Wèngyǒu xiánpíng 甕牖閒評
Leisurely Reviews from the Jar-Window Studio
by 袁文 (Yuán Wén, 1119–1190; zì Zhìfǔ 質甫; native of Yīnxiàn 鄞縣, Sìmíng 四明)
About the work
A philological-historical bǐjì in eight juan by the Southern-Sòng private scholar Yuán Wén — father of the official and dàoxué exegete Yuán Xiè 袁燮 and grandfather of Yuán Fǔ 袁甫. The Wèngyǒu xiánpíng was for centuries effectively lost: it is not catalogued in the Sòngshǐ · Yìwén zhì, nor in Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì 郡齋讀書志 or Chén Zhènsūn’s 陳振孫 Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí 直齋書錄解題. The Sòng evidence for its existence consists of stray citations in Lǐ Tāo’s 李燾 Xù Zīzhì tōngjiàn cháng biān kǎo yì 續資治通鑑長編考異; the Míng Wényuān gé shūmù 文淵閣書目 records a single one-fascicle copy with no author attributed; and the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn preserved the bulk of the text as scattered entries under various rhyme-headings, again with no author named. The Sìkù editors recovered the work from these Yǒnglè dàdiǎn fragments and identified Yuán Wén as the author by cross-checking against the funerary memorial his son Yuán Xiè composed in his Jiézhāi jí 絜齋集. They reorganized the surviving four hundred-odd entries into the present eight-juan thematic recension. Catalogued under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家 division, záyǎng zhī shǔ 雜考之屬.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Wèngyǒu xiánpíng in eight juan, neither catalogued by the Sòngshǐ · Yìwén zhì nor by Cháo Gōngwǔ, Chén Zhènsūn, and other [Sòng] bibliographers — only Lǐ Tāo’s 李燾 Xù Zīzhì tōngjiàn cháng biān kǎo yì occasionally cites the book. The Míng Wényuān gé shūmù also has this book in one fascicle of one part, but neither identifies surname, given name, or period. The Yǒnglè dàdiǎn scattered it across various rhyme [headings] with no author attribution. Now, examining Yuán Xiè’s 袁燮 Jiézhāi jí 絜齋集, his Mù biǎo 墓表 (“Tomb Inscription”) of his own father reads: “the late lord, huì 諱 Wén, zì Zhìfǔ, of Yīnxiàn in Sìmíng. As a youth he loved reading, was not anxious for examination success but only diligent in study. He has miscellaneous writings in one volume titled Wèngyǒu xiánpíng.” Further, Xiè’s collection records the great-grandfather’s office as Magistrate of Suízhōu, Lady Shí 石氏 the great-grandmother’s pain in the arm, the grandfather inviting physicians and cultivating the Buddha, and assorted other anecdotes of his father — all conforming with the entries of this work. So that it is by Yuán Wén is beyond question.
The book is principally devoted to kǎodìng 考訂 (textual-critical examination). On Classics and Histories all matters have its discussions, distinguishing similarities and differences, with many original fāmíng 發明 (clarifications). Phonological scholarship is especially precise: piānpáng 偏旁 (radicals), diǎnhuà 點畫 (strokes), fǎnqiè 反切 (Chinese-style phonetic spelling), xùngǔ 訓詁 (gloss-philology) — all are rigorously distinguished in the most subtle and ambiguous cases. The institutional anecdotes and historical episodes it carries are also complete from beginning to end, often supplying what other books fail to include. Although its citations are sometimes prolix and not without minor errors — for example, taking the Hàn shū · Xù zhuàn phrase that “Yuán Àng 袁盎 was [styled] Zǐ Sī” 字絲 to mean a missing character in a transmission ([Yuán Wén] not realizing that the Xù zhuàn uses four-character verse and so adds “Zǐ” 子 to make the line scan, just as the Shǐjì · Xiàng Yǔ běnjì writes Xiàng Yǔ’s zì “Yǔ” 羽 but Sīmǎ Qiān’s autobiographical postface writes “Zǐ Yǔ” 子羽); or supposing that the line “at dusk leaning on slender bamboo, but the beauty has yet to come” 日暮倚修竹佳人殊未來 is what is meant by “jiārén refers to a worthy man” — when in fact “at dusk leaning on slender bamboo” is from Dù Fǔ’s 杜甫 Jiā rén 佳人 poem (which the line “is not the [poet’s] wife” comes from), already mistaken; “the beauty has yet to come” being [in fact] from Jiāng Yān’s 江淹 Nǐ Xiūshàngrén yuànbié 擬休上人怨别 poem — and combining the two into a single piece is a graver error still; or his not knowing that “fù yóu guǒ rán” 腹猶果然 (“the belly was indeed full”) comes from Zhuāngzǐ; or his not knowing that “shǔgū” 鼠姑 is a name for the peony; or his not knowing that Túkǎi 屠蒯 and Dùkǎi 杜蒯 are sound-variants — like Bāo Xū 包胥 and Bó Sū 勃蘓 — these are similar slips, blind to what is in front of one’s own eyebrows.
But on the whole the work is broadly comprehensive, and is in fact a fine model for the kǎojù school. We regret only that even by Sòng times the work was already rarely transmitted, and by the Míng was lost altogether — even bibliophiles could not recall its name. The author’s son Xiè, grandson Fǔ, and the histories all have biographies, but Wén alone is not recorded, and his life is also nearly impossible to verify. Today, mercifully recovered from sunken-and-flaked remains, sorted, arranged, and recompiled — so that his name and learning shall not finally perish from the world to come — we may know that there is a time for [a man’s] visibility and obscurity, decided by Heaven. The original number of juan cannot be determined; what we have collected today still amounts to over four hundred entries, the topics quite mixed. We respectfully arrange them into eight juan: juan 1 on Classics; juan 2 on Histories; juan 3 on Heaven, Earth, and human affairs; juan 4 on xiǎoxué alone; juan 5 on poetry, cí, and calligraphy and painting; juan 6 on food, clothing, implements and dwellings; juan 7 on Buddhism, Daoism, technical arts, and natural products; and finally on miscellaneous matters of cause-and-effect, the marvellous, and the author’s own self-records.
Respectfully revised and submitted, eighth month of the forty-third year of Qiánlóng [1778].
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
The Wèngyǒu xiánpíng is one of the more remarkable Sòng bǐjì in transmission-history: composed by a learned but officeless private scholar in the second half of the twelfth century, lost from circulation already by the Southern Sòng’s end (it is absent from all of the major Sòng catalogs: Sòngshǐ · Yìwén zhì, Cháo Gōngwǔ’s Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì, Chén Zhènsūn’s Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí), surviving only as a heap of unattributed entries in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, and reconstructed and re-attributed by the Sìkù editors using internal anecdotes that the author’s son had independently recorded in the Jiézhāi jí 絜齋集. The recovered text is an eight-juan thematic compilation of approximately four hundred entries, arranged by the Sìkù editors themselves (they expressly state that the original division of juan was no longer recoverable). The thematic divisions imposed are: 經 jīng (canon), 史 shǐ (history), 天文地理人事 (cosmography, geography, human affairs), 小學 xiǎoxué (philology), 詩詞書畫 (poetry, cí, calligraphy, painting), 飲食衣服器用宫室 (foods, clothing, implements, architecture), 釋道技術物産 (Buddhism, Daoism, technical arts, natural products), and 因果怪異 (cause-and-effect tales, the marvellous, plus self-records).
The dating bracket adopted here (notBefore 1140, notAfter 1190) reflects Yuán Wén’s plausible adult writing life from his early twenties to his death in 1190; the work bears no internal date and was assembled across many years of private reading. The author’s son Yuán Xiè 袁燮 (1144–1224) — a major late-Sòng official, dàoxué exegete, and student of Lù Jiǔyuān 陸九淵 — preserved the only securely datable evidence for Yuán Wén’s authorship in his collection.
The Sìkù editors’ assessment is unusually warm: they reckon the Wèngyǒu xiánpíng a “fine model for the kǎojù school” 考據家之善本, with particular praise for its phonological precision (fǎnqiè and xùngǔ), and they catalogue its detected errors (mostly attributions of poetic lines and sources of common idioms) in unusual detail — a sign of the editors’ respect for the underlying method. The work is an indispensable witness to the late-twelfth-century state of kǎozhèng-philology in private, non-official circles in the Sìmíng region.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. Modern Chinese scholarship treats the work as a major rediscovered Sòng bǐjì:
- Quán Sòng bǐjì 全宋筆記, ser. 5 (Lǐ Wěiguó 李偉國 et al., eds., Zhèngzhōu: Dàxiàng chūbǎnshè, 2012), punctuated Wèngyǒu xiánpíng.
- Lǐ Wěiguó 李偉國, Sòngdài bǐjì yánjiū 宋代筆記研究 (and related papers in 《文獻》).
- Liú Yèqiū 劉葉秋, Lìdài bǐjì gàishù 歷代筆記概述 (Zhōnghuá, 1980; rev. 2003), notice in the section on Sòng kǎojù bǐjì.
- The work is heavily quarried in modern Chinese specialist studies on Sòng-period phonology, Sì-míng (Níng-bō) intellectual history, and the textual criticism of the Shǐ jì and Hàn shū.
Other points of interest
The Tíyào’s narration of the rediscovery is a small monument to Sìkù editorial method: identification of an anonymous text by cross-referencing internal anecdotes against an independently transmitted family-memorial source. The reorganization into eight thematic juan is also explicitly a Sìkù-editorial intervention, not a feature of the original recension — readers using the text should keep in mind that the present sequence is editio princeps eighteenth-century work, not a Sòng-period structure.
Links
- Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Wèngyǒu xiánpíng entry.
- Yuán Xiè 袁燮, Jiézhāi jí 絜齋集 (KR4d0255), juan 16–17 (memorial for his father Yuán Wén).
- Wikidata: Q11074800 (Wengyou xianping).