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文則

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Text ID
KR4i0031
Date
1170–1190
Dynasty
宋

Wén zé 文則

Rules of Literary Composition by 陳騤 (撰)

About the work

The Wén zé 文則, in two juǎn (an upper and a lower, with sixty-three numbered items in the upper and a comparable number in the lower), is the earliest comprehensive treatise on Chinese prose rhetoric — what would later be called xiūcíxué 修辭學. Composed by the Southern-Sòng statesman Chén Kuí 陳騤 (1128–1203) during his years out of office, the book systematically anatomizes the literary techniques of the Six Classics and the early masters — sentence rhythm, parallelism, brevity, the figures of comparison (bǐ 比 and its ten sub-types), the structure of opening and closing, the relation of cí 辭 to zhì 質, the use and avoidance of rhyme in prose, the careful handling of vocative particles. It is the first Chinese work to abstract literary technique from the classics as a normative fǎ 法 (“rule”), explicitly modelled on the way Liú Zhījī 劉知幾 had abstracted historiographical principle in his Shǐ tōng 史通 (KR2k0001). The Wén zé has accordingly been treated by twentieth-century Chinese rhetoricians (especially Chén Wàngdào 陳望道, Xiūcíxué fāfán 修辭學發凡, 1932) as the foundational treatise of the discipline. Chén Kuí’s own preface explains that the title means rules for himself (自則), not rules he claims to impose on others.

Tiyao

Wén zé, in two juǎn, by Chén Kuí of the Sòng. Kuí also wrote the NánSòng guǎngé lù 南宋館閣錄 (KR2l0005); already entered in the catalogue. As the Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽 cites it, Zhì Yú’s 摯虞 Wénzhāng liúbié lùn 文章流別論 has it that the four-syllable form of ancient verse is exemplified in “the egrets fly fluttering” (振鷺于飛) — the Hàn ancestral and suburban hymns chiefly use it; the five-syllable form is exemplified in “who says the sparrow has no horn? how then has he bored through my house?” (誰謂雀無角，何以穿我屋) — yuèfǔ uses it; the six-syllable form in “let me ladle from yonder bronze pitcher” (我姑酌彼金罍) — yuèfǔ also uses it; the seven-syllable form in “calling, calling, the yellow bird perches on the mulberry” (交交黃鳥止于桑) — used in farcical and entertainers’ songs; the nine-syllable form in “now I draw long from the flowing rain-pool and pour it into yonder vessel” (泂酌彼行潦，挹彼注茲) — which does not enter song and ballad, and is rarely composed. The syntactic principles of literary writing should be referred back to the Six Classics: there is their authority. Liú Zhījī’s Shǐ tōng, in its chapter on Mónǐ 模擬 (imitation), distinguishes “same outward face, different inner heart” from “different outward face, same inner heart” with particular precision — and there too one does not seek mere sentence-rules in the Six Classics. The literary forms Kuí lays out in this book, while taking in many schools, are all in their main thrust set up by reference to the Classics. That he does not have his reader root every utterance in the canon and refine literary thought from there, but contents himself with weighing the increase or decrease of characters, is to chase the trivial and lose the root. His sorting into categories is also a bit fussy and over-tight, an instance of attending to the petty and missing the great. Still, to take one’s standard from the sacred books is in the end better than imitating the tunes of later writers; what he has signalled is to be illumined by the reader himself in living use. One must neither bind the book by treating its rules as fixed law, nor blame the book for being a set of fixed laws. (Imperial editorial colophon: presented after collation, ninth month, Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, by zǒngzuǎn officials Jǐ Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; zǒngjiào Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.)

Abstract

The Wén zé belongs to the high middle of Chén Kuí’s career, between his Privy Counsellor service in the 1180s and his final fall to Hán Tuōzhòu in 1196; the book is not precisely datable, but the self-preface presents it as the matured fruit of “one whole cycle of years” (一星終 — twelve years) of free reading following his zhuàngyuán in 1154. A plausible composition window is the 1170s–80s, when he held a string of provincial and metropolitan posts. The book is divided into an upper and a lower juǎn, with the items running consecutively as 上一 through 上六十三 and continuing in the lower; the Sìkù recension preserves this two-juǎn division. Chén’s overall plan is to abstract from the Six Classics, the Zuǒ zhuàn 左傳, Guóyǔ 國語, Zhuāngzǐ, Mèngzǐ, Xúnzǐ, the Lǎozǐ, and the Chǔ cí a systematic typology of prose technique: the opening item, “the Yì’s diction resembles the Shī’s, the Shī’s the Shū’s, the Shū’s the Lǐ’s” (易文似詩，詩文似書，書文似禮), with worked illustration of how a Zhōngfú hexagram line-judgement could be transposed into the Daya without notice — sets out a programmatic interpenetration of the canonical genres. Subsequent items treat the principle of brevity (簡); the doctrine that “writing carries the deed, diction is what makes it visible” (文以著言); the difference between jiǎn 簡 (concise) and shū 踈 (sparse-and-defective); rhymed and unrhymed prose; the eight functions of opening particles (fācí 發辭); the ten varieties of figural comparison (bǐ 比) — zhíbǐ 直比 (direct), yǐnbǐ 隱比 (concealed), léibǐ 類比, jièbǐ 借比, duìbǐ 對比, bóbǐ 博比, and so on — and an inventory of devices for ending an essay. This catalog of bǐ 比 in the lower juǎn is the earliest such typology in Chinese, and the principal reason Chén Wàngdào and twentieth-century rhetoricians located the origin of Chinese rhetorical theory here.

Transmission is straightforward. The Wén zé was already cited under that title in the late Sòng (e.g., by Wáng Yīnglín 王應麟 in the Yùhǎi 玉海) and in the Yuán (by Chén Lì 陳櫟); it was printed in the Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海 of Zuǒ Guī 左圭 (Xiánchún 9 = 1273), in the Míng Mòhǎi jīnhú 墨海金壺, and again in the Qīng Sìkù quánshū from a copy submitted by the Jiāngsū provincial administration; the Sìkù editors’ tíyào (translated above) is sharply critical, taking the book to task for being more concerned with surface increase-and-decrease of characters than with the Confucian moral root, but acknowledges it as superior to mere imitation of “the tunes of later writers”. The Sìkù verdict has been overturned in the modern reception: as Liú Yúnshēng 劉雲生, Wén zé yánjiū 文則研究 (BāShǔ shūshè, 2009) and Lǐ Yùpíng 李玉平 (Wén zé jiàozhù 文則校注, BāShǔ, 2007) demonstrate, the Wén zé anticipates by some seven centuries — in concept though not always in vocabulary — the rhetorical categories that Western philology would only formalize in the nineteenth century.

Translations and research

  • Chén Wàngdào 陳望道, Xiūcí-xué fāfán 修辭學發凡 (Shànghǎi: Dàjiāng shū-pù, 1932; rev. Fùdàn UP, 1976) — the foundational modern Chinese rhetoric, which identifies the Wén zé as the historical origin of the discipline.
  • Liú Yúnshēng 劉雲生, Wén zé yánjiū 文則研究 (Chéngdū: Bā-Shǔ shū-shè, 2009) — full-length monograph, the standard modern study.
  • Lǐ Yùpíng 李玉平, Wén zé jiào-zhù 文則校注 (Bā-Shǔ shū-shè, 2007) — collated and annotated modern edition.
  • Zhōu Zhènfǔ 周振甫, Wén zé zhù-yì 文則注譯 (Rénmín wénxué, 1988) — annotated translation into modern Chinese.
  • Andrew H. Plaks, “Where the Lines Meet: Parallelism in Chinese and Western Literatures,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 10 (1988): 43–60 — uses the Wén zé as a major Chinese-language point of reference.
  • Christoph Harbsmeier, “Chinese Rhetoric,” T’oung Pao 85 (1999): 114–126.

Other points of interest

The Wén zé is one of the very few pre-modern Chinese works that defines and exemplifies the figure of bǐ 比 (“comparison”) with the explicitness Western rhetoricians give to similitudo. Chén Wàngdào’s 1932 Fāfán drew its core typology of figures of speech directly from the Wén zé, and the work has come to be regarded as the indigenous Chinese counterpart to Aristotle’s Rhetoric for the prose tradition — even though Chén Kuí’s own framing is normative-prescriptive rather than analytic-philosophical.

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