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陸氏異林

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Text ID
KR3l0140
Date
289–303
Dynasty
西晉

Lùshì yìlín 陸氏異林

Master Lù’s Forest of Anomalies by 陸雲 (撰)

About the work

A Western-Jìn zhìguài / yìwén 異聞 collection compiled by 陸雲 Lù Yún 陸雲 (262–303), younger brother of Lù Jī 陸機 and one of the Èr Lù 二陸 (Two Lùs of Wú). The work is among the very earliest dedicated anomaly-collections in the Chinese tradition — contemporary with or slightly later than KR3l0137 Lièyì zhuàn — and is part of the constellation of late-3rd-c. Western-Jìn proto-zhìguài texts (also including KR3l0006 張華 Zhāng Huá’s Bówù zhì) that mark the genre’s formal emergence between the foundational Lièyì zhuàn and the systematic 4th-c. Sōushén jì. Lù Yún’s collection — under the title Yìlín 異林 — is registered briefly in early bibliographic sources but does not survive as a transmitted unitary text; what is preserved is essentially a single famous narrative, the Zhōng Yáo 鍾繇 / female-ghost-in-a-tomb story.

Tiyao

Lost; no original 提要; fragments only.

Abstract

The Lùshì yìlín is registered in the Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書經籍志 (under zǐbù xiǎoshuō) as Yìlín 異林, 10 juàn (later reduced in transmission). The work’s attribution to Lù Yún is secured by Péi Sōngzhī’s 裴松之 (372–451) commentary on Sānguó zhì Wèishū 13 (the biography of 鍾繇 Zhōng Yáo, 151–230), which cites the Lùshì yìlín under that title for the famous Zhōng Yáo ghost-narrative, and adds the gloss qīnghé Lù Yún yě 清河陸雲也 (“[the author is] Lù Yún of Qīnghé” — Lù Yún having held the Qīnghé nèishǐ 清河內史 commission). The composition window is therefore the period of Lù Yún’s documented career: 289 (his arrival at Luòyáng) – 303 (his execution in the Bāwáng zhī luàn). The work is among the first generation of Western-Jìn Wúemigré literary productions, contemporaneous with Zhāng Huá’s Bówù zhì and predating Gān Bǎo’s Sōushén jì by some 20–30 years. The work was lost as a transmitted unitary text well before the Sòng; no Sòng catalogue registers it.

The surviving fragment is the Zhōng Yáo episode — preserved in essentially identical form in (a) Péi Sōngzhī’s commentary on the Sānguó zhì (Zhōng Yáo’s biography), (b) the Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽 (juàn 819 and 887), and (c) KR3l0099 Sōushén jì (which absorbed it). The narrative: the Wèi minister Zhōng Yáo 鍾繇 (151–230) is observed by his colleagues to be absent from court for several months, looking agitated and unwell. Asked why, he confesses that a beautiful woman has been visiting him at night. His friends warn him that this is certainly a ghost (guǐ wù 鬼物) and that he must kill her. The next time the woman comes, she hesitates at the threshold; Zhōng Yáo asks why; she replies “you have it in mind to kill me.” He denies it and presses her to come in. He strikes her with a sword, wounding her thigh; she flees, dabbing the wound with a wad of fresh silk, leaving a trail of blood. The next day, following the trail, his servants reach a large tomb; inside is a beautiful woman in a white-silk shift and a vermilion-embroidered cap-band, lifelike, with a wound on her left thigh, the blood blotted with silk-wadding. The narrative ends with Péi Sōngzhī’s attribution gloss.

The narrative is the foundational text of one of the most important early-medieval zhìguài topoi: the seductive female ghost from the tomb. The figure becomes a fixture of the Six-Dynasties imagination and feeds directly into Táng chuánqí (compare the Líhún jì 離魂記 of Chén Xuányòu and the Rèn shì zhuàn 任氏傳 of Shěn Jìjì), and ultimately into the Liáozhāi zhìyì corpus. The narrative is also significant for what it documents about the dating of zhìguài compilation: that a Western-Jìn aristocrat of the Wúemigré class — a poet and bureaucrat of the highest literary distinction — composed a dedicated anomaly-collection establishes the practice of zhìguài compilation as a respectable literary activity in this milieu, well before Gān Bǎo articulated its theoretical defence in the Sōushén jì preface.

Translations and research

  • DeWoskin, Kenneth J., and J. I. Crump, Jr., trans. In Search of the Supernatural (Stanford, 1996). Translates the Sōushén jì parallel of the Zhōng Yáo narrative.
  • Lǔ Xùn 魯迅. Gǔ xiǎo-shuō gōu-chén 古小說鉤沉 (c. 1909–11; published 1938). Standard modern reconstruction of the Lùshì yìlín fragment.
  • Lǐ Jiàn-guó 李劍國. Táng qián zhì-guài xiǎo-shuō shǐ 唐前志怪小說史 (Nán-kāi, 1984; rev. 2005). Treats the Lùshì yìlín as one of the foundational Western-Jìn zhì-guài collections.
  • Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (SUNY, 1996). Discusses the Yì-lín in the context of the proto-zhì-guài corpus.
  • Knechtges, David R., and Chang, Taiping, eds. Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide, vol. 1 (Brill, 2010), entry on Lù Yún.
  • Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §62 (zhì-guài genre).

Other points of interest

The Zhōng Yáo narrative is one of the founding texts of the měirén shì guǐ (beautiful woman / ghost) trope in Chinese literature, with a continuous literary genealogy stretching to Liáozhāi zhìyì. The internal evidence of Péi Sōngzhī’s gloss — explicitly identifying the Lùshì yìlín with Lù Yún of Qīnghé — is unusually firm by the standards of Six-Dynasties yíshū attributions: it ties the work directly to a named, documented historical figure (Lù Yún) and identifies him by the specific Western-Jìn commission (Qīnghé nèishǐ) under which his collected works circulated. The attribution is universally accepted.

Lù Yún’s authorship of the Yìlín also has bearing on his literary biography. He is best known as a fù poet and as the author of the Yǔ xiōng Píngyuán shū 與兄平原書 letters (preserved in his collection KR4b0007 Lù Shìlóng wén jí 陸士龍文集) — the principal contemporary witness to his elder brother Lù Jī’s compositional process. That he also engaged in zhìguài compilation extends our picture of his literary range, and links him to the wider Wúemigré intellectual circle (Zhāng Huá, Liú Yì 劉毅, etc.) that was producing the first generation of dedicated anomaly-collections.

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