Shùxué nèipiān 述學內篇
Inner Chapters of (My) Account of Learning by 汪中 (撰)
About the work
The principal collected prose of 汪中 Wāng Zhōng (1745–1794, zì Róngfǔ 容甫, native of Jiāngdū 江都, Yángzhōu, Jiāngsū) — the great late-Qiánlóng Yángzhōu gǔwén prose master and kǎozhèng polymath, regarded by 阮元 Ruǎn Yuán and the Yángzhōu school as the single greatest prose-stylist of the eighteenth century, equal or superior to Tóngchéng’s 姚鼐 KR4f0052. The Shùxué (“Account of Learning”) is organized as nèipiān (3 juan, this work) and wàipiān (1 juan, separately catalogued) — a Zhuāngzǐ-style framing in which the nèi are the carefully-finished and intellectually-central essays and the wài the more occasional pieces. The nèipiān contains Wāng’s most famous essays: the Āi yánchuán wén 哀鹽船文 (a fù-style lament for the victims of the 1769 Yízhēng salt-fleet fire on the Yángzǐ, perhaps the most celebrated late-Qīng gǔwén composition); the Guǎnglíng duì 廣陵對 (essay-dialogue on the historical geography of Yángzhōu); the Huánghèlóu míng 黃鶴樓銘 (inscription on the Yellow Crane Tower); the Zhōuguān zhēngwén 周官徵文 (philological-historical recovery of the Zhōu lǐ); the Zuǒshì chūnqiū shìyí 左氏春秋釋疑; the Xúnqīngzǐ tōnglùn 荀卿子通論 (a foundational Qīng rehabilitation of 荀子 Xúnzǐ, who had been marginalized by Sòng Lǐxué); the Jiǎ Yì Xīn shū xù 賈誼新書敘; and the Shì sānjiǔ 釋三九 (“Explanation of ‘Three’ and ‘Nine’” — a famous philological essay on the ancient use of these numerical terms as conventional rather than literal). Each essay is brief, densely allusive, and intellectually self-sufficient.
Prefaces
The Shùxué nèipiān opens with a preface by Wāng Zhōng’s close friend and zhīyīn 王念孫 Wáng Niànsūn (1744–1832, the great Gāoyóu philologist, author of the Guǎngyǎ shūzhèng), dated Jiāqìng èrshí nián suì zài yǐhài zhèngyuè zhī qī rì 嘉慶二十年歲在乙亥正月之七日 (seventh day of the first month, yǐhài = 1815, Jiāqìng 20), signed “Gāoyóu Wáng Niànsūn xù, shí nián qīshí yǒu èr” 高郵王念孫敘時年七十有二. Wáng Niànsūn writes that he and Wāng Zhōng had been intimate scholarly companions for nearly forty years; that while Wáng Niànsūn himself worked in xùngǔ wénzì shēngyīn zhī xué (philology, paleography, phonology), Wāng Zhōng’s strength lay in jīngshǐ tǎolùn (synthesizing critical inquiry into Classics and histories). Wáng Niànsūn confesses yú zhuō yú wéncí ér Róngfǔ dànyǎ zhī cái kuàyuè jìndài 余拙於文詞而容甫澹雅之才跨越近代 — “I am clumsy at literary composition, while Róngfǔ’s pure-elegant talent surpasses the recent generations.” Wáng Niànsūn relates the editorial occasion: in jiǎxū (1814) Wāng Zhōng’s son 汪喜孫 Wāng Xǐsūn, having come to Běijīng for the Lǐbù shì (metropolitan examination — he passed in 1814), brought to Wáng Niànsūn the Shùxué manuscripts (printed and unprinted), asking for a preface. Wáng Niànsūn discusses Wāng Zhōng’s prose: hé HànWèi JìnSòng zuòzhě ér zhù chéng yījiā zhī yán 合漢魏晉宋作者而鑄成一家之言 (synthesizing Han-Wei and Jin-Song writers, casting a single-school discourse); the Āi yánchuán wén, Guǎnglíng duì, and Huánghèlóu míng are dāng shì suǒ zuì chēngsòng (the most acclaimed of the age). On Wāng Zhōng as a person: xiào yú qīn, dǔ yú péngyǒu, jí è rú fēng, ér lè dào rén shàn 孝於親、篤於朋友、疾惡如風、而樂道人善 — filial, friendship-devoted, swift in hatred of evil, glad to praise others’ good. Wáng Niànsūn invokes the Lúnyǔ’s zhí, liàng, duōwén 直諒多聞 (“upright, sincere, broadly learned”) as ancient ideal friend, applied to Wāng Zhōng.
Abstract
Wāng Zhōng’s career is one of the most striking in the eighteenth century. He was a zhūshēng throughout his life (failing the metropolitan exams repeatedly) but was nonetheless treated by the Yángzhōu kǎozhèng circle as a peer of the senior scholars. Native of Jiāngdū, born into poverty (his widowed mother 鄒氏 Madame Zōu raised him alone after his father’s early death); supported in his youth as a bookseller’s clerk in Yángzhōu, which gave him access to the famous Wénhuìgé 文匯閣 Sìkù depository and the major Yángzhōu private collections. By the late 1760s he had assembled a working library and a coterie of patrons (the Mǎ 馬 brothers and others), and his Āi yánchuán wén (composed 1770 on the salt-fleet disaster) made him famous overnight. From 1770 until his death in 1794 he produced a steady stream of philological-historical essays — circulated in manuscript and printed piecemeal — that constitute the documentary core of the Yángzhōu school.
The intellectual signature of Wāng Zhōng’s work is the willingness to take seriously the pre-Hàn philosophical and historical tradition outside of the narrow Sòng Lǐxué canon. His Xúnqīngzǐ tōnglùn is the most important pre-modern Chinese rehabilitation of Xúnzǐ as a primary philosophical authority, breaking the 韓愈 / 朱熹 consensus that Xúnzǐ was a heterodox successor of Mencius; the essay opened the way for nineteenth-century Xúnzǐ scholarship. His Mòzǐ xù 墨子序 (in this collection) is the principal Qīng rehabilitation of 墨子 Mòzǐ, decades before 孫詒讓 Sūn Yíràng’s Mòzǐ xián gǔ. His Jiǎ Yì Xīn shū xù defends the authenticity of 賈誼 Jiǎ Yì’s Xīn shū against eighteenth-century skeptics. Wāng’s habit of giving major pre-Hàn texts their own xù (project-introduction) and tōnglùn (synoptic essay) became a Yáng-zhōu-school methodological signature, taken up later by 焦循 Jiāo Xún and 阮元 Ruǎn Yuán.
Wāng Zhōng’s prose itself is a touchstone for late-Qīng gǔwén discussion: Tóngchéng critics typically held it in higher esteem than they would admit in print, since Wāng’s style — piánsàn hé liú 駢散合流 (parallel and prose-style combined) — flowed more easily across the piánwén / gǔwén divide than the strictly Tóngchéng program allowed.
Composition window: c. 1770 (the Āi yánchuán wén) through 1794 (his death). The 1815 imprint by Wāng Xǐsūn under Wáng Niànsūn’s auspices is the editio princeps of the unified 3+1-juan Shùxué. The SBCK reproduces this recension. (The companion Shùxué wàipiān 述學外篇 has its own catalog id; the Róngfǔ xiānshēng yíshī KR4f0061 is the poetry collection.)
Translations and research
David B. Honey, Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology (American Oriental Society, 2001) — discusses Wāng Zhōng’s Shì sān-jiǔ as an early specimen of philological reasoning.
Liú Wén-xìng 劉文興, Wāng Róng-fǔ wén tóng-lùn 汪容甫文通論 (in Wāng Zhōng quán-jí, ed. Tián Hàn-yún 田漢雲, Yangzhou: Guangling Shushe, 2005).
Tián Hàn-yún 田漢雲 ed., Wāng Zhōng quán jí 汪中全集 (Yangzhou: Guangling Shushe, 2005) — the standard modern critical edition.
Sūn Yí-ràng 孫詒讓, Mò-zǐ xián gǔ 墨子閒詁 (1893) — explicitly continues Wāng Zhōng’s Mò-zǐ rehabilitation program.
ECCP 813–815 (Hellmut Wilhelm).
Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §28.7 (Qīng gǔwén prose); §66 (Yáng-zhōu kǎo-zhèng).
Other points of interest
The Āi yánchuán wén 哀鹽船文 — the lament for the salt-fleet that caught fire near Yízhēng 儀徵 in the autumn of Qiánlóng 34 (1769), drowning over 130 victims — became almost immediately the canonical example of late-Qīng fù-style commemorative writing. The piece was singled out by 杭世駿 Háng Shìjùn (Qiántáng) as evidence that Wāng Zhōng, although a zhūshēng without examination success, had restored to gǔwén prose the qí (essential breath) it had lost since the Sòng masters. It is the basis on which Wāng was admitted to the late-Qiánlóng Yángzhōu salon despite his low formal social rank.
Links
- Wikidata Q11149230 (Wang Zhong)
- ECCP 813–815
- Wilkinson 2018, §28.7, §66
- CBDB id 65767 (1745–1794)