伯牙琴

Bóyá qín 伯牙琴

Bó-yá’s Lute by 鄧牧 (撰)

About the work

The self-edited biéjí of Dèng Mù 鄧牧 (1247–1306; zì Mùxīn 牧心, hào Jiǔsuǒ shānrén 九鎖山人 — “Mountain Man of the Nine Locks”), a Qiántáng yímín who refused all post-1276 Yuán recruitment and lived out his life as a Daoist householder at the Dòngxiāo gōng 洞霄宮 (the great Quán-zhēn-line Daoist establishment in the Yúháng hills west of Hángzhōu). The title alludes to the Lǚshì chūnqiū / Lièzǐ topos of Bó Yá’s lute — broken when Zhōng Zǐqī died, since no one else could understand the music — and Dèng’s self-preface inverts the topos: “the present world has no one of true ear, yet I alone play and do not cease — am I not a fool? But Bó Yá broke his lute and severed its strings on account of Zǐqī’s death; I have not yet met my Zǐqī, [so] how do I know whether he is dead or not? Therefore I preserve this.” The collection’s twenty-six pieces (Dèng’s zìbá says “more than sixty poems and prose pieces” — the verse juàn has been lost) include two ferocious LǎoZhuāng political treatises — Jūndào 君道 (“The Way of the Ruler,” resembling Xǔ Xíng’s “the ruler should plough alongside the people”) and Lìdào 吏道 (“The Way of the Clerk,” echoing the Dàodé jīng on smashing the dǒu and breaking the héng — i.e., abolishing measures of weight) — together with a Yuán Wúrén zhuàn 元無人傳 (a fictive biography “no man of the Yuán”), a famous biography of the Sòng-loyalist poet Xiè Áo 謝翺 (the Xiè Gāofù zhuàn), and prefaces to Zhōu Mì’s 周密 KR3i0036 Làjī jí and to Zhāng Shūxià’s 張叔夏 cí. The Sìkù editors group him among the principal post-1276 Hángzhōu yímín intellectual society — alongside Xiè Áo 謝翺 and Zhōu Mì 周密 — and identify Dèng’s tone as the most distinctly LǎoZhuāng of the three. The collection’s last three pieces (Chōngtiānguàn jì, Chāoránguàn jì, Qīngzhēn dàoyuàn bēi jì) are bibliographically marked as bǔyí (supplements) — recovered from stone-inscriptions rather than the author’s manuscript; the Qīngzhēn dàoyuàn bēi jì is dated Dàdé 4 (1300) and signed “Qiántáng Dèng Mù jì; Jíxián zhí xuéshì Zhào Mèngfǔ 趙孟頫 shūzì.”

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Bóyá qín, one juàn, was composed by Dèng Mù of the Sòng. Mù’s zì was Mùxīn, a man of Qiántáng. When the Sòng fell he did not take office. In Zhìyuán jǐhài (1299) he entered the Dòngxiāo [gōng], settled at the Chāorán Guǎn, and Shěn Jièshí 沈介石 fitted up for him a Báilù Shānfáng (White-Deer Mountain Cottage) in which he dwelt. Later, without illness, he passed away. Mù was on intimate terms with Xiè Áo 謝翺 and Zhōu Mì 周密 — both men of resistance-integrity and concealed traces. He had composed a biography for [Xiè] Áo and a preface for [Zhōu] Mì’s Làjī jí; the Áo biography expressing the warmest friendship. As Áo was about to die, Mù happened to be away on travel; Áo composed a poem with the lines: “XièBào blossoms have opened, mulberry leaves are even; Dàishèng [hoopoe] has settled, the medicinal herbs are plump — the Mountain-Man of the Nine Locks, has he returned or not?” — “Mountain Man of the Nine Locks” being Mù’s biéhào. His aspirations and disposition can be imagined.

[Zhōu] Mì wandered freely among mountains and waters and composed the Guǐxīn zázhì and other books, in which each recounts the causes of the Sòng’s fall, mostly tracing-back to Hán [Tuōzhòu] and Jiǎ [Sìdào] — bearing the “Shǔlí” poet’s sentiment of “those persons, what people [were they]?“. Áo’s “Xītái tòngkū jì” and other works are mostly impassioned and aggrieved, sounding the biànzhǐ note. Mù however — only in the Yùwū bì jì (Dwelling-house wall record) and Nìlǚ bì jì (Traveler’s-inn wall record), two pieces — slightly reveals the sentiment of “splendor dispersed and dissolved”; the rest has not a single word touching on rise-and-fall; yet in truth [he was] frustrated and quietly grieving, unable to release [his feelings] himself, [and] therefore poured forth in outside-the-world unbridled talk and primordial-antique remote discourses, the doctrinal core repeatedly engaging with the Two-Schools [Buddhism and Daoism].

His one piece Jūndào fairly resembles Xǔ Xíng’s “plough together” doctrine; his one piece Lìdào likewise resembles Lǎozǐ’s “smash the dǒu, break the héng” purport. Indeed, since the Sòng ruler and ministers had been roaming and feasting on lakes and mountains, the regulations and discipline grew muddled and minor, leading to ruin; thus he had cause to speak [as he did], unaware that his words had exceeded [propriety]. This collection was self-edited by Mù: all is voluminous, clear, and discriminating, without losing cleanliness — not what the late-Sòng people can attain. There is a self-preface at the front and a self-postscript at the rear, [explaining that] “knowing-ears are hard to meet, therefore I name it Bóyá’s Lute.” The postscript says: “poetry and prose more than sixty pieces” — [but] this base has only twenty-four prose pieces, with preface and postscript making twenty-six; presumably its one juàn of poetry has been lost.

At the end is also appended the Chōngtiānguàn jì, Chāoránguàn jì, Qīngzhēn dàoyuàn bēi jì — three pieces, titled Bǔyí (Supplement). And the Qīngzhēn dàoyuàn bēi jì end has “Dàdé 4, gēngzǐ, Qiántáng Dèng Mù jì; Jíxián zhí xuéshì Zhào Mèngfǔ shūzì” — by this we know later persons inserted [it] from a stone inscription, [that it] is not what the collection originally had. The self-postscript saying “I have composed prose in my lifetime not [only] this much” is one proof of this. Respectfully collated, eighth month of Qiánlóng 42 (1777). 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.

Abstract

Dèng Mù (CBDB 33896; conventional lifedates 1247–1306) is the principal Sòng-loyalist yǐnshì–philosopher of the post-1276 generation. Refusing Yuán recruitment, he attached himself in 1299 to the great Dòngxiāo gōng Daoist establishment in the Yúháng hills, where a network of yímín literati and Quánzhēn Daoist masters had concentrated. There he composed and self-edited the Bóyá qín and the substantial Dòngxiāo túzhì 洞霄圖志 KR4j0036 — the latter a topographical-religious gazetteer of the temple complex, organized in the model of a fāngzhì. The Bóyá qín prose contains the most pointed of all yímín-period radical political theory: the Jūndào opens with the assertion that “the ruler of antiquity was no different from the ploughman” (anticipating in some readings the seventeenth-century Míngyí dàifǎng lù of Huáng Zōngxī, who in fact echoes Dèng explicitly); the Lìdào attacks the institutional clerical apparatus as the proximate cause of dynastic decay. The biography of Xiè Áo (Xiè Gāofù zhuàn), preserving the moving deathbed verse on the “Mountain Man of the Nine Locks,” is one of the principal Yuán-period sources for Xiè’s life and for the Sòng-loyalist intellectual sociability of the Hángzhōu region. The fictive Yuán Wúrén zhuàn — “Biography of a man who is not from Yuán” — is, on the literal reading, a jiǎtuō of the Hán Yù / Sū Shì “zhuàn” parody type, and on the political reading, a refusal-to-name-the-dynasty manifesto. The composition window for the surviving pieces is essentially 1276–1306 (with the Qīngzhēn dàoyuàn bēi dated 1300). CBDB 19543 confirms 1247–1306. Wilkinson treats Dèng among the yímín political theorists (§31, LǎoZhuāng recovery in SòngYuán transition; §35, theories of rulership).

Translations and research

• Hé Zōng-měi 何宗美, Sòng-mò Yuán-chū yí-mín wén-rén qún-tǐ yán-jiū 宋末元初遺民文人群體研究 (Běijīng: Rén-mín chū-bǎn-shè, 2009), ch. 6 — Dèng Mù as the political theorist of the Dòng-xiāo yí-mín group.
• Liú Yùn-jūn 劉雲軍, “Dèng Mù Bó-yá qín zhèng-zhì sī-xiǎng yán-jiū” 鄧牧《伯牙琴》政治思想研究, Zhōng-guó zhé-xué shǐ 中國哲學史 2011, no. 3 — on the Jūn-dào and Lì-dào.
• Anne Cheng, Histoire de la pensée chinoise (Paris: Seuil, 1997), pp. 489–490 — places Dèng Mù in the Lǎo-Zhuāng recovery of the Sòng-Yuán transition.
• Wm. Theodore de Bary, Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince (Columbia UP, 1993) — explicitly cites Dèng Mù as the Sòng-Yuán precedent for Huáng Zōng-xī’s late-Míng radical critique.
• Quán Sòng wén vol. 358 collates Dèng’s prose against the present WYG base and the original 1304 zì-bá.

Other points of interest

The Jūndào and Lìdào of Bóyá qín are the most important SòngYuán precedents for the late-Míng / early-Qīng radical political critique of Huáng Zōngxī (Míngyí dàifǎng lù) and Tán Sìtóng (Rénxué). The Yuán Wúrén zhuàn is one of the most-anthologized single pieces of Sòng-loyalist jiǎtuō zhuàn prose. The appended Chāoránguàn jì and Qīngzhēn dàoyuàn bēi jì, with the latter’s calligraphy by Zhào Mèngfǔ 趙孟頫, document the Yuán-period rebuilding of the Hángzhōu temple complex and Zhào’s calligraphic practice in his Dàdé years.

Links

• WYG SKQS V1189.9, p501.
• CBDB person 33896 (Dèng Mù)
• Wikipedia, 鄧牧