陸士衡文集

Lù Shìhéng wén jí 陸士衡文集

Collected Works of Lù Shìhéng (Lù Jī) by 陸機 (撰)

About the work

Lù Shìhéng wén jí 陸士衡文集 in ten juǎn preserves the writings of Lù Jī 陸機 (261–303), the elder of the Èr Lù 二陸 (“two Lù”) brothers from the great Lù lineage of Wújùn Huátíng 吳郡華亭 (modern Sōngjiāng 松江, Shànghǎi). After the Wú collapse (280) Lù Jī and his brother Lù Yún 陸雲 came north to Luòyáng (太康末, ca. 289) and were welcomed by the Tàicháng Zhāng Huà 張華 with the famous remark “the conquest of Wú yielded two paragons” 伐吳之役利獲二俊. Lù Jī wrote prolifically — fù, yuèfǔ, shī, the celebrated Wén fù 文賦 (a foundational poetics in fù form), and the Biàn wáng lùn 辯亡論 on the rise and fall of his ancestral state of Wú. He was caught up in the Bā wáng zhī luàn 八王之亂 (War of the Eight Princes) and executed in 303 by Sīmǎ Yǐng 司馬穎 on the false denunciation of his subordinate Lú Zhì 盧志. The recension here, edited and printed by Xú Mínzhān 徐民瞻 in Sòng Qìngyuán gēngshēn (1200), is the Jìn èr jùn wén jí 晉二俊文集 base text in SBCK.

Abstract

The Suíshū jīngjí zhì records Jīn píngyuán nèi shǐ Lù Jī jí 晉平原內史陸機集 in 14 juǎn (with a Liáng-era ancestor of 47 juǎn + 1-juǎn table of contents); both Tángshū bibliographies retain the larger Liáng count. The Sòngshǐ yìwén zhì gives 15 juǎn, and Chén Zhènsūn’s Shū lù jiě tí gives 10 juǎn — already the form of the SòngYuán transmission. The present 10-juǎn text is the result of a Sòng Qìngyuán-era 慶元 (1200, gēngshēn) recovery and re-cutting by Xú Mínzhān 徐民瞻 of Xìn’ān 信安, Fèngyìláng and magistrate of Huátíngxiàn 華亭縣 in Jiāxīng prefecture. Xú’s preface explains the editorial occasion: appointed to magistracy at Huátíng — Lù Jī and Lù Yún’s ancestral district — Xú found the brothers’ commemorative portraits dust-covered in a clerk’s annex; he built a new shrine east of the county school, recovered Lù Jī’s ten-juǎn collection (with Wén fù in the leading position) from Línjūn 林君, Fǔgàn of Xīnhuái 新淮西, and Lù Yún’s ten-juǎn collection (with Yì mín fù leading) from his old friend the Mìshū láng Zhōng 鍾君 the following year, and printed both as Jìn èr jùn wén jí 晉二俊文集.

This Sòng Qìngyuán Xú Mínzhān edition is the ancestor of all later transmitted texts. Within the corpus the works of permanent literary importance include: the Wén fù 文賦 (one of the foundational works of medieval Chinese literary theory, the first systematic fù on the writing process); the Biàn wáng lùn 辯亡論 in two parts (a Wú-perspective companion to the Hòu Hàn and Sānguó historiography); the Èr fù 二俊 group of yuèfǔ in archaic five-character form; the Měng hǔ xíng 猛虎行 (deeply influential on Cáo Cāo’s reception); and the elegy Tàn shì fù 嘆逝賦 / Sī gū sūn shī 思故孫詩 (memorializing his cousin who died young). The Wén fù alone has been the subject of an English-language critical-translation tradition stretching from Achilles Fang’s classic 1951 HJAS article through Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (1992).

The catalog meta gives no precise birth–death years for Lù Jī; standard scholarship and CBDB give 261–303. The dating bracket adopted here for the recension is Qìngyuán gēngshēn = 1200, the date of Xú Mínzhān’s preface.

Translations and research

• Achilles Fang, tr. 1951. “Rhymeprose on Literature: The Wên-Fu of Lù Chī (A.D. 261–303).” HJAS 14: 527–66. Foundational English translation of the Wén fù.
• Stephen Owen. 1992. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. HUP. Includes a re-translation and extensive commentary on the Wén fù.
• Sam Hamill, tr. 1991. The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters. Shambhala. Verse translation of the Wén fù.
• David R. Knechtges. 1986–1996. Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature. 3 vols. Princeton UP. Includes the Wén fù and several Lù Jī fù.
• David R. Knechtges. 2010. “Lu Ji’s (261–303) ‘Theatrics of Capital’: An Imagined Map of Late Wu Sites in His ‘Bian wang lun.‘” Early Medieval China 16: 1–24.
• Yáng Mù 楊牧 (C. H. Wong). 1985. Lù Jī Wén fù jiào shì 陸機文賦校釋. Hóng Fàn 洪範. Standard modern critical edition of the Wén fù.
• David Hawkes. 1985. “Wên fu: A Reconstruction.” Asian Studies series.
• Liú Yùnhǎo 劉運好, ed. 2007. Lù Shìhéng wén jí jiào zhù 陸士衡文集校註. Fènghuáng. Substantial PRC critical edition.

Other points of interest

This collection and its companion KR4b0007 Lù Shìlóng wén jí (Lù Yún’s collection) are the two halves of Xú Mínzhān’s joint Jìn èr jùn wén jí; the joint preface, dated Qìngyuán gēngshēn zhōngchūn 慶元庚申仲春 (= second month of 1200), is incorporated into both volumes. Wilkinson notes that with Lù Jī and Lù Yún the southern (Wú) literary tradition first gains real prestige in the unified post-Three-Kingdoms cultural order: the brothers’ move from Huátíng to Luòyáng marks the start of the long pattern by which southern aesthetics — closely interrogated parallelism, descriptive density, lexical exuberance — colonized the northern court.

Links

• Lu Ji (Wikipedia)
• Lu Ji (Wikidata Q717499)
• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §27.4 (Wén fù); §35.6.1 (Lù Jī’s Máo shī cǎo mù shū — i.e., the homonymous Lù Jī 陸璣).