環溪詩話

Huánxī shīhuà 環溪詩話

Poetry-Talks from the Ring Creek by Anonymous (撰)

About the work

The Huánxī shīhuà 環溪詩話, in one juǎn, is an anonymously compiled Southern-Sòng shīhuà recording the critical opinions and verse of Wú Hàng 吳沆 (zì Déyuǎn 德遠; hào Huánxī 環溪, “Ring Creek”). The compiler is identified in the body of the text as a member of Wú’s later family — not a disciple — and refers to Wú reverentially as “the late Huánxī” (先環溪). The book preserves Wú’s poetic doctrine of one ancestor and two patriarchs (yī zǔ èr zōng 一祖二宗): Dù Fǔ as zǔ, with Lǐ Bái and Hán Yù as the two zōng, and Huáng Tíngjiān as an occasional auxiliary model. Wú himself was the author of a remarkable corpus of works — the Sānfén xùnyì 三墳訓義, Yì xuánjī 易璇璣, Lúnyǔ fā wēi 論語發微, Yì lǐ tú shuō 易禮圖說, Lǎozǐ jiě 老子解, and the Huánxī jí 環溪集 — of which only the Yì xuánjī (already entered in the Sìkù under Jīngbù) survives. The shīhuà is thus, for nearly all of Wú’s intellectual output, the principal surviving witness.

Tiyao

This book gives no compiler’s name. Throughout it appraises the poetry of Wú Hàng and reports Wú’s own statements on poetry. At the head it refers to Hàng as “the late Huánxī”; in a self-annotation it adds, “This collection was not edited by disciples, who would only have called the master Huánxī — it is the work of his later kin, recording from memory.” Zhào Yǔshí 趙與峕’s Bīntuì lù calls the book Wú Déyuǎn’s Huánxī shīhuà and seems to think it Wú’s own composition — this is wrong. Hàng’s writings include the Sānfén xùnyì, Yì xuánjī, Lúnyǔ fā wēi, Yì lǐ tú shuō, Lǎozǐ jiě, and the Huánxī jí; today only the Xuánjī survives, already entered in the bibliography. His Classical learning has substance; and his poetry, too, is energetic and individual, not constrained by the fashion of the day. The main doctrine is: Dù Fǔ is the one ancestor, Lǐ Bái and Hán Yù are the two patriarchs; occasionally Huáng Tíngjiān’s mode is also produced, but it is not the central commitment.

In an exchange with Zhāng Yòuchéng on a Dù Fǔ couplet — “Banners warm in the day, dragons and serpents move; / Heaven-and-earth, day-and-night, float” 旌旗日暖龍蛇動, 乾坤日夜浮 — Wú said: “the first line is a sentence that names five things; the second is a sentence that can fill the world.” (The first entry, under “Sūn Shàngshū”, has the note: “In what the Huánxī master discussed with others, only the official titles are used; he did not dare cite names; hence the Bīntuì lù does not know Zhāng Yòuchéng’s personal name. We here keep the original wording.“) The Bīntuì lù once attacked this, saying: if abundance of things in a line is to count as craft, then one would have to write like Chén Wújǐ [Chén Shīdào]‘s “Jiāo, guì, nán, lú, fēng, zuò, zhāng” 椒檜枬櫨楓柞樟 (Note: this Chén Shīdào line is actually based on the Bǎiliángtái shī “Pípá, jú, lì, táo, lǐ, méi” 枇杞橘栗桃李梅 — not Chén’s own creation. That Zhào Yǔshí did not quote the Hàn poem but cited Chén’s may be because the Hàn poem has only six things, not seven) before one could be peerless — and Dù Fǔ himself would not be unique. If “Heaven-and-earth, day-and-night, float” counts as a sentence “filling the world”, then any sentence with “Heaven and Earth”, “Universe”, or “the Four Seas” in it would do as well — what is unique about this one? Zhāng Fù 張輔 liked Sīmǎ Qiān for narrating three thousand years in five hundred thousand words; Zhāng Yòuchéng likes Dù Fǔ for naming five things in one line — these are tastes of the same kind. — Yǔshí’s thrust is justly aimed: Sòng poetry was generally vague and slack, so Wú put up the doctrine “use solid characters and you will have strength”; but he held the doctrine to extremes, slipping into one-sidedness. The pair-instances he gives — bái jiān huáng lǐ 白間黃裏, shā qīng shēng bái 殺青生白, sù wáng huáng dì 素王黃帝, xiǎo wū dà bái 小烏大白, zhú mǎ mù niú 竹馬木牛, yù shān yín hǎi 玉山銀海 — are also fussy and trivial, somewhat off from the high mode. The verse he wrote himself — “the grass clouds the flower-path, vexing tending and rest; / the water beats the lotus pond, slighting season and propriety” 草迷花徑煩調䕶, 水汨蓮塘欠節宣 — pretends to be in the Yùzhāng [Huáng Tíngjiān] manner, but only catches its weakest side; this is not at all a model. Yet the method of taking is high; the basic doctrine remains right. Among Sòng shīhuà, one should not fail to preserve a copy as one school. Zhào Yǔniú 趙與虤’s Yúshūtáng shīhuà KR4i0038 also praises Wú’s Guānhuò poem: “the new moon’s gleam shines and stirs; / the yellow clouds slowly draw back” 新月輝輝動, 黃雲漸漸收, as the very pinnacle of xíngróng.

Abstract

The Huánxī shīhuà is a one-juǎn document of the poetic theory and verse of Wú Hàng (zì Déyuǎn, hào Huánxī), a mid-twelfth-century scholar from Jiāngxī. Wú was a Classicist and Yìjīng commentator who held no significant office and made his reputation locally; his polymath output — six titles across the Yì, Lúnyǔ, Lǎozǐ, and ritual studies — is otherwise nearly entirely lost. The book’s compiler is anonymous and identifies himself as a member of the Wú family (“not a disciple”) writing after Wú’s death; the composition window therefore falls between Wú’s death (mid-twelfth century, c. 1155) and the early-thirteenth-century reception in Zhào Yǔshí’s Bīntuì lù and Zhào Yǔniú’s Yúshūtáng shīhuà (c. 1230s), i.e. roughly 1148–1200. The catalog meta lists the work as anonymous (闕名), which is correct: even the Sìkù editors could not identify the compiler.

The book’s theoretical contribution is concentrated in three doctrines: (i) yī zǔ èr zōng 一祖二宗 — Dù Fǔ as ancestor, Lǐ Bái and Hán Yù as the two patriarchs of style — a formulation that anticipates Yán Yǔ’s 嚴羽 genealogy in the Cānglàng shīhuà by some decades; (ii) duō yòng shí zì zé jiàn 多用實字則健 — “the more concrete-noun characters you use, the more sinewy the line” — which proved an influential but controversial counsel (Zhào Yǔshí’s Bīntuì lù immediately attacked it as a recipe for trivial enumeration); (iii) the celebration of the “one-line-five-things” structure in Dù Fǔ, which the Sìkù editors locate within the broader Sòng aesthetic of shū wèi 疏味 (sparse, fragrant savor) but criticize as mechanistic. Despite these reservations, the Sìkù editors conclude that “the method of taking is high, the basic doctrine remains right” and preserve the work.

The book’s transmission was through the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn — like Zhāng Jiè’s Suìhántáng shīhuà KR4i0021, it had nearly vanished before the Sìkù editors recovered it. The Sìkù recension is the only premodern complete text. The book’s main subsequent reception is via the two Zhào critics: Zhào Yǔshí, who attacked it on the doctrinal points cited above, and Zhào Yǔniú, who picked out Wú’s Guān huò couplet for praise; both attentions are characteristic Southern-Sòng responses to Sòng-poetics extremism.

Translations and research

• Guō Shào-yǔ 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), 120–123 — the principal modern bibliographical study, including a full reconstruction of Wú Hàng’s lost works and the family circumstances of the anonymous compiler.
• Wú Wén-zhì 吳文治 et al., comp., Sòng shīhuà quán biān 宋詩話全編 (Jiāng-sū guǎn-líng, 1998), vol. 4.
• Zhāng Bó-wěi 張伯偉, Quán Sòng shīhuà jiào kǎo 全宋詩話校考 (Zhōnghuá, 2009).
• Wú Hàng’s surviving Yì xuán-jī 易璇璣 is at KR1a0086 in the Kanripo corpus.

Other points of interest

The book is one of the earliest shīhuà to formulate the yī zǔ èr zōng genealogy of Táng poetry, with Dù Fǔ as ancestor — a formulation that becomes standard in Yán Yǔ and after. The anonymous author’s pseudo-discipular tone provides a rare glimpse into the way the Sòng provincial Classical scholar’s jiāxué tradition handled the transmission of poetic doctrine. The Zhào Yǔshí counter-polemic in the Bīntuì lù is the most extensive single Sòng-on-Sòng shīhuà critique on record and a valuable specimen of the Southern-Sòng critical conversation.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikipedia 環溪詩話