曹毗志怪

Cáo Pí zhìguài 曹毗志怪

Records of Anomalies, by Cáo Pí by 曹毗 (zhuàn)

About the work

A zhìguài 志怪 anomaly-account collection by the Eastern-Jìn literatus 曹毗 Cáo Pí (zì Fǔzuǒ 輔佐, fl. mid-4th c.; not the Wèi emperor Cáo Pī 曹丕). The original is lost; the text transmitted under this id is the one-juàn reconstruction by Lǔ Xùn 魯迅 in Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沈, drawn from quotations in early- and mid-Táng léishū (Chūxué jì 初學記, Tàipíng yùlǎn) and Sòng commentary citations. The work is listed in the Suí shū Jīngjí zhì (子部·小說家) as “Zhìguài, 2 juǎn, Cáo Pí of Jìn”, and is again recorded in the Jiù Táng shū Jīngjí zhì and Xīn Táng shū Yìwén zhì; the loss occurred between the late Táng and the Sòng.

Important homograph caution. The author’s name is Cáo Pí 曹毗 (with the bì/pí graph 毗, lower component 比+毛), an Eastern-Jìn literatus. He is wholly distinct from Cáo Pī 曹丕 (187–226, Wèi Wéndì), to whom the Lièyì zhuàn 列異傳 is sometimes ascribed; the two names are routinely confused in print and in casual reference, with serious consequences for the dating of the zhìguài tradition.

Tiyao

Lost; no original 提要; fragments only.

Abstract

The surviving fragments are scant. The principal extant passage, preserved in Chūxué jì j. 7 and Cǎotáng shī jì jiān j. 26 (with a closing-six-character variant at j. 38 reading “Fāng zhǐ zuò yàn” 方旨作驗), recounts the “Hàn Wǔdì zuò Kūnmíng chí” 漢武帝鑿昆明池 ash-residue anecdote: when the Hàn emperor Wǔdì had the Kūnmíng pool excavated at extraordinary depth, the entire spoil came up as carbonised soot (huīmò 灰墨) with no real earth. The court was baffled; Dōngfāng Shuò 東方朔, asked, professes ignorance but suggests asking “an Indian húrén 胡人 from the Western Regions.” When in Hàn Míngdì’s time foreign Buddhist monks (“dàorén 道人”) finally enter Luòyáng, an official remembers Dōngfāng Shuò’s words and puts the question to them; the húrén replies: “When the great kalpa of the heavens and earth is about to end, there is the kalpa-conflagration; this is the residue of that kalpa-conflagration.” Only then does the court understand the deeper sense of Dōngfāng Shuò’s hint.

This single anecdote is, in fact, one of the textually most consequential fragments in the entire pre-Táng zhìguài corpus: it is the earliest narrative occurrence in Chinese literature of the Buddhist kalpa (jié 劫) — kalpa-fire (jiéshāo 劫燒) cosmological doctrine, fictionally retrojected into a Hàn imperial setting; it is the source for the long TángSòng poetic topos of “Kūnmíng huī” 昆明灰 (Kūnmíng ashes) as a marker of cosmic catastrophe (Dù Fǔ alludes to it in Qiūxìng 秋興 — hence the citation in the Cǎotáng shī jì jiān); and it documents the early-medieval imagination of Dōngfāng Shuò as a crypto-Buddhist sage. Other Cáo Pí zhìguài fragments preserved in Táng léishū are individually slight but thematically of a piece: divine retribution, Buddho-Daoist syncretism, foreign-region marvels.

A second collection closely associated with Cáo Pí’s name is the Dù Lánxiāng zhuàn 杜蘭香傳, the immortal-bride narrative of the goddess Dù Lánxiāng’s descent to marry the mortal Zhāng Shuò 張碩, preserved in Tàipíng yùlǎn j. 671 and elsewhere. Modern scholarship (Lǐ Jiànguó) treats the Dù Lánxiāng zhuàn as a separate (single-tale) work of Cáo Pí’s rather than a fragment of the zhìguài, though the generic kinship is obvious; the Kanripo catalog treats the two as distinct text-ids.

The dating bracket adopted here (340–380) follows Cáo Pí’s documented Eastern-Jìn career under Yú Yì 庾翼 and Yīn Hào 殷浩, with the upper bound corresponding to the latest plausible date for his death and final compilation.

Translations and research

• Lǔ Xùn 魯迅. Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沈; Zhōng-guó xiǎo-shuō shǐ-lüè 中國小說史略 §5.
• Lǐ Jiànguó 李劍國. Táng-qián zhì-guài xiǎoshuō shǐ 唐前志怪小說史 (Tiānjīn jiào-yù, rev. 2005), §6, with detailed treatment of Cáo Pí and the Dù Lán-xiāng tradition.
• Wáng Guóliáng 王國良. Liù-cháo zhì-guài xiǎoshuō kǎo-lùn 六朝志怪小說考論 (1988).
• Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (SUNY 1996), pp. 71ff. (chronology of post-Gān-Bǎo zhì-guài compilers).
• Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden 1959; rev. 2007), pp. 273ff. — on the Hàn Míng-dì gǎn-mèng qiú-fǎ and Kūn-míng huī legends as early Chinese narrative receptions of Buddhist cosmology.

Other points of interest

The fragment is one of the very few pre-5th-c. Chinese texts in which a Buddhist cosmological technicality (kalpa-fire) is given the form of a court-anecdote (yìwén 軼聞) about Dōngfāng Shuò — a generic move that locates the strangeness of the foreign doctrine inside the most familiar pre-Buddhist Chinese trickster-sage. It is in this sense a small but textually-pivotal zhìguài node in the larger early-medieval Sino-Buddhist literary encounter.

Links

• https://ctext.org/searchbooks.pl?if=en&author=曹毗
• Lǔ Xùn 魯迅, Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén — reconstruction.
• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §61.3 (xiǎoshuō and biji); §62 (zhìguài).