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本事詩

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Text ID
KR4i0005
Date
886–886
Dynasty
唐

Běnshì shī 本事詩

Poems and Their Backgrounds by 孟棨 (撰)

About the work

The Běnshì shī 本事詩 is a one-juǎn anthology of short prose anecdotes, each ending in a poem (or pair of poems) whose composition the anecdote purports to explain. Compiled by the late-Táng official Mèng Qǐ 孟棨 (zì Chūzhōng 初中) during the Xīzōng 僖宗 court’s flight to Xīngyuán 興元 in Guāngqǐ 2 / 886, the book is organized into seven thematic divisions: qíng gǎn 情感 (“feelings of love”), shì gǎn 事感 (“affecting events”), gāo yì 高逸 (“lofty detachment”), yuàn fèn 怨憤 (“grievance and indignation”), zhēng yì 徵異 (“portentous strangeness”), zhēng jiù 徵咎 (“portents of misfortune”), and cháo xì 嘲戲 (“mockery and jest”). All but two of the cases (the Lèchāng princess 樂昌公主 mirror-and-poem story from the ChénSuí transition, and a piece concerning Liú Yù 劉裕 of the Sòng) are Táng material. The book is the foundation of the běnshì sub-genre of Chinese poetic anecdote and remained an indispensable source for Táng shīhuà through the entire later tradition; many famous Táng anecdotes (Cuī Hù 崔護 of “Rén miàn táo huā 人面桃花” fame, Sòng Zhīwèn 宋之問 buying a couplet from a monk, Lǐ Bái’s 李白 Fànluǒ shāntóu mocking Dù Fǔ, the Hán Hóng 韓翃 “Liǔ shì 柳氏” reunion story) take their canonical form in the Běnshì shī.

Tiyao

Běnshì shī, by Mèng Qǐ of the Táng. Qǐ’s zì was Chūzhōng 初中; his rank and origin are not preserved. Wáng Dìngbǎo’s 王定保 Táng zhāi yán says of him: “Qǐ moved in and out of the examination rolls for more than thirty years; he was somewhat senior to the lesser Wèi Duke (i.e., Wèi Bǎohéng 韋保衡).” On the day of the fàngbǎng 放榜 he “went out for a courtesy round” — meaning he had been graded under Cuī Háng 崔沆. In the Hán Hóng 韓翃 entry of the book he writes “in the Kāichéng era I was relieved at Wúzhōu 梧州”, but his Wúzhōu rank is not known. The Xīn Tángshū Yìwénzhì gives his name as Mèng Qǐ 孟啟, and Máo Jìn’s Jīndài mìshū follows that — but the citation traditions everywhere give 棨, and the Táng-history reading is probably an error.

The book has Qǐ’s own preface dated Guāngqǐ 2 / 886. The preface says: “When the imperial carriage was at Bāozhōng …” — that is, the book was made during the Xīzōng court’s removal to Xīngyuán. It collects across the ages writers’ yuánqíng (occasion-and-feeling) compositions and gives their backstories. It divides them into seven categories: qíng gǎn, shì gǎn, gāo yì, yuàn fèn, zhēng yì, zhēng jiù, cháo xì. Of all that is recorded, only two pieces are pre-Táng (the Lèchāng princess and the Sòng Wǔdì stories); the rest are Táng. Among them is a poem of “a scholar replying for his wife”: Wéi Hú’s 韋縠 Cáitiáo jí attributes the same to Gě Yāér 葛鵶兒, who lived close to the period — clearly a divergent oral tradition. The Qiángwēi huā luò 薔薇花落 poem is in fact Jiǎ Dǎo’s 賈島 satire of Péi Dù 裴度; Qǐ’s record gives no occasion-story, which looks like transmission damage. The “Fàn luǒ shān tóu” 飯顆山頭 poem (Lǐ Bái’s 李白 supposed mocking of Dù Fǔ at Rice-Mound) has been called a fabrication by critics — but Táng poetic anecdota are largely preserved by virtue of works like this, and discussers of the art cannot dispense with it. Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Dúshū zhì records that a Wǔdài writer Chǔchángzǐ 處常子 made a sequel in two juǎn on Qǐ’s same plan, divided into the same seven sections, all Táng material; it is now lost, only Qǐ’s book surviving.

Abstract

Mèng Qǐ’s preface — preserved at the head of the Sìkù recension — frames the work in classical xù fashion: the great poetry of the age, he says, arises from real circumstance, and to read a poem without its běnshì (background occasion) is to lose half its meaning. This is the first programmatic statement of the běnshì approach in Chinese poetics and one of the founding doctrines of shīhuà. The book proper supplies seventy-odd cases (the exact count varies slightly across recensions). The most influential are the love-and-separation tales of section one: Cuī Hù’s 崔護 “Rén miàn táo huā xiāng yìng hóng 人面桃花相映紅” (face-and-blossom) — Mèng’s version is the source for nearly all later retellings, including the Yuán dramatic adaptations; Hán Hóng’s 韓翃 reunion with the abducted Liǔ shì 柳氏 — basis for the yuànfèn drama Liǔ shì zhuàn 柳氏傳; and the Lèchāng princess’s 樂昌公主 split-mirror reunion with Xú Déyán 徐德言 — the locus classicus of the “pò jìng chóng yuán 破鏡重圓” topos. Section three, gāo yì, preserves the most famous version of the Lǐ Bái–Dù Fǔ rice-mound 飯顆山 anecdote (often regarded as apocryphal, though Mèng records it unhesitatingly).

Transmission. The earliest surviving recension is the late-Sòng Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海 edition (Zuǒ Guī 左圭, 1273). Máo Jìn’s 毛晉 Jīndài mìshū recension follows the Xīn Tángshū reading of the author’s name (Mèng Qǐ 孟啟 rather than 孟棨), an emendation rejected by the Sìkù. The Wǔdài sequel by Chǔchángzǐ 處常子 (recorded in Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì) is lost. The Běnshì shī is the principal source for many of the most-cited Táng poems and stories; Robert Joe Cutter and Anne Birrell have studied its transmission in detail.

The běnshì form Mèng established was taken up by later anthologists. Most directly, the Sòng Jì Yǒugōng 計有功 Tángshī jìshì 唐詩紀事 KR4i0025 (c. 1144) systematized the format across the entire Táng corpus. The Sòng shīhuà tradition — Liùyī shīhuà KR4i0006, Xù shīhuà KR4i0007, and on — also draws explicitly from Mèng’s anecdotes.

Translations and research

  • Robert Joe Cutter, “Saying Goodbye: The Transformations of the Dirge in Early Medieval China”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 109.2 (1989): 211–224 — uses the Běn-shì shī incidentally but extensively.
  • Anne Birrell, Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China (Honolulu: UH Press, 1988; rev. 1993) — discussion of the yuè-fǔ anecdotes that the Běn-shì shī preserved.
  • Manling Luo, Literati Storytelling in Late Medieval China (Seattle: UW Press, 2015), 100–135 — extended discussion of the Běn-shì shī as a key source for the late-Táng literati-anecdote tradition.
  • Suzanne Cahill, “Pien Tung-hsüan: A Taoist Woman Saint of the Mid-T’ang Dynasty”, in Taoism (Brill, 1995) — uses Mèng’s zhēng yì entries.
  • Lǐ Jiàn-guó 李劍國, Táng Wǔ-dài zhì-guài chuán-qí xù lù 唐五代志怪傳奇敘錄, 2 vols. (Nán-kāi dà-xué chū-bǎn-shè, 1993) — bibliographical entry on the Běn-shì shī and the lost Chǔ-cháng-zǐ sequel.
  • Wáng Mèng-ōu 王夢鷗, Táng-rén xiǎo-shuō yán jiū 唐人小說研究, 4 vols. (Yì-wén yìn-shū-guǎn, 1971–1978) — important for the relation between the Běn-shì shī and chuán-qí.
  • Yáng Mǔ 楊牧, Lǐ Bái yán-jiū 李白研究 (Hóng-fàn shū-diàn, 1987) — discusses the Fàn-luǒ shān anecdote at length.

Other points of interest

The Běnshì shī is the locus classicus for the most-cited Cuī Hù Rén miàn táo huā 人面桃花 quatrain and for the pò jìng chóng yuán (split-mirror reunion) topos. The seven-category structure proved enormously influential: most subsequent běnshì collections — including the lost Wǔdài Xù běnshì shī by Chǔchángzǐ — kept the same seven-fold division. The Lǐ Bái Fànluǒ shāntóu anecdote (in gāo yì) is the principal source for the persistent popular notion that Lǐ Bái and Dù Fǔ were on cool poetic terms; modern scholarship is split on whether the anecdote reflects historical fact.

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