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夷堅志甲

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Text ID
KR3l0122
Date
1161–1202
Dynasty
南宋

Yíjiān zhì jiǎ 夷堅志甲

Record of the Listener — First Series (jiǎ) by 洪邁 (撰)

About the work

The Yíjiān zhì 夷堅志 (“Record of the Listener Yíjiān”) of 洪邁 Hóng Mài 洪邁 (1123–1202) is, by an overwhelming margin, the largest zhìguài / bǐjì xiǎoshuō collection in the classical Chinese tradition: at its complete extent it ran to 420 juàn in 32 sub-collections (biān 編), gathered across some forty years of Hóng’s adult life (the earliest jiǎzhì 甲志 series was completed c. 1161; the latest sìzhì 四志 series in the late 1190s). Today only the jiǎ 甲 through wù 戊 series (50 juàn in 5 series × 10 juàn) of the principal collection — preserved in the Sìkù quánshū 四庫全書 as the present text — plus partial zhī 支 and sān 三 series survive; the surviving total is c. 207 juàn, about half of the original. The present KR3l0122 is the Sìkù 50-juàn recension, which the Sìkù tíyào already identified as in fact the zhījiǎ 支甲 through zhīwù 支戊 of the Yíjiān zhì (i.e., the second-cycle “zhī” series, not the original jiǎ-cycle), based on its agreement with the prefatory inventory preserved in Zhào Yǔshí’s 趙與峕 Bīntuì lù 賓退錄. Despite the misnomer, this is the principal extant Sòng-edition witness for any portion of the Yíjiān zhì, and the textus receptus of Hóng’s zhìguài corpus is built on it. The title is drawn from Lièzǐ 列子·Tāngwèn 湯問, where Yíjiān 夷堅 is the legendary learned auditor who recorded the rare beasts and anomalies that Yǔ saw and Bóyì named.

Tiyao

Your servants report: Yíjiān zhì in 50 juàn. Sòng Hóng Mài, zhuàn 撰. Mài’s other work, the Róngzhāi suíbǐ 容齋隨筆 (KR3l0027), has been catalogued separately. This book records entirely matters of gods and prodigies, and so takes its name from the Lièzǐ tale of the Yíjiānzhì affair. We note that the Lièzǐ says: “When Great Yǔ travelled and saw them, Bóyì knew them and named them, Yíjiān heard them and recorded them” — that is, of rare birds and strange beasts, of the Shānhǎi jīng 山海經 type. Mài, however, miscellaneously records the doings of immortals and ghosts and yet draws his title from there: not the original meaning of the phrase. Still, the Táng [poet] Yìyuánwèi (commandant of Yìyuán) Zhāng Shènsù 張慎素 had already used the name Yíjiān lù 夷堅錄, so Mài’s title likewise has a precedent.

Chén Zhènsūn 陳振孫’s Shūlù jiětí 書錄解題 records: Yíjiān zhì from jiǎ to guǐ (the first decade-cycle), 200 juàn; zhījiǎ to zhīguǐ, 100 juàn; sānjiǎ to sānguǐ, 100 juàn; and sìjiǎ, sìyǐ, 20 juàn — totalling 420 juàn. Zhào Yǔshí’s 趙與峕 Bīntuì lù likewise records that Mài’s Yíjiān zhì in 32 series carried 31 separate prefaces (none of them duplicate), and gives a précis of each — most thorough.

The present recension only preserves jiǎ through wù, 50 juàn, titled merely “Yíjiān zhì”, and has lost its original preface. Tested against Zhào Yǔshí’s inventory, [this text] is in fact the zhījiǎ through zhīwù — not the principal collection. Only, Zhào Yǔshí records “zhībǐng” 支丙 as “zhījǐng” 支景 (avoiding the xiánmíng 嫌名 of his great-grandfather), whereas this [recension] still writes bǐng 丙 — likely a copyist’s emendation. Hú Yìnglín 胡應麟’s Bǐcóng 筆叢 records that his copy ran to 100 juàn; Zhōu Liànggōng 周亮工’s Shūyǐng 書影 says Yìnglín’s copy was zhījiǎ through sānjiǎ — likely the same as Hú’s, which has lost half. Zhū Guózhēn 朱國禎’s Yǒngchuáng xiǎopǐn 涌幢小品, not knowing this was only one of the [original] series, said: “Yíjiān zhì was originally 420 juàn; what circulates today is 51 juàn — they cut it down for prolixity.” Greatly mistaken.

Chén Zhènsūn criticised Mài for misapplying his energy — a fair criticism. Zhāng Shìnán 張世南’s Yóuhuàn jìwén 游宦紀聞 said Mài wished to compile the Guóshǐ 國史 and used [the Yíjiān zhì] as practice for his pen — this seems an apologia. Yet within it, shī and cí citations are often worth extracting, and the stray-anecdotes and trivial-matters are also instructive for moral exemplum; not entirely without benefit to the heart-and-mind. The xiǎoshuō school has always been catalogued; why must we hold it strictly against Mài alone?

Respectfully checked, Qiánlóng 43 (1778), 5th month. Chief Compilers: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief Collator: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Yíjiān zhì is Hóng Mài’s vast lifelong gathering of anomalous tales, anecdote, ghost-story, bùpō (uncanny) report, and miscellaneous narrative — the immediate prose counterpart to his philological masterwork Róngzhāi suíbǐ (KR3l0027). At completion in the late 1190s it stood at 420 juàn across 32 alphabetically-ordered series (jiǎyǐbǐngdīng-…-guǐ for each of four cycles: primary, zhī 支, sān 三, and sì 四), each series ten juàn, with a separately-dated preface. The Sòngshǐ Yìwén zhì and Chén Zhènsūn’s Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí 直齋書錄解題 confirm the 420-juàn extent. Of this only some 207 juàn survive — the principal jiǎyǐbǐngdīngwù 50 juàn (the present Sìkù recension; identified by the Sìkù compilers as in fact the zhī cycle, see the tíyào), plus partial zhīsì 四 series recovered later. The textual transmission is convoluted: from the late Sòng a number of select-anthology recensions (Yíjiān zhì xuǎn 選, Yíjiān zhì lèibiān 類編) circulated, complicating the recovery of the original series-structure. The standard modern critical edition is Hé Zhuō 何桌’s Yíjiān zhì (Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1981, 4 vols.), which reconstructs the surviving 207 juàn and prints Hóng Mài’s original 31 prefaces in sequence.

The work’s importance for premodern Chinese cultural and social history was first highlighted by Cháng Bǐdé 昌彼得 and especially by the great Sinological monograph of Valerie Hansen (Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276, Princeton 1990) and Edward L. Davis (Society and the Supernatural in Song China, Hawaii 2001): both treat the Yíjiān zhì as the principal extant witness to Southern-Sòng popular religion, the cult of local gods (Tǔdì shén 土地神, the city-god Chénghuáng 城隍), Daoist exorcism, ritual specialists, and the interpenetration of literati and demotic religious practice. As Wilkinson §62.3.11 notes, Hóng Mài mentions the names of over 4,000 people — most from the literate elite, but with dozens of commoners — and his stories are drawn from across the empire (north and south) and from his own service postings in 鄱陽 Póyáng, 婺州 Wùzhōu, 福州 Fúzhōu, 贛州 Gànzhōu, and the court at Lín’ān 臨安. Recent scholarship (Alister Inglis 2006; Cong Ellen Zhang 2018) has emphasised the work’s deliberate documentary intent: Hóng systematically names his informants — often friends, fellow officials, or local elders — and treats each report as a piece of miscellaneous historiography (biéshǐ 別史) as much as imaginative fiction. The Sòng-era bǐjì genre had no clear boundary between “true” anecdote and “fictional” zhìguài; the Yíjiān zhì exemplifies this porosity.

Yuán Hàowèn 元好問 (1190–1257), the great JīnYuán transitional poet, composed a Xù yíjiān zhì 續夷堅志 in continuation — preserved in 4 juàn (Lǐ Zhèngmín 李正民, ed., Xù Yíjiān zhì píngzhù, Shānxī gǔjí 1999) — testifying to the immediate canonicity of Hóng’s genre-name. Over 30 Yíjiān tales were retold in Míng and Qīng vernacular story-collections (the San yán 三言 of Féng Mènglóng, Líng Méngchū’s Èr pāi 二拍 corpus), demonstrating the work’s long-term role as a reservoir of plot-material for huàběn and xiǎoshuō.

The Sìkù compilers’ identification of the present 50-juàn recension as the zhī cycle rather than the principal cycle is now considered correct by all modern editors. The principal cycle’s jiǎyǐbǐngdīngwù are lost.

Translations and research

  • Hansen, Valerie. Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276. Princeton UP, 1990. The foundational social-historical study; reconstructs Southern-Sòng popular religion almost entirely from Yíjiān zhì evidence.
  • Davis, Edward L. Society and the Supernatural in Song China. University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Companion volume; uses the Yíjiān zhì to map the world of Daoist ritualists, exorcists, and possession-mediums.
  • Inglis, Alister David. Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener and Its Song Dynasty Context. SUNY Press, 2006. The standard English-language monograph on the work; treats compositional method, authorial voice, and genre-status.
  • Inglis, Alister David, trans. Yíjiān zhì xuǎn / Selections from Record of the Listener. Bilingual Chinese-English ed. Wàiwén 外文 publishing, 2009. ~50 stories with parallel Chinese text.
  • Zhang, Cong Ellen, trans. Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai’s Yijian zhi. Hackett, 2018. 100 stories in fluent annotated English translation — the most extensive English translation available.
  • Hé Zhuō 何桌, coll. Yíjiān zhì 夷堅志. 4 vols. Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1981, with frequent reprintings. The standard critical edition.
  • Wáng Yùntún 王雲屯, comp. Yíjiān zhì tōngjiǎn 夷堅志通檢 (CFC 4, 1937; repr. Xuéshēng shūjú, 1977). The standard index with separate listings of personal names, place names, book titles, and themes.
  • Lǐ Jiànguó 李劍國. Sòng-dài zhì-guài chuán-qí xù-lù 宋代志怪傳奇敘錄. Nán-kāi dàxué, 1997. The standard Chinese-language source-critical study; treats the Yíjiān zhì’s sub-collection structure in detail.
  • Allen, Sarah M. “Tang Stories: Genres and Sources,” in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (2001), and in her 2014 Shifting Stories (Harvard) — frames the Yíjiān zhì as the Sòng inheritor of the Táng chuán-qí / zhì-guài tradition.

Other points of interest

The Yíjiān zhì is a foundational corpus for historical Chinese sociolinguistics: it preserves substantial early-vernacular dialogue (in particular birth-order naming patterns — Wilkinson §8.8.1 — that document the Southern-Sòng commoner naming system) and a wealth of báihuà 白話 idiom that the Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn failed to incorporate (Wáng Xuānwǔ 王宣武, Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn shíbǔ 漢語大詞典拾補, Guìzhōu rénmín 1999, makes this a central methodological point). For the study of Sòng popular religion, exorcism, and the female experience (Hóng records numerous tales centred on women, with the xīngdì 姓第 [surname-and-number] feminine naming conventions explicit), no other single source comes close to it in coverage.

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