Chú yán 芻言
Words of a Hay-Cutter (i.e. humble, rustic words — a self-deprecating title from the Book of Odes)
by 崔敦禮 (Cuī Dūnlǐ, d. 1181; Southern-Sòng jìnshì of the Shàoxīng era, Zhūwánggōng dàxiǎoxué jiàoshòu 諸王宫大小學教授)
About the work
A short Southern-Sòng zájiā treatise in three juan, organized as upper / middle / lower juan respectively Yán zhèng 言政 (“Discoursing on Government”), Yán xíng 言行 (“Discoursing on Conduct”), and Yán xué 言學 (“Discoursing on Learning”). The title is taken from the Shījīng idiom xún yú chúráo 詢於芻蕘, “to consult the hay-cutter and the wood-gatherer” — a self-deprecating gesture indicating humble, common, but possibly worthwhile words. The book is consciously modeled on the moralizing aphoristic prose of Yáng Xióng’s 揚雄 Fǎ yán 法言 and Wáng Tōng’s 王通 Zhōng shuō 中說, deliberately written in classical literary diction in order to avoid the colloquial yǔlù 語錄 form that had come to dominate Sòng Daoxue circles. Catalogued under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家 division.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Chú yán in three juan, composed by Cuī Dūnlǐ of the Sòng. Dūnlǐ’s family was originally from north of the Hé; after the southern crossing he and his younger brother Dūnshī 敦詩 both passed the Shàoxīng jìnshì together. He rose to the post of Zhūwánggōng dàxiǎoxué jiàoshòu 諸王宫大小學教授 (Tutor to the Greater and Lesser Schools of the Princely Palaces). He was fond of the mountains and waters of Lìyáng 溧陽 and bought land and built a residence there.
The present compilation is in three juan: the upper juan discusses government, the middle juan conduct, the lower juan learning. The composition style imitates Yáng Xióng 揚雄 and Wáng Tōng 王通 to a considerable degree, harking back to the ancient Ruist convention of avoiding the rustic colloquialism of yǔlù anthologies. At the head of the book he distinguishes the gradations of dào dé rén yì 道德仁義; in the middle he also has the view that the various jīngzhuàn 經傳 sub-commentaries are dù dào zhī shū 蠹道之書 (a “wood-worm of the Way”) — his thrust is in places mixed with the HuángLǎo and is not the pure speech of a Ruist. But in his sharp engagements with practical matters, in penetrating the hidden recesses of human feelings and the conditions of things, he often hits the joint. The zájiā tradition is a Qīlüè 七略 catalog category, and there is no harm in preserving alongside it his account, that one may pick and choose; nor should it be entirely discarded.
(The same SKQS volume’s tiyao continues with the Lèān yǔlù entry — see KR3j0020 for that text and its tiyao.)
Respectfully revised and submitted, second month of the forty-seventh year of Qiánlóng [1782].
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
Cuī Dūnlǐ 崔敦禮 (d. 1181), of a northern family that crossed the Yangzi at the Jìngkāng catastrophe (1126/27) and re-established itself in the south, took the jìnshì in the Shàoxīng era together with his younger brother Cuī Dūnshī 崔敦詩, and rose to the office of Zhūwánggōng dàxiǎoxué jiàoshòu 諸王宫大小學教授 — Tutor to the Greater and Lesser Schools of the Princely Palaces. He retired to a country residence in Lìyáng 溧陽 (in modern Jiāngsū, near Nánjīng), at the foot of which the Chú yán was composed. He is also the author of the Gōngjiào jí 宮教集 KR4d0238 (12 juan, reconstructed by the Sìkù editors from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn).
The Chú yán is a short three-juan philosophical-political treatise in the Fǎ yán / Zhōng shuō tradition. The title — drawn from the Shījīng idiom xún yú chúráo — performs the conventional gesture of self-deprecation; the book itself is pointedly not humble in scope, taking up government (juan 1), personal conduct (juan 2), and learning (juan 3) in densely-packed gnomic chapters. The Sìkù editors note three distinctive features. First, the book sets up a graded relation among dào dé rén yì 道德仁義 (Way, Virtue, Humaneness, Righteousness) at the very head of the work, a programmatic move drawing on Hán Yù’s 韓愈 Yuán dào 原道 and on Lǎozǐ. Second, in the middle juan it argues that the proliferation of jīngzhuàn sub-commentary (the textual scholarship the Daoxue movement of his period was producing) is dù dào zhī shū 蠹道之書 — “wood-worms of the Way” — a critique that explains the Sìkù editors’ classification of the book under Zájiā rather than under Rújiā. Third, while drawing on HuángLǎo material, the book remains crisply attentive to the practicalities of human affairs and administrative conduct.
The dating bracket adopted here (notBefore 1145, notAfter 1181) is a defensible Shàoxīng-era-onward window: Cuī Dūnlǐ obtained the jìnshì in the Shàoxīng era (the precise year is uncertain — Shàoxīng 15 / 1145 is one plausible reference point that has been suggested for the brothers’ joint examination success), and the book is the work of his maturity; the terminus ante quem is fixed by his death in 1181.
The work is recorded in the Sòng shǐ · Yìwén zhì, the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo, and the standard SòngYuán bibliographies. Modern Chinese reference works treat it as an important specimen of Southern-Sòng zájiā moralizing prose composed in conscious resistance to the rise of the yǔlù genre.
Translations and research
No complete European-language translation exists. Substantive treatments are confined to Chinese-language scholarship:
- Cuī Wén-yìn 崔文印 and other modern editors, punctuated editions of the Chú yán in zǐ-school anthology series.
- Sòng shǐ 卷 393 (Cuī Dūn-shī 崔敦詩 zhuàn, with details on Cuī Dūn-lǐ).
- Discussions of Southern-Sòng zájiā prose in surveys of Sòng intellectual history (Lǐ Cún-shān 李存山, Yǔ Yīng-shí 余英時, etc.).
No substantial European-language secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The book’s deliberate stylistic resistance to the yǔlù form — at exactly the period when the yǔlù was becoming the dominant medium of Daoxue discourse — makes it a useful counter-witness for the literary history of Southern-Sòng intellectual prose. Its critique of jīngzhuàn sub-commentary as parasitic on the Way also positions Cuī Dūnlǐ as an early voice in the longstanding SòngMíng debate over the proper relation of textual scholarship to moral practice.
Links
- Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Chú yán entry.
- 《宋史》卷393; 《文獻通考》.
- Related work by same author: KR4d0238 Gōngjiào jí.