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先天集

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Text ID
KR4d0341
Date
1216–1285
Dynasty
宋

Xiāntiān jí 先天集

Collected works of [the Hall of] Antecedent Heaven by 許月卿 (撰)

About the work

The Xiāntiān jí 先天集 in ten juan, with an upper and a lower appendix (附錄上, 附錄下), gathers the surviving poetry, prose and occasional writings of Xǔ Yuèqīng 許月卿 (Tàikōng 太空, later Sòngshì 宋士, hào Shānwū 山屋, “the Recluse of the Mountain Hut”; 1216–1285), a Sòng loyalist of Wùyuán 婺源. The collection is preserved in the Sìbù cóngkān 四部叢刊 from a Míng print descending from the family-school redaction by his great-grand-nephew Xǔ Hù 許汻. Juàn 1–6 contain poetry (sìyán, gǔshī in five and seven words, chángduǎnjù lyric, regulated and quatrain forms); juàn 7–10 hold jì 記 inscriptions, tíbá 題跋 colophons, shū 書 letters (notably to chief councillors Chéng Yuánfèng 程元鳳 and Wú Qián 吳潛), zázhù, examination policy compositions (jīngyì), congratulatory openings, a bēi (the Wùyuán Zhūtáng Huìwēng cí bēi commemorating the Zhū Xī 朱熹 ancestral shrine), memorials including the surviving abstract of his impeachment of Yú Rúsūn 余如孫 (son of Yú Jiè 余玠), eulogies, a 行狀 for his mother LǐTàiānrén, and tomb inscriptions. The two appendices preserve his Línrǔ Academy lecture on the Zhōngyōng together with letters to him from prominent contemporaries (Wú Qián, Dǒng Huái 董槐, Wāng Lìxìn 汪立信, Tāng Hàn 湯漢, Liú Huìmèng 劉會孟, Fāng Yuè 方岳); the 行狀 by his son Yì Fēi 翼飛, dated Yányòu 1 (1314); and various local-gazetteer notices.

Tiyao

(The text in the Kanripo corpus is the Sìbù cóngkān SBCK reprint, which carries no Sìkù tíyào; the Kyoto Zinbun digital Sìkù tíyào likewise has no entry under this id, and the work was not in the WYG. The 1534 (Jiājìng 13) preface by Zhàn Ruòshuǐ 湛若水 (1466–1560), copied at the head of the SBCK exemplar, takes its bearings from the maxim that “to recite a man’s poems and read his books, and to know him thereby” requires that the words proceed from the heart. He recounts that he received the manuscript from a descendant of Xǔ Yuèqīng named Liàng 亮 and prepared it for printing, finding in its lines the marks of “self-attainment” 自得, of moral firmness, of loyal love, and of the great resolve 大節 of one who in the dynasty’s collapse “shut his door in mourning, never changed unto death.“)

Abstract

The Xǔ family was Huīzhōu-based at Wùyuán; Xǔ Yuèqīng was the son of the Cheng-school disciple Xǔ Dàníng 許大寧 (“Yǒurén xiānshēng” 友仁先生), a friend of Wèi Liǎowēng 魏了翁 (1178–1237), and was schooled first under Dǒng Mèngchéng 董夢程 (Jièxuān 介軒, in the line of Chéng Duānméng 程端蒙, a Zhū Xī disciple) and then directly under Wèi Liǎowēng’s son Wèi Kèyú 魏克愚 (“ZǐWèizǐ”). After early military-merit service he won jìnshì by virtue of topping the Yìjīng paper at the Jiāngdōng court audience in Chúnyòu 4 (1244) and rose into court office. He was a fierce opponent of the chief councillors Shǐ Sōngzhī 史嵩之, Dīng Dàquán 丁大全, and Jiǎ Sìdào 賈似道; the surviving “memorial impeaching Yú Rúsūn” and the speech transcribed in the funerary 行狀 are characteristic of his fēngjié 風節. Refusing to serve under Jiǎ Sìdào after 1259, he retired to Wùyuán and “shut his door, wrote books, and called himself Quántián zǐ 泉田子.” After the dynasty fell in 1276 he is said never to have spoken again for five years, dying aetatis 70 in Zhìyuán 22 / Yǐyǒu (1285); his close friend Xiè Fāngdé 謝枋得 (himself a martyr of 1289) wrote of him: “If you would see a Xiè Fāngdé of today, you have only to look back at Xǔ Yuèqīng of yesterday.”

The work’s title — “Xiāntiān”, an allusion to the Yìjīng hexagram order ascribed by Sòng Yì-learning to Fú Xī 伏羲 — frames the collection as the literary residue of an Yì-trained Confucian who saw himself as the heir of Sòng xīnxué 心學 in the Wèi-school strand. The Bǎiguān zhēn 百官箴 KR2l0018, Xǔ Yuèqīng’s other major surviving work, is mentioned in the 行狀 as a 16,000-character admonition presented at court but never received by Lǐzōng before his death; it survives in another Sìkù division. The catalog meta gives Xǔ Yuèqīng’s lifedates as 1216–1285, in agreement with CBDB (id 33263).

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. On Xǔ Yuèqīng’s place in late-Sòng Daoxue and the Wùyuán intellectual scene see the entries on Wèi Liǎowēng’s lineage in standard Chinese surveys (e.g. Hóu Wài-lú et al., Sòng-Míng lǐxué shǐ 宋明理學史). The Bǎiguān zhēn has attracted some attention as a specimen of Sòng admonitory literature (e.g. studies in Wén-shǐ-zhé and Gǔjí zhěnglǐ yánjiū xuékān).

Other points of interest

The 行狀 preserved in the lower appendix transmits a long quotation from Xǔ Yuèqīng’s Línrǔ Academy lecture on the Zhōngyōng I.1 — anchoring his cosmology in Zhèng Xuán’s gloss that the five elements correspond to the five virtues with shén 神 (“spirit”) as the link between lǐ (above-form) and qì (below-form) — and is one of the relatively rare extant late-Sòng examples of an academy-lecture record where both the lecturer’s reasoning and the auditors’ response are preserved together. The same appendix’s letter from Liú Huìmèng 劉會孟 (Liú Chénwēng 劉辰翁, 1232–1297) is a witness to the late Sòng academic network in the years immediately before the Mongol conquest.

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