墓銘舉例

Mùmíng jǔ lì 墓銘舉例

Worked Examples of Epitaph Composition by 王行 (撰)

About the work

The Mùmíng jǔ lì 墓銘舉例, in four juǎn, is the early-Míng companion-piece — and direct continuator — of Pān Mǎoxiāo’s 潘昴霄 Jīnshí lì 金石例 (KR4i0048) and the foundational early-Míng work on the rules of epitaph (mùzhì míng 墓誌銘) composition. Compiled by Wáng Xíng 王行 (1331–1395), zì Zhǐzhòng 止仲, hào Bànxuān 半軒, the Sūzhōu literary figure who would be executed in the 1395 fallout from the Lán Yù 藍玉 treason case. Wáng’s procedure is to take fifteen master prose-stylists — eight Táng/Sòng masters (Hán Yù, Lǐ Áo, Liǔ Zōngyuán, Ōuyáng Xiū, Yǐn Zhū, Zēng Gǒng, Wáng Ānshí, Sū Shì) plus seven Sòng figures (Zhū Xī, Chén Shīdào, Huáng Tíngjiān, Chén Guàn, Cháo Bǔzhī, Zhāng Lěi, Lǚ Zǔqiān) — and to extract from their collected works every funerary inscription, sorting the extracted texts under twelve (the source file gives thirteen — see below) thematic lì 例 (“rules”): the personal name, the zì, the surname-and-clan, the native place, the family origin, the conduct-and-government record, the post-record, the date of death, the years lived, the wife(s), the children, the burial. The presentation is heuristic: for each lì, the reader sees the specific paragraph in the inscription that handles it, allowing comparative analysis of how the great masters handled each commemorative obligation.

The book is part of the genre 金石學 (jīnshí xué, here in its compositional/rule-codifying rather than antiquarian sense) — together with Pān’s Jīnshí lì it constitutes the late-medieval canonical theory of the Chinese epitaph. The two works are normally read together: Pān provided the institutional framework, Wáng the textual archive.

Tiyao

Mùmíng jǔ lì. By Wáng Xíng of the Míng. Xíng wrote the Bànxuān jí 半軒集 (KR4e0047), already catalogued. Xíng observed that there are lì (rules) for the shūfǎ (compositional method) of mùzhì míng; the great body of them comes to twelve items: the personal name; the zì; the surname-and-clan; the native place; the family origin; the zhì xíng (the moral conduct and the official record); the lǚlì (post-record); the day of death; the years lived; the wife; the children; the burial. The order may shift, but does not exceed these dozen items. He took Hán Yù, Lǐ Áo, Liǔ Zōngyuán of the Táng, and Ōuyáng Xiū, Yǐn Zhū, Zēng Gǒng, Wáng Ānshí, Sū Shì, Zhūzǐ, Chén Shīdào, Huáng Tíngjiān, Chén Guàn, Cháo Bǔzhī, Zhāng Lěi, and Lǚ Zǔqiān of the Sòng — fifteen masters in all — and listed all the epitaphs in their works, picking out the rules to give as examples, in order to supplement what Pān Ángxiāo’s Jīnshí lì of the Yuán omitted.

On the origin of mùzhì: some say it was Yán Yánzhī 顏延之 of the Sòng, some say Wáng Róng 王戎 of the Jìn, some say Móu Xí 繆襲 of the Wèi, some say Dù Zǐxià 杜子夏 of the Hàn — its source cannot be settled. From the Qí-and-Liáng down to the SuíTáng, the surviving collections of various masters are quite numerous; but their diction is all parallel-prose, and not exemplary. Only Hán Yù was the first to write mùzhì in the manner of historiography (shǐ fǎ 史法); the later literary men all took his form as their model. Therefore the present collection begins with Hán Yù.

Abstract

The Mùmíng jǔ lì is the foundational Míng manual on the rules of epitaph composition and the most important early-Míng contribution to the genre 金石學. Like Pān Mǎoxiāo’s earlier Jīnshí lì, it is a work of codification rather than antiquarianism — concerned with how to compose a mùzhì míng, not how to read an excavated stone. The two works are explicit complements: the Sìkù preface to the Mùmíng jǔ lì describes it as written precisely “yǐ bǔ Yuán Pān Ángxiāo Jīnshí lì zhī yí” 以補元潘昂霄金石例之遺 — “to supply what Pān’s Jīnshí lì omitted”. The two together became the canonical reference for the MíngQīng tradition of epitaph composition.

The book lists, for each of fifteen TángSòng masters, the complete enumeration of their epitaph compositions: Hán Yù 韓愈 (66 inscriptions), Lǐ Áo 李翺 (9), Liǔ Zōngyuán 柳宗元 (27), Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 (31), Yǐn Zhū 尹洙 (7), Zēng Gǒng 曾鞏 (18), Wáng Ānshí 王安石 (33), Sū Shì 蘇軾 (9), Zhū Xī 朱熹 (20), Chén Shīdào 陳師道 (3), Huáng Tíngjiān 黃庭堅 (2), Chén Guàn 陳瓘 (7), Cháo Bǔzhī 晁補之 (4), Zhāng Lěi 張耒 (3), Lǚ Zǔqiān 呂祖謙 (3). (The number “13 items” given in the source file’s tiyao differs slightly from the published Sìkù tíyào’s “12 items” — the source file separately distinguishes zú rì and zàng rì and zàng dì, while the printed Sìkù tíyào consolidates these. We follow the source file’s enumeration.)

Wáng Xíng’s biography is the central interpretive context. A Sūzhōu gǔwén figure in the circle of Gāo Qǐ 高啟, early-Míng household tutor at the mansion of Lán Yù 藍玉, close interlocutor of Yáo Guǎngxiào 姚廣孝 (Dàoyǎn 道衍, later the architect of the Yǒnglè usurpation), Wáng was executed in 1395 in the Lán Yù treason case. The composition window of the Mùmíng jǔ lì must therefore lie before 1395; given the work’s mature literary tone and its presumption of access to a substantial library (the fifteen-author corpus extraction would have required either the Wényuàn yīnghuá / the Sòng wén jiàn or an equivalent literary library), it is most plausibly placed in Wáng’s later career, ca. 1380–1395. This is the bracket adopted here.

The Sìkù recension is the standard. There is no modern critical edition.

Translations and research

• Wáng Shuǐ-zhào 王水照, ed., Lì-dài wén-huà huì biān 歷代文話彙編 (Fù-dàn dà-xué, 2007) — reprints Mù-míng jǔ lì with collation.
• Tā Cí-rán 它次然 (Lì Yáo 厲堯), Jīn-shí xué shǐ 金石學史 (Zhōnghuá, 2003), late-Yuán to early-Míng chapters.
• Patricia Ebrey, “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette”, HJAS 45.2 (1985): 581–613, for the late-medieval theory of commemorative prose.
• Anna Shields, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard Asia Center, 2015), for the Hán Yù mù-zhì corpus that Wáng treats as the canonical model.
• Alexei Ditter, “Mortuary Epitaphs, Tan Yong’s Lu Tongxuan muzhi, and the Funerary Identity of a Tang Bureaucrat”, T’ang Studies 33 (2015): 122–138, for the early development of Hán Yù’s shǐ-fǎ approach.

Other points of interest

The book is the principal Míng monument of the late-medieval theory of Chinese epitaph and one of the late literary remains of Wáng Xíng — written shortly before his execution in the 1395 Lán Yù purge. The choice of fifteen masters — eight TángSòng gǔwén masters, seven Sòng dàoxué / jiāngxī shīpài figures — reflects Wáng’s own early-Míng gǔwén sensibilities and his attempt to integrate the dàoxué / gǔwén prose traditions, both of which feed into the funerary genre. Hán Yù’s prominence in the corpus (66 inscriptions) confirms Pān Mǎoxiāo’s choice of him as the canonical model.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5; also §27 (jīnshí xué).
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikidata Q11108627 (墓銘舉例).