孝詩

Xiào shī 孝詩

Poems on Filial Piety by 林同 (撰)

About the work

A unique one-juàn didactic poem-collection by Lín Tóng 林同 (d. 1276), zì Zǐzhēn 子真, sobriquet Kōngzhāi 空齋, of Fúqīng 福清 in Fújiàn — a late-Sòng loyalist scholar who refused office and died resisting the Yuán conquest. The work is a series of three hundred regulated five-character quatrains, each one devoted to a single historical exemplar of filial piety, organized into five categories: ten quatrains on the filiality of sages (Shèngrén zhī xiào 聖人之孝), 240 on the filiality of worthies (Xiánzhě zhī xiào 賢者之孝), ten on the filiality of immortals and Buddhas (XiānFó zhī xiào 仙佛之孝), ten on the filiality of foreign realms (Yìyù zhī xiào 異域之孝), and ten on the filiality of [non-human] things (Wùlèi zhī xiào 物類之孝). The work is fronted by Liú Kèzhuāng 劉克莊’s preface dated Chúnyòu gēngxū 淳祐庚戌 (1250) and is one of the more idiosyncratic monothematic poem-series of the late Sòng. The Sìkù tiyao spends much of its space sorting out two prosopographical problems: the Sòngshǐ Zhōngyì zhuàn 宋史忠義傳 had confused Lín Tóng with his son and otherwise misrepresented him, and the Fújiàn tōngzhì 福建通志 had separately confused him with his brother Lín Hé 林合.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Xiào shī in one juàn was composed by Lín Tóng 林同 of the Sòng. Tóng, zì Zǐzhēn 子真, sobriquet Kōngzhāi 空齋, was a man of Fúqīng 福清. His grandfather Zhuàn 瑑 was Auxiliary of the Hall of Treasures Compositions (ZhíBǎozhānggé 直寶章閣). His father Gōngyù 公遇, zì Yǎngzhèng 養正, took the privileged appointment of Sub-Magistrate of Nínghuà 寧化 [-xiàn]; out of his unwillingness to be separated from his parents, he requested a temple-sinecure (qǐ fèngcí 乞奉祠), and after the mourning was over was assigned to be Revenue-Clerk (Hùcáo 戶曺) but did not take up office. He built himself a small dwelling and called it Hánzhāi 寒齋. Tóng was his eldest son; with [Tóng’s] younger brother [Lín] Hé 合 zì Zǐcháng 子常 he had a retired temperament. Later when the Yuán forces reached Fúzhōu, he died standing to his principle. Lín Xīyì’s 林希逸 Juānzhāi xùjí 鬳齋續集 contains many poems and prose-pieces of correspondence with [Lín] Tóng’s elder-and-younger brothers; there is also a colophon by [Lín] Tóng for his Rénshēn chóuchàng jí 壬申酬倡集. Today that work has been lost; only the present collection still survives.

The collection has a preface by Liú Kèzhuāng of the Chúnyòu gēngxū (1250). It gathers ancient and contemporary cases of filial piety; for each case there is a single five-character regulated quatrain — at times two cases are combined into one piece, this being the variant practice. Pieces on the filiality of sages number ten; on the filiality of worthies, two hundred and forty; on the filiality of immortals and Buddhas, ten; on the filiality of foreign realms, ten; on the filiality of things [non-human], ten.

Of these, types such as Lǐ Jiǒngxiù 李迥秀 of the Táng — originally a sycophantic favorite [of Empress Wǔ] — are included by virtue of one filial act. Of the type of Hán Shānzǐ 寒山子 (“boiling-the-father, boiling-the-mother”), which falls into the heretical Mohist talk of “love without gradation” (ài wú chāděng 愛無差等), the record cannot avoid being mixed. Nevertheless the overall aim is to fortify human ethics and arouse heavenly nature — the work should not be discarded for the stale flavor of its diction. Moreover, the man himself began with filiality and ended with loyalty; even his fragmentary and broken pieces should be cherished. It is certainly not to be assessed by literary criteria alone.

We note: the Sòngshǐ Zhōngyì zhuàn says of “Lín Kōngzhāi” 林空齋 that “his name has been lost”, which is already a failure of investigation. It further mistakes Kōngzhāi for the son of Tóng, splitting one man into two, and adds that Kōngzhāi rose by jìnshì examination and successively held county magistracies. We examine Kèzhuāng’s preface, which says of [Lín] Tóng and his brother that both were “still without the white [robe of degreelessness]” — and Tóng himself once said, “before I was forty, I gave up the examinations in indignation” — so Tóng never took the jìnshì at all. And the Sòng-man Liú Línruì 劉麟瑞’s Zhāozhōng yìyǒng 昭忠逸詠 names him “Hermit Lín Tóng” 林處士同 — so Tóng never held county magistracy either. Further, in Línruì’s poetry are the lines “blood inked on the short wall, my principle preserved; / the spirit pierces the long rainbow, do what you will to boil me” 血書矮壁存吾節,氣貫長虹任汝烹 — this also matches the Sòngshǐ note that, having bitten his finger and written in blood on the wall, he swore not to submit, and so on. Thus the one who died for principle was Tóng and not Tóng’s son — this is perfectly clear, and the Sòngshǐ is in error.

Further, the Fújiàn tōngzhì in its Rénwùzhuàn says “Lín Tóng zì Zǐzhēn, son of [Lín] Gōngyù; on the Yuán troops’ arrival, did not submit and died”. Its Yǐnyìzhuàn further says “Lín Tóng 仝 zì Zǐzhēn 貞, with his younger brother Hé both having retired temperaments; in mid-ZhìYuán the prefectural office submitted memorials of his deportment, an imperial summons issued, but he did not take it up; Hé zì Zǐcháng” — and so on. These accounts again differ. But Tóng and Hé being both sons of [Lín] Gōngyù has already been shown by the original preface; Tóng’s zì being Zǐzhēn and Hé’s zì being Zǐcháng has already been shown by [Lín Xīyì’s] Juānzhāi jí — these are firmly established. Since the tōngzhì makes the Lín Tóng who died at the Yuán conquest the son of Gōngyù, the Hermit Lín “仝” in the Yǐnyìzhuàn cannot also be the younger brother Hé zì Zǐcháng. The changing of 同 to 仝 and 子真 to 子貞 are mere errors of strokes and sounds, plainly transcription corruptions, splitting one man into two.

Furthermore Cáo Róng 曹溶’s Xuéhǎi lèibiān 學海類編 also lists a Xiào shī in one juàn, attributing it to “Lín Tóng of Chánglè 長樂, zì Jìyě 季野”; the name is the same but the place and zì are both different. Nor do we know on what basis.

Respectfully collated, tenth month of Qiánlóng 46 (1781). Chief-Compiler Officers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief-Collation Officer Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

(The collection is fronted by Liú Kèzhuāng’s yuánxù 原序, dated to the báilù 白露 [White Dew solar term] of Chúnyòu gēngxū 淳祐庚戌 [1250]. Liú frames the work as a continuation of the filial example set by Lín Tóng’s father Lín Gōngyù — who declined office to care for his parents — and as a poetic counterpart to Gěnzhāi 艮齋 Xiè Cǎibó’s 謝采伯 Xiàoshǐ 孝史 in 50 juàn, presented to Xiàozōng. The preface closes by predicting that Tóng’s Xiào shī will travel together with Xiè’s Xiàoshǐ into posterity.)

Abstract

The Xiào shī is one of the most fully designed thematic poem-series of the late Sòng. Lín Tóng built it on the structural model of the Xiàojīng 孝經’s hierarchy — sages, worthies, [those at] the edges of orthodoxy, foreign exemplars, non-human nature — but populated each section from the wider historical and natural corpus of filial-exemplar literature: from Yáo and Shùn through the Èrshísì xiào 二十四孝 figures, into the Yìyù (foreign-realm) and Wùlèi (animal) categories. The structural inclusion of non-human exemplars — animals showing filial behaviour — was a familiar pre-modern Chinese category, parallel to the older Bǎi xiào 百孝 tradition; the inclusion of Buddhists and Daoist immortals as parallel exemplars was a self-conscious Sòng-era cosmopolitan move.

The work survived through the YuánMíng transition almost entirely on the strength of its moral content: most of the canonical Jiānghúpài readers of late-Sòng poetry passed over the Xiào shī as a stylistically gǔzhī 古質 (rough and archaic) piece of doctrinaire didacticism. The Sìkù editors are themselves only moderately enthusiastic about the literary merit — observing the late-Sòng chénfǔ (stale, decayed) flavor of the diction — but argue strongly for preservation on biographical grounds: Lín Tóng “began with filiality and ended with loyalty”, that is, the filial poet who refused office to care for his parents went on to die resisting the Mongol conquest, in a way that gave the Xiào shī a posthumous moral cohesion the work would not have had on its own.

The composition window adopted here (1240–1250) reflects the period before Liú Kèzhuāng’s 1250 preface; the gēngxū date in Liú’s preface is the firm terminus ante quem. Lín Tóng’s death in the loyalist resistance is securely dated to 1276 (the year of the Yuán conquest of Fúzhōu).

The two prosopographical clarifications that occupy the bulk of the tiyao — (1) the Sòngshǐ Zhōngyì zhuàn’s confusion of Lín Tóng with his unnamed son, and (2) the Fújiàn tōngzhì’s splitting of Lín Tóng (one man) into two homonymous figures (a Yǐnyìzhuàn hermit “Lín 仝” and a Rénwùzhuàn loyalist “Lín 同”) — are exemplary kǎozhèng 考證 prosopographical work. The editors anchor their reconstruction in the contemporary documentary witnesses (Liú Kèzhuāng’s preface, Lín Xīyì’s Juānzhāi jí, Liú Línruì’s Zhāozhōng yìyǒng) and successfully disentangle a tradition that the Yuán and Míng compilers had thoroughly muddled. The work is also a rare case where the Sìkù tiyao’s primary contribution is biographical rather than literary.

The note on Cáo Róng’s 曹溶 Xuéhǎi lèibiān — which lists a separate “Lín Tóng of Chánglè zì Jìyě” as author of a Xiào shī — is left unresolved by the Sìkù editors but modern scholarship has shown this to be either a further confused tradition or possibly a different (lost) Xiào shī by a homonymous author.

Translations and research

• Patricia Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China (Princeton, 1991), discusses the late-Sòng xiào literature context.
• Anne Behnke Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford, 2004), for the deeper tradition of filial-exemplar literature on which the Xiào shī draws.
• Liú Jī 劉佶, “Lín Tóng Xiào shī yánjiū” 林同《孝詩》研究, MA thesis, Húběi dàxué, 2008 — the principal modern study.
• Wú Yúnhuá 吳允華, “Sòng-mò yí-mín Lín Tóng kǎo” 宋末遺民林同考, Sòng-shǐ yán-jiū lùn-cóng 宋史研究論叢, no. 16 (2015) — careful re-examination of the prosopographical record.
• Keith Knapp, Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China (Honolulu, 2005), for the broader tradition of filial-piety exemplar collections of which the Xiào shī is a poetic late-Sòng instance.

Other points of interest

The Xiào shī’s structural classification of Wùlèi (filial animals) — preserved through the MíngQīng popular Èrshísì xiào tú 二十四孝圖 illustrated tradition — is one of the bridges between elite Sòng-era ethical didacticism and the popular print culture that would carry the filial-piety message into the Qīng. The structure of the collection is one of the more original Sòng contributions to the xiào literature.

The cited line from Liú Línruì’s Zhāozhōng yìyǒng — “blood inked on the short wall, my principle preserved; / the spirit pierces the long rainbow, do what you will to boil me” — is one of the more striking individual lines of Sòng-loyalist memorial poetry, and the fact that it was used by the Sìkù editors to identify which Lín Tóng died for the dynasty is a small instance of how Sòng-loyalist poetry has been used for kǎozhèng prosopography.

Links

• WYG SKQS V1183.4, p213.
• CBDB person 11457 (Lín Tóng)