物理論

Wù lǐ lùn 物理論

Treatise on the Patterns of Things

by 楊泉 (Yáng Quán, zì Déyuān 德淵, fl. c. 265 – c. 300, Western Jìn).

About the work

The Wùlǐ lùn is a major late-3rd-century Chinese work in natural philosophy by Yáng Quán 楊泉, a Western-Jìn recluse who refused office under the new Jìn after the conquest of Wú in 280. Suíshū jīngjí zhì records the work in sixteen piān; the original was lost during or after the Táng, and the received text is a Qīng jíyì reconstruction by Sūn Xīngyǎn 孫星衍 (1753–1818) in one juǎn, included in his Píngjīn guǎn cóngshū 平津館叢書 (1804). The KRP source reproduces this reconstruction. The work is one of the most substantial naturalistic monuments of the WèiJìn period — frequently cited in Yìwén lèijù, Chūxué jì, and especially Tàipíng yùlǎn and Běitáng shūchāo, where Yáng’s discussions of cosmology, atmospheric phenomena, agriculture, medicine, and craft technique are preserved as topic-headed extracts.

Tiyao

Abstract

Yáng Quán’s Wùlǐ lùn belongs to the materialist qì-cosmology tradition that runs from Wáng Chōng 王充 in the Latter Hàn through Zhāng Zài 張載 and the Sòng qì-philosophers. The opening fragments preserved in the KRP text immediately stake out a critical, observational standpoint: *“Heaven is rotation, it is balance. Massed yáng makes the hard; its body turns in a great gyre, and is what the myriad living things look up to” — Běitáng shūchāo, Tiānbù; Tàipíng yùlǎn, Tiānbù. Yáng then enters the long Hàn debate among the gàitiān 蓋天, xuānyè 宣夜, and húntiān 渾天 cosmological schools, recording his predecessor Yáng Xióng 楊雄’s gàitiān objections and the Latter-Hàn rebuttal by Huán Tán 桓譚; he himself reformulates the yuánqì hàotiān 元氣皓天 conception (“the primordial qì in its greatness is called the hàotiān; the hàotiān is the primordial qì itself — vast and luminous, nothing else”). Further fragments treat the comparison of cosmological models to mechanical analogues (the húntiān like a chariot-wheel, the Zhōu bì like a millstone), the polestar (dǒují) as the center of heaven, and a vast range of wùlǐ topics: tides, rainbows, atmospheric optics, silk-weaving and lacquer technique, smelting, agriculture, medicine, and human nature. The text is a locus classicus for WèiJìn natural philosophy and a principal source for the history of Chinese pre-modern science.

The dating bracket reflects Yáng Quán’s documented period of activity: notBefore 265 (the founding of Jìn; the work could plausibly have begun in his Wú years) and notAfter c. 300 (Yáng’s death some time around the yǒngníng / tàiān period). The bracket is conservative; if the Wùlǐ lùn was a yímín 遺民 composition following the fall of Wú, notBefore could be tightened to 280, but the early biographical fragments do not unambiguously require this.

Translations and research

• Standard text: Sūn Xīng-yǎn 孫星衍, Wù-lǐ lùn 物理論, Píng-jīn guǎn cóng-shū 平津館叢書 edition, one juǎn (1804).
• Modern collated edition: many reprints; see also Sōng-yīn-jí-series Qīng jí-yì anthologies.
• Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. II (Cambridge: CUP, 1956), pp. 367–8 — Yáng Quán’s cosmology and rainbow theory.
• Hatano Tarō 波多野太郎, “楊泉とその思想 — 物理論を中心にして”, Hōrin / Kyōto Univ. (PDF in KURENAI repository).
• General treatments in Féng Yǒu-lán 馮友蘭, Zhōng-guó zhé-xué shǐ xīn-biān; A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (1989), pp. 354–6, briefly.

Other points of interest

The Wùlǐ lùn is one of the very few self-identified lùn (treatise) works in Chinese natural philosophy between Wáng Chōng’s Lùn héng 論衡 and the Yījīng commentaries of the Sòng. Its preservation in fragmentary form makes it an object of considerable historiographic dispute: passages cited in Tàipíng yùlǎn as “Yángquán Wùlǐ lùn” are sometimes echoed without attribution in Bówù zhì 博物志 (cf. KR3l0123) and Shíyí jì 拾遺記, raising questions of cross-citation and editorial harmonization in the leishu tradition.

Links

• Chinaknowledge.de: Wulilun 物理論.
• Kyoto Univ. KURENAI: 楊泉とその思想 (PDF).
• Wikipedia (zh): 楊泉.