Lí sāo cǎo mù shū 離騷草木疏
Glosses on the Plants of the Lí sāo by 吳仁傑 (撰)
About the work
The Lí sāo cǎo mù shū 離騷草木疏 (Glosses on the Plants of the Lí sāo) by Wú Rénjié 吳仁傑 (b. 1137) is a four-juan natural-historical commentary devoted to the botanical vocabulary of the QūYuán portion of the Chǔ cí — the twenty-five pieces Zhū Xī had recently fixed as the authentic Lí sāo core. Modeled on Lù Jī’s 陸璣 Máo shī cǎo mù niǎo shòu chóng yú shū 毛詩草木鳥獸蟲魚疏 and Luó Yuàn’s 羅願 Ěr yǎ yì 爾雅翼, it explains the names of plants encountered in the Lí sāo through dense citation of earlier philological and natural-historical literature. The author’s distinctive — and to the Sìkù compilers, debatable — methodological commitment is to treat the Shān hǎi jīng 山海經 as the principal authority for Lí sāo botany.
Tiyao
From the WYG tíyào of 乾隆四十六年二月 (1781/2):
Your servants etc. respectfully report: the Lí sāo cǎo mù shū in four juǎn was composed by Wú Rénjié 吳仁傑 of the Sòng. Rénjié, also the author of the Gǔ Zhōu yì 古周易 (KR1a0042 Yì tú shuō and the lost Gǔ Zhōu yì), is already on record. At the end of this edition is Rénjié’s own preface dated Qìngyuán dīngsì (1197).
He notes that Liú Yǎo 劉杳 of Liáng wrote a Cǎo mù shū in two juǎn, mentioned in his biography but no longer extant; Liú’s shū covered everything that Wáng Yì collected. Rénjié by contrast singles out only the twenty-five pieces [Zhū Xī’s Lí sāo core] for treatment. His central thesis is that “the language of the Lí sāo is in great part rooted in the Shān hǎi jīng,” and so he uses the Shān hǎi jīng as his decisive authority throughout. For instance, on the line xī lǎn zhōu zhī sù mǎng 夕攬洲之宿莽 (“at evening I gathered the sùmǎng of the islet”), he cites the Shān hǎi jīng — “on the mountain of Zhāogē grow the mǎng plants” — as evidence to overturn Wáng Yì’s old gloss.
His arguments are forcefully made; nevertheless the sāo poets’ use of allusion is not single in its significance — qióng zhī 瓊枝 and ruò mù 若木 and the like are clearly figurative, while Lǐlán 澧蘭 and Yuánzhǐ 沅芷 and the like are mostly things actually seen. The poet certainly responds to immediate sights and present objects; to drag every one of them across the great desolation [of the Shān hǎi jīng] and make Língjūn’s compositions all derive from what Bóyì 伯益 wrote — that is, to suppose that the man chanting at the lake-bank was chiefly concerned to display erudition rather than to write out his grief — is also the excess of a love of strangeness.
Yet his citations are richly comprehensive, his examination is solid and verified, and he genuinely supplements Wáng Yì’s glosses where they fall short. Compared with Lù Jī’s shū on the Máo shī and Luó Yuàn’s Yì on the Ěr yǎ, Wú’s work can drive abreast and contend for the lead — students of natural history have always drawn on it; trace the breadth of his learning, and the work is also a forest of verifications.
This text is an yǐngSòng 影宋 (facsimile-of-Sòng) old hand-copy. At the end is a colophon by Fāng Càn 方燦 of Qìngyuán gēngshēn (1200), and three lines of editorial-staff names — apparently when Rénjié held office as guózǐ xuélù 國子學録, he commissioned Càn to print it at Luótián 羅田. The old printing-blocks have been scattered and lost, the book is rarely circulated, only the manuscript copy survives — it can indeed be called a precious folio of the literary forest.
Respectfully collated and submitted, second month of Qiánlóng 46 (1781). 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 book is dated by its own preface to Qìngyuán 3, dīngsì (1197), and by Fāng Càn’s colophon to Qìngyuán 6, gēngshēn (1200) — a compositional and printing window of 1197–1200, adopted in the frontmatter. Wú’s restriction of his commentary to the twenty-five-piece Lí sāo core (rather than the seventeen-section anthology) follows Zhū Xī’s Jí zhù (KR4a0004) restructuring of just a few years earlier; Wú’s preface explicitly frames itself against Wáng Yì’s KR4a0002 failure to ground the botanical glosses in earlier authorities.
The Shān hǎi jīng-centered methodology is the work’s distinguishing feature, and it remains controversial: the Sìkù tíyào criticizes it as an “excess of love of strangeness” (hǎo qí zhī guò 好奇之過) but concedes that Wú’s citations are “richly comprehensive and his examination solid and verified,” supplementing what Wáng Yì had missed. The work entered the Sìkù from a single rare hand-copy (yǐng Sòng jiù chāo 影宋舊鈔) that survived after the Sòng print blocks were lost — its preservation is largely accidental.
The Sìkù tíyào’s bracketing of Wú alongside Lù Jī’s Máo shī cǎo mù niǎo shòu chóng yú shū and Luó Yuàn’s Ěr yǎ yì situates the Cǎo mù shū in the lineage of Sòng bó wù 博物 (broad-learning of things) commentary, an important Southern-Sòng genre that prefigures Qīng natural-historical philology. For Wú himself, the work pairs with his gǔ Yì 古易 reconstructions (KR1a0042) as the two great surviving products of his text-critical and natural-historical scholarship.
Translations and research
- Sì-kù quán-shū zǒng-mù tí-yào, jí bù, Chǔ cí lèi. Standard reference.
- Schimmelpfennig, Michael. 2016. The Songs of Chu (Chuci): A Bibliography. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
- Pān Fù-jūn 潘富俊. 2014 (2002). Chǔ cí zhí wù tú jiàn 楚辭植物圖鑑. 2nd ed. Maotouying — modern illustrated handbook of Chǔ-cí plants, citing Wú throughout.
- Cui Fuzhang and Li Daming, chief eds. 2003. Chǔ cí jí jiào jí shì 楚辭集校集釋. Hubei jiaoyu — collates Wú’s identifications.
Other points of interest
The work’s transmission story — surviving only as a single Sòng-facsimile manuscript copy after the Luótián blocks were lost — is itself a small case study in the fragility of provincial Southern-Sòng print runs and the role of imperial yǐngSòng projects in salvaging them.