Bìzhǒu gǎolüè 敝帚藁畧
Selected Drafts of [the Studio of] the Worn-out Broom by 包恢 (撰)
About the work
An eight-juàn literary collection of the high-ranking Sòng councillor and Zhū-Xī-school adherent Bāo Huī 包恢 (1182–1268), reconstituted by the Sìkù editors from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. The title — “Worn-out Broom” — is the conventional self-deprecating studio name (cf. Cáo Pī: “the family’s worn broom is treasured at a thousand pieces of gold”).
Tiyao
We respectfully submit: Bìzhǒu gǎolüè, eight juàn, was composed by Bāo Huī of the Sòng. Huī, zì Hóngfù 宏父, was a man of Jiànchāng 建昌. He took his jìnshì in Jiādìng 13 (1220), rose through office to Minister of Justice and Auxiliary Member of the Bureau of Military Affairs, was enfeoffed Marquis of Nánchéngxiàn, and retired as Academician of the Hall of Resources; on death he was given the posthumous title Junior Guardian (少保) and the canonization Wénsù 文肅. His Sòngshǐ biography records that Huī’s paternal uncles all studied under Master Zhū, so that as a youth he was already familiar with the doctrines of mind and nature; in office, wherever he went, he broke local strongmen, expelled wicked men, settled poisoning-cases, and supervised salt production. Yet in the biography of Jiǎ Sìdào 賈似道 it is stated that when Sìdào instituted the Public-Field Law (公田法), Bāo Huī, then Prefect of Píngjiāng 平江, was charged with buying up the citizens’ land and resorted to corporal punishment. The two biographies — both produced under the hand of Tuōtuō 脫脫 (rendered Tuōkètuō 托克托 in Qīng editions of the Sòngshǐ; we note the editorial-orthographic variant) — present sharply contrasting characters; this is because the Sòngshǐ uniformly praises Dàoxué figures, while the Sìdào biography happens not to have been edited to remove the discordant detail.
Huī did not in his lifetime claim to be a literary man, and the Standard History does not at all mention his writings. Only the Yuán Yǐnjū tōngyì 隱居通議 of Liú Xūn 劉壎 says: “Huī was a teacher of his age in learning, and throughout his life composed for others great steles and grand inscriptions; whenever he set brush to paper, the writing flowed broad and unrestrained, anchored in moral principle, copious without exhaustion. Indeed his learning was deep beyond bounds.” Liú alone treasured him highly. Examining the present pieces, we find them broadly clear, fluent, and amply expressive; the memorials are particularly trenchant and detailed, possessing the form of true memorial-prose. Although his moral standing wavered between the gentleman and the petty man, setting the man aside and judging the texts, these are nevertheless not unworthy of being called the words of a Confucian.
The Yǐnjū tōngyì further states that Huī always doubted the Zhōulǐ and held it not to be the work of a sage, and so wrote a book to refute it called the Zhōulǐ liùguān biàn 周禮六官辨; in Jǐngdìng rénxū (1262) he and Liú Kèzhuāng 劉克莊 attended together at the Jīxī Hall, and Kèzhuāng memorialized for an imperial summons of the work; Ōu Shèngbì 歐聖弼 was assigned to compose its presentation memorial: “the argument is somewhat misguided but the memorial is excellent.” This affair too is missing from his Standard History biography, and the Liùguān biàn itself is not in this collection — perhaps it had a separate single-text edition and so was not absorbed.
The collection was edited by Huī himself. Neither the Sòngshǐ yìwénzhì nor Mǎ Duānlín’s Wénxiàn tōngkǎo 經籍考 record it, and there is no other transmitted recension. The original table of contents is no longer recoverable. We have here culled and assembled from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, recovering altogether more than seventy prose pieces and more than eighty shī, arranging them into eight juàn, and appending Huī’s own colophon and a postface by his disciple Zhèng Wúwàng 鄭无妄 at the end — a faint trace of the original collection’s beginning and end.
Respectfully collated, ninth month of Qiánlóng 46 (1781).
Abstract
The collection is the principal surviving testimony of Bāo Huī’s literary persona, complementing the Standard History biographies that frame him in conflicting terms. Bāo’s twin posthumous reputations — Dàoxué administrator-statesman in the Dàoxué category, harsh enforcer of Jiǎ Sìdào’s confiscation policy in the Jiǎ Sìdào biography — are not reconcilable, and the present collection’s silence on the Píngjiāng episode of c. 1263 is itself indicative. The Sìkù editors’ delicate phrasing (“his moral standing wavered between the gentleman and the petty man”) preserves both judgments. The composition bracket for the surviving texts is the span 1220 (his jìnshì) to 1268. Of his lost Zhōulǐ liùguān biàn, which he co-presented with 劉克莊 in 1262, only Liú Xūn’s notice survives. CBDB confirms 1182–1268. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, does not single out Bāo individually; he is treated in the literature on late-Sòng Dàoxué office-holding (e.g., Tillman’s Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy).
Translations and research
- Bāo Huī, Bāo Huī jí 包恢集, modern punctuated edition (Jiāngxī rén-mín, various reprints).
- Hoyt Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (Hawaii, 1992), context for the Bāo-family connection to Zhū Xī.
- No substantial Western-language monograph on Bāo Huī located.
Other points of interest
The disconnect between the two Sòngshǐ biographies of Bāo is one of the standard test-cases for source-critical work on the Dàoxué lièzhuàn of the Yuán-compiled Sòngshǐ. Note also the orthographic slip in the source (托克托 for 脫脫) — a Qīng-era editorial substitution preserved silently in the WYG transmission.
Links
- WYG SKQS V1178.10, p703.
- CBDB person 10767
- Sòngshǐ juàn 421 (Bāo Huī biog.) and juàn 474 (Jiǎ Sìdào biog.).