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文心雕龍

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Text ID
KR4i0001
Date
496–502
Dynasty
梁

Wénxīn diāolóng 文心雕龍

The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons by 劉勰 (撰)

About the work

The Wénxīn diāolóng 文心雕龍, in fifty chapters arranged across ten juǎn, is the first and most systematic treatise on literature in the Chinese tradition. Composed by Liú Xié 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 522) at the very end of the Southern Qí (around 496–502, just before Liú entered Liáng service), it surveys the entire body of literary culture inherited from antiquity through the Six Dynasties: its sources in the Classics, its branching into thirty-three named genres, and the formal, prosodic, and psychological problems facing the writer. The book divides cleanly into a first half (chapters 1–25) on the cosmological foundations of literature and the genre system, and a second half (chapters 26–49) on style, technique, originality, decorum, and the reader; chapter 50, Xù zhì 序志, is a self-preface. Liú’s writing is exceptionally dense parallel prose (駢文 piánwén), and the title itself has resisted definitive translation — a single English convention, “the literary mind and the carving of dragons”, masks at least seven syntactic readings (cf. Wilkinson §3.1.6.6).

Tiyao

Wénxīn diāolóng, by Liú Xié of the Liáng. Xié’s zì was Yànhé 彥和; he was a native of Jǔ 莒 in Dōngguān 東莞. During the Tiānjiān 天監 reign (502–519) he served concurrently as Tōngshì shèrén of the Eastern Palace 東宮通事舍人, was promoted Bùbīng xiàowèi 歩兵校尉, and held the shèrén post as before; later he took religious vows as a shāmén and changed his name to Huìdì 慧地. His acts are entered in his biography in the Nán shǐ 南史. The chapters of the book from Yuán dào 原道 down to the twenty-fifth treat the institutions of literary form; the chapters from Shén sī 神思 through the next twenty-four treat the achieved and the inept in literary craft; together with the Xù zhì 序志, fifty chapters in all. According to the Xù zhì, [Liú says] “the upper section ends here, the lower section begins here”, and the work originally stood in only two juǎn, though the Suí shū Jīngjízhì 隋書經籍志 already records it in ten — clearly a later partition. The Shí xù 時序 chapter shows that the work was in fact completed under the Qí; that the present copy bears the rubric Liáng Tōngshì shèrén Liú Xié zhuàn 梁通事舍人劉勰撰 is a later restitution. From the Zhìzhèng yǐwèi edition cut at Jiāhé 嘉禾 (1355) down through five further printings of the Míng Hóngzhì, Jiājìng, and Wànlì periods, the Yǐnxiù 隱秀 chapter has been transmitted with a lacuna. At the end of the Míng, Qián Yǔnzhì 錢允治 of Chángshú 常熟 claimed to have obtained an Ruǎnhuáshān 阮華山 Sòng printing and supplied four hundred-odd missing characters from it. But his book appeared late and rests on no other corroboration; the diction does not match the rest of the chapter (Ǒu xīn tǔ dǎn 嘔心吐膽 looks lifted from Lǐ Hè’s 李賀小傳; Duàn suì liàn nián 鍛歳煉年 from the Liùyī shīhuà on Zhōu Pǔ 周朴; calling Bān Jī 班姫 a “common woman” 匹婦 from Zhōng Hóng’s 鍾嶸 Shīpǐn). Since Zhìzhèng is not so distant from the Sòng, it is unbelievable that not one Sòng impression should have survived to Yuán, only to surface three hundred years later in Míng hands; nor that none of the abundant Sòng impressions of that day should have made it into the imperial library complete. What Ruǎn Huāshān reports is presumably a forgery; Hé Chuò 何焯 and others trusted it in error. As for textual blunders, from Yáng Shèn 楊愼 and Zhū Móuluǎn 朱謀㙔 onward, correctors have followed one another, but not without arbitrary emendation: thus Āi lěi 哀誄 chapter, fù xiàn zhī shì 賦憲之諡, is everywhere “corrected” to yì dé 議德 — by analogy of fù 賦 to yì 議 and xiàn 憲 to dé 悳 (an old form of 德). But Wáng Yīnglín 王應麟’s Yùhǎi 玉海 quotes the Zhōushū shìfǎ 周書諡法 — “It was in the third month, when the moon began to wane, that Dàn the Duke of Zhōu and Wàng the Grand Duke, while assisting the succeeding king Fā, having read out the laws and received the captives in the field at Mù 牧, on the eve of the burial, devised the system of posthumous titles” — and notes that the Wénxīn diāolóng’s fù xiàn zhī shì derives from this. So the two characters are not corrupt: the ancients had already said so. By this example one sees how much arbitrary correction has been done elsewhere.

Abstract

The Wénxīn diāolóng is the foundational comprehensive treatise on literature in China. Liú Xié, an impoverished bachelor scholar of Dōngguān 東莞 raised under Buddhist patronage at the Dìnglín 定林 monastery of Jiànkāng 建康 by the monk Sēngyòu 僧祐, completed the book around the turn of the Qí–Liáng transition. Internal evidence in the Shí xù 時序 (chapter 45) — which surveys the literary history of every dynasty down to but not including the Liáng — places composition under the Qí (i.e. before 502), as the Sìkù editors observe; the post-502 attribution “of the Liáng” on the title page is later. The book opens with three programmatic chapters — Yuán dào 原道 (the cosmic origin of literature), Zhēng shèng 徵聖 (warranting it through the Sages), Zōng jīng 宗經 (its anchorage in the Classics) — followed by Zhèng wěi 正緯 on the apocrypha and Biàn sāo 辨騷 on the Chǔ cí; chapters 6–25 treat the named genres (shī, yuèfǔ, fù, sòng, zàn, zhù, méng, míng, zhēn, lěi, bēi, āi, diào, záwén, xié, yǐn, shǐzhuàn, zhūzǐ, lùn, shuō, zhàocè, xí, yí, fēngshàn, zhāng, biǎo, zòu, qǐ, yì, duì, shū, jì); chapters 26–49 are essays on the writer’s craft (shén sī “spiritual thought”, tǐ xìng “stylistic temperament”, fēng gǔ “wind-and-bone”, tōng biàn “continuity and change”, and so on). Chapter 50, Xù zhì, is Liú’s preface explaining his motivation: a vivid dream of carrying ritual vessels in the train of Confucius, which he took as a sign that he should devote himself to literature in service of the Classics.

The textual transmission is well-studied. The Suí shū Jīngjízhì already records it in ten juǎn; the work survived intact through Táng and was widely cited in Sòng shīhuà. The Yuán Zhìzhèng 至正 15 (1355) Jiāhé printing of Qián Wéishàn 錢惟善 is the earliest survival; five Míng printings followed during the Hóngzhì, Jiājìng, and Wànlì eras. The Yǐn xiù 隱秀 chapter has a lacuna of roughly four hundred characters in all transmitted recensions; the Míng Qián Yǔnzhì 錢允治 supplement claimed to derive from a Sòng Ālacute;n Huāshān printing is rejected as a late forgery already by the Sìkù editors and remains so judged. The most thorough modern variorum is Zhān Yīng 詹鍈, Wénxīn diāolóng yìzhèng 文心雕龍義證 (Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1989). Liú’s eventual ordination as the monk Huìdì 慧地 toward the end of his life is fixed by his biography in Liáng shū 50 and Nán shǐ 72, though those sources also report that he assisted Sēngyòu in cataloguing the Buddhist canon and editing translation prefaces — a connection that has prompted a long modern debate about Buddhist elements in the treatise (Mair 2001 contra more conservative readings).

Translations and research

  • Vincent Yu-chung Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Columbia, 1959; rev. CUHK Press, 1983; bilingual edition).
  • Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard, 1992), 183–298 — annotated translation of chapters 1–5 and 26–50 with critical commentary.
  • Yáng Guó-bīn 楊國斌, tr., Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2003), 2 vols., bilingual with Zhōu Zhèn-fǔ 周振甫’s modern Chinese rendering.
  • Siu-kit Wong, Allan Chung-hang Lo, and Kwong-tai Lam, tr., The Book of Literary Design (Hong Kong UP, 1999) — a smooth paraphrase.
  • Zhān Yīng 詹鍈, Wénxīn diāolóng yì-zhèng 文心雕龍義證, 3 vols. (Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1989) — variorum edition, the most comprehensive Chinese reference.
  • Zhōu Zhèn-fǔ 周振甫, Wénxīn diāolóng cídiǎn 文心雕龍辭典 (Zhōnghuá, 1996).
  • Cai Zong-qi et al., eds., A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin Diaolong (Stanford, 2001).
  • Antje Richter, “Wenxin diaolong”, in Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (IEAS, Berkeley, 2015).
  • Qī Liáng-dé 戚良德, Wénxīn diāolóng-xué fēnlèi suǒyǐn 文心雕龍學分類索引 (Shànghǎi gǔjí, 2005) — bibliography of 6,517 Lóng-xué publications, 1907–2005.

Other points of interest

The work has spawned an entire modern subfield called Lóngxué 龍學 — by Qī Liángdé’s 2005 count more than six thousand books and articles. The Yǐn xiù chapter lacuna and the rejection of the Qián Yǔnzhì supplement is the most famous textual crux. Liú’s chapter 26, Shén sī 神思 (“Spirit-Thinking”), and chapter 28, Fēng gǔ 風骨 (“Wind-and-Bone”), are the loci classici for two of the most cited concepts in subsequent Chinese poetics. The Buddhist context of Liú’s milieu at Dìnglínsì has prompted Mair (2001) and others to read parts of the treatise (e.g. Yuán dào) against Mahāyāna scholastic categories, though this remains contested.

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