōng ér zuò 酌中而作). The book is one of the most important early-Sòng documents of the Buddhist-Confucian reconciliation programme that would become a major theme of Northern-Sòng intellectual life. Catalogued under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家 division.
The catalog meta gives “980” (Tàipíng xīngguó 5) as the date — that is in fact the year Cháo Jiǒng obtained the jìnshì degree, not the date of composition. The book is explicitly his late work, and from internal evidence (the author calls himself an octogenarian and notes he has been retired in leisure for some time) the composition window must fall in the last years of his life, i.e. roughly 1027–1034.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Zhāodé xīnbiān in two juan, composed by Cháo Jiǒng (note: the SKQS prints the name as 晁逈, which is a typographical variant of the standard form 晁迥) of the Sòng. Jiǒng’s zì was Míngyuǎn 明遠, a man of Qīngfēng 清豐 in Cáozhōu 漕州 [note: the SKQS prints “漕州” — read 澶州]; from his father’s generation the family had moved to Péngmén 彭門. Jìnshì of the fifth year of Tàipíng xīngguó [980]; at the end of the Zhìdào era promoted to Yòu zhèngyán 右正言 with concurrent Zhí Shǐguǎn 直史館 and Zhīzhìgào 知制誥; soon after made Hànlín xuéshì 翰林學士 and given the additional title Chéngzhǐ 承旨; in the Tiānxǐ era made pàn Xījīng liúsī Yùshǐtái 判西京留司御史臺; retired with the title Tàizǐ tàibǎo 太子太保 and at his death received the posthumous title Wényuán 文元.
The present work was composed in his late years; because he then resided in the Zhāodé Ward 昭德坊, that is the title of the book. At the start of the Sòng there was still Táng-period custom, and shìdàfū 士大夫 mostly devoted themselves to the inner canon (nèidiǎn 內典 — i.e. the Buddhist scriptures); thus though the main thrust of Jiǒng’s writing here is to encourage people to do good, he could not avoid drawing also on the Shì 釋 (Buddhist) tradition. His own preface says: “the books of the East-Lǔ are literary and elegant; the books of the Western Regions are substantive and exhaustive; and so the present five discourses draw the middle from the two and are made,” referring to the Zhǐmí wǔ shuō 指迷五說 of the lower juan. Lǐ Shū 李淑 said of him that “his devotion to the Féndiǎn 墳典 (the canonical books) was unflagging in old age, and he had in his youth met an extraordinary man (yìrén 異人) who imparted to him the essentials of the heart-mind”; Wáng Gǔ 王古 said that “the subtlety of his name-and-principle (mínglǐ 名理) discourse Bái Lètiān (Bái Jūyì) himself could not match” — by which one may judge his learning.
Jiǒng’s fifth-generation descendant Sù 遡 [Cháo Sù] gathered the family’s compositions and obtained this book at Dānléng 丹稜 [in Méizhōu], from Lǐ Tāo 李燾; in the Qìngyuán era of the Sòng there was a printed edition, and in the Jiājìng of the Míng there was again a re-cut printing. The present copy is titled “re-recorded by the descendant Fúwǔ 伏武,” with Jiǒng’s own preface and Lǐ Zūnxù’s 李遵勖 preface both matching what Cháo Sù records — clearly the old recension. After it are appended several jǐ shǒu 數十首 of poems by Jiǒng and by the Míng-period Cháo Lì 晁瑮 and Cháo Dōngwú 晁東吳 — these are family-collection material gathered by descendants and never finished into a coherent text, bìngmǔ zhīzhǐ 駢拇枝指 (joined-thumb supernumerary-finger — i.e. extraneous appendages), and we have entirely deleted them and not catalogued them.
Respectfully revised and submitted, twelfth month of the forty-fifth year of Qiánlóng [1781].
General Compilers: Jǐ Yún 紀昀 (note: 均 in the original is a typographical slip for 昀), Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General Reviser: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
Cháo Jiǒng 晁迥 (951–1034), zì Míngyuǎn 明遠, posthumous Wényuán 文元, of Chánzhōu Qīngfēng 澶州清豐 (the SKQS tiyao mistakenly prints 漕州 for 澶州), was one of the senior Hànlín academicians and policy-drafters of the early Northern Sòng, attaining the offices Hànlín xuéshì chéngzhǐ 翰林學士承旨 and Tàizǐ shàobǎo / Tàizǐ tàibǎo 太子太保 before his retirement. He was the founding figure of the Cháo lineage of Northern-Sòng scholarship (the bibliographer Cháo Gōngwǔ 晁公武 was his fifth-generation descendant). He is among the most prominent early-Sòng lay Buddhists in the high official class — known both for his courtly hymnology of the Fǎzàng suìjīn lù 法藏碎金錄 KR4d0007 and for his Dàoyuàn jí yào 道院集要 KR4d0008.
The Zhāodé xīnbiān is his late-period devotional and ethical zǐ-school treatise, named after the Zhāodé Ward 昭德坊 of the Sòng Eastern Capital where he resided in retirement. By internal evidence (the author identifies himself as past eighty years old, “from beginning office to retirement four jì [forty-eight years], from before capping to old age five jì [sixty years]”) the composition is fixed in the late 1020s to 1034, the year of his death. The catalog meta’s date of 980 is in error: 980 / Tàipíng xīngguó 5 is the year Cháo Jiǒng obtained the jìnshì degree, not the year of composition. The dating bracket adopted here (notBefore 1027, notAfter 1034) is what the internal evidence supports.
The work is in two juan. Its core is the lower juan’s Zhǐmí wǔ shuō 指迷五說 (“Five Discourses for Pointing Out the Confused”), in which Cháo argues programmatically for a Confucian-Buddhist reconciliation: the Confucian classics (“books of the East-Lǔ”) are literary and elegant but elliptical; the Buddhist sūtras (“books of the Western Regions”) are substantive and exhaustive but unwieldy; his own Wǔ shuō “draws the middle” (zhuó zhōng ér zuò 酌中而作) and offers a workable everyday programme. The tone is irenic and explicitly devotional — the rhetoric of fúhuì èr yè 福慧二業 (“the twin ventures of merit and wisdom”), of jié réntiān zhī shèngyuán 結人天之勝緣 (“forging the surpassing affinities for [rebirth in] the heavens and as a human”), and of repeated insistence that the Buddhist canon “permits only correct contemplation, never permits heterodox practice” (wéi xǔ zuò zhèngguān, bù xǔ xíng xiédào 惟許作正觀、不許行邪道). The original Zhāodé xīnbiān recension was rediscovered at Dānléng 丹稜 (Méizhōu) by Cháo Jiǒng’s fifth-generation descendant Cháo Sù 晁遡 from the holdings of Lǐ Tāo 李燾, the great Sòng historian; printed editions appeared in Qìngyuán (Sòng) and Jiājìng (Míng), and the SKQS recension is the late-Míng “re-recorded by the descendant Fúwǔ” copy stripped of the appended Cháo Lì 晁瑮 / Cháo Dōngwú 晁東吳 family poetry.
The work is recorded in the Sòng shǐ · Yìwén zhì, in Cháo Gōngwǔ’s Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì (under the descendant’s diligent compilation), in Chén Zhènsūn’s Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí, and in the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo. It is an essential primary source for the Buddhist-Confucian intellectual atmosphere of the early Northern-Sòng Hànlín circles.
Translations and research
No complete European-language translation exists. The work is treated principally in studies of early-Sòng Buddhist-Confucian reconciliation:
- Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) — discussion of Cháo Jiǒng’s place in the early-Sòng jū-shì (lay-Buddhist) tradition.
- Albert Welter, Yongming Yanshou’s Conception of Chan in the Zongjing lu (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Monks, Rulers, and Literati: The Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2006) — relevant on the broader Northern-Sòng lay-Buddhist context.
- Robert M. Gimello and Peter N. Gregory, eds., Studies in Ch’an and Hua-yen (University of Hawai’i Press, 1983), background on the doctrinal currents Cháo Jiǒng drew on.
- Dèng Kè-míng 鄧克銘 and other Chinese / Japanese scholars on early-Sòng jū-shì fó-jiào 居士佛教.
- Cháo Jiǒng zhuàn 晁迥傳 in 《宋史》卷305.
Other points of interest
Cháo Jiǒng’s three principal devotional works — the Fǎzàng suìjīn lù 法藏碎金錄 KR4d0007, the Dàoyuàn jí yào 道院集要 KR4d0008, and the present Zhāodé xīnbiān — together constitute the most substantial early-Sòng lay-Buddhist literary-philosophical corpus to have come down from the Hànlín circle. The contemporary judgment quoted in the tiyao that “the subtlety of his name-and-principle discourse Bái Jūyì himself could not match” places him in a recognizable late-Táng / early-Sòng tradition of high-literary lay devotion descending from Bái Jūyì.