Xīshān wénjí 西山文集
Collected Writings of Master Xīshān by 眞德秀 (撰)
About the work
The collected writings of Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀 (1178–1235, zì Jǐngyuán 景元 / Xīshān 西山, of Pǔchéng 浦城, Jiànníng), the second of the two great dàoxué statesmen of the Lǐzōng reign alongside Wèi Liǎowēng. The textually transmitted recension is fifty-one juàn in the Míng Zhèngdé reprint and fifty-four juàn (extant from an original sixty) in the WYG. The collection contains Zhēn’s poetry, lectures (jiǎngyì), memorials, prefaces, epitaphs, and sacrificial texts; his three monographic works — the Dàxué yǎnyì 大學衍義, Dúshū jì 西山讀書記, and Xīnjīng 心經 — circulate independently and are excluded from the wénjí.
Tiyao
No tíyào present in the local source file. The Kanripo source for KR4d0306 (file KR4d0306_000.txt) is the Sìbù cóngkān (SBCK) photo-reproduction of the Zhèngdé gēngchén 正德庚辰 (1520) Jiànníng print edited by Huáng Gǒng 黃鞏 of Púyáng, not the WYG. The frontmatter consists of Huáng Gǒng’s 1520 preface and the 51-juàn table of contents. The WYG tíyào is therefore not available within this Kanripo source file.
Huáng Gǒng’s 1520 preface (paraphrased): “Ever since Mencius died, the learning of the sages was not transmitted; for over fourteen hundred years, until in the Sòng there appeared Master Zhōu of Liánxī, and the two Masters Chéng of Hénán, did the broken thread begin to be rejoined. After the Chéng brothers died, more than a hundred years passed before Master Zhū of Kǎotíng appeared, and the learning of the sages was greatly clarified. Of those who learned by hearing alone — that is, who never sat at his door — the Master of Xīshān, Mr. Zhēn Wénzhōng, is the one. He was Zhū Xī’s fellow-prefectural and was born just too late to enrol as his disciple, so he revered him only privately and absorbed his teaching by self-study, regarding himself as receiving Zhū Xī’s boundless grace. Therefore the learning of the Master is the learning of Zhū Xī. When the Powerful Minister [Hán Tuōzhòu] enumerated ‘fake learning’ to silence the upright, the Master alone shouldered this culture as his charge, expounding it above to his sovereign and below in conversation with scholars, ever quoting Master Zhū. He often said, ‘Students who read Master Zhū’s books, before getting to the bottom of them, already begin to doubt that the explanations are exhaustive. Therefore I customarily urge friends to soak first in the Sìshū of the Wéngōng until they have absorbed its meaning, and only then to advance to the Tàijí, the Xīmíng jiě, and the Jìnsī lù — after a few years thus, you will not lack insight into the fine points of moral principle.’ He also held that knowledge and action must be pursued as one. His Dúshū jì and Xīn jīng are already in circulation; only his collected writings, fifty-one juàn, were rarely seen in this generation. My contemporary Zhāng Gōngruì 張公瑞, prefect of Jiànníng, found a copy with the dìguān láng Yáng Qiánshū 楊乾叔; he sighed, ‘In every bookshop the works of Master Xīshān are absent, and as I am a man of his prefecture, that this collection should be lost is no small lacuna,’ and undertook to print it. Now Mr. Jiāng Mèngbīn 姜夢賓 of Tàicāng, a friend of mine, has been demoted to the assistantship of this prefecture and pressed me by letter to write the preface… The benefactors of this venture have rendered great service. Inscribed by Huáng Gǒng of Púyáng on the full-moon day of the twelfth month of Zhèngdé gēngchén (winter 1520).”
Abstract
Zhēn Déxiù (1178–1235) — the Sòngshǐ gives him a major biography in juàn 437 — is one of the two principal dàoxué officials of the Lǐzōng reign and the leading expositor of the Zhū Xī orthodoxy at the imperial court. He took the jìnshì in 1199 (Qìngyuán 5), the same year as Wèi Liǎowēng, and rose through provincial and central appointments to Hànlín Academician and Adjutant of the Heir-Apparent (zīzhèngdiàn xuéshì), dying in office shortly after his appointment as deputy minister of personnel. His sobriquet Wénzhōng 文忠 was awarded posthumously. Wilkinson (Chinese History: A New Manual §62 Sòng research tools, p. 10664) lists his Xīshān dúshū jì 西山讀書記 as one of the canonical Sòng prose collections; the same notebook by Saeki Tomi (the Sōdai bunshū sakuin) treats Zhēn Déxiù as one of ten major Sòng biéjí meriting an indexed concordance.
The textual situation is that Zhēn’s writings were originally collected in the years immediately after his death in 1235, but the early Sòng print is lost; the surviving textual line begins with the 1520 Zhèngdé reprint produced at Jiànníng by Zhāng Wénlín 張文麟 under Huáng Gǒng’s editorship — the SBCK base — and the WYG editors used a related Míng-print stemma to produce a fifty-four-juàn recension marked as “cún 存” (surviving), implying loss from the original sixty juàn. The catalog meta records this as “存54卷”. Zhēn’s signature contribution to the collection lies in juàn 1–10 (lectures and memorials), where the systematic Zhū-Xī-school philosophy is applied to Lǐzōng-era court ritual and policy. Note: the catalog uses the variant character 眞 (= 真) for the surname; the standard form is 真.
Translations and research
- William Theodore de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (Columbia, 1981) — extended treatment of Zhēn Déxiù’s Xīn jīng and its place in the formation of Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy.
- Wing-tsit Chan (Chén Róngjié), Chu Hsi: New Studies (Hawai’i, 1989), several chapters trace Zhēn Déxiù’s reception and codification of Zhū Xī.
- Lin Su-fen 林素芬, Běi-Sòng zhōng-qī rúxué dào-lùn yánjiū and Zhēn Déxiù yánjiū — recent Taiwanese monograph treatment.
- Cài Fāngguò 蔡方鹿, Zhēn Déxiù yǔ Lǐ-xué 真德秀與理學 (Sìchuān dàxué, 2008).
- Hilde de Weerdt, Competition over Content (Harvard, 2007), uses Zhēn Déxiù’s writings on the examination system and the Sì-shū curriculum.
- Cheong-choo Ari Daniel Levine, Divided by a Common Language: Factional Conflict in Late Northern Song China (Hawai’i, 2008) — broader context.
- Sòngrén bié-jí xùlù (Zhū Shàngshū, 2020), the entry on the Xī-shān wén-jí, gives the standard textual history.
Other points of interest
The 1520 preface preserved at the head of the SBCK source is itself a key document in the Míng reception of Sòng dàoxué: Huáng Gǒng’s framing of Zhēn Déxiù as the unique transmitter “by hearing alone” of Zhū Xī’s learning is the canonical seventeenth-century formula and was reproduced in essentially every MíngQīng anthology of Lǐxué genealogy.