金石要例

Jīnshí yào lì 金石要例

Essential Examples of Epitaph and Inscription Composition by 黃宗羲 (撰)

About the work

The Jīnshí yào lì 金石要例, in one juǎn, is Huáng Zōngxī 黃宗羲 (1610–1695)‘s contribution to the late-medieval jīnshí xué 金石學 tradition of rule-codification for epitaph composition. It belongs to the same genre as Pān Mǎoxiāo 潘昂霄’s Yuán-period Jīnshí lì 金石例 (KR4i0048) and Wáng Xíng 王行’s early-Míng Mùmíng jǔ lì 墓銘舉例 (KR4i0050) — concerned not with antiquarian collection of inscribed objects but with the literary conventions governing the composition of mùzhì míng 墓誌銘 and related funerary inscriptions. The work distils thirty-six lì (rule-headings) on the structure and conventions of such compositions, with an appendix of nine lùnwén guǎnjiàn 論文管見 (“modest views on prose”). As Huáng’s preface explicitly says, it is intended to “patch the gaps” (補蒼崖之缺) in Pān Mǎoxiāo’s earlier work — Pān had taken Hán Yù 韓愈 as the canonical model and tracked his usage but had not articulated the underlying principles, nor had he distinguished rules from idiosyncratic practice. Huáng’s contribution is the principle-by-principle articulation.

Tiyao

Jīnshí yào lì, one juǎn. By Huáng Zōngxī of our dynasty. Zōngxī’s Míngrú xuéàn 明儒學案 is separately catalogued. This book gathers and frames the ancients’ rules of stone-and-bronze inscription in thirty-six headings, with the Lùnwén guǎnjiàn in nine items appended.

His own preface says: “Pān Cāngyái 潘蒼崖 has the Jīnshí lì, which in the main takes Chānglí (Hán Yù) as exemplary; but he had not actually articulated the rationale of each rule, nor (the rationale of) where the corruption of the rules began. There are also things that did not need to be rules but were turned into rules — for instance, of the elder generation’s brothers, lineage members, and in-law partisans, some are written and some not, depending only on whether they were notable or not, without any settled rule. Hence I extract the essentials and somewhat correct the practice, so as to supplement Cāngyái’s lacunae.” Cāngyái is the hào of the Yuán-period Pān Ángxiāo (i.e. Pān Mǎoxiāo 潘昂霄); this work is essentially the supplement to the gaps in his Jīnshí lì.

What is included — such as the Bǐgàn tóngpán míng 比干銅槃銘 — comes from Wáng Qiú 王球’s Xiàotáng jí gǔ lù 嘯堂集古録 and is in fact a Sòng-period forgery; the Xiàhóu Yīng shíguǒ míng 夏侯嬰石槨銘 comes from Wú Jūn 吳均’s Xījīng zájì 西京雜記 (KR3l0014) and is also a shadow-composition of the QíLiáng era — to draw on them as evidence is to fail in critical scrutiny. Again, on the strength of Sūn Hé 孫何’s bēi explication, he argues that bēi (stele) is not the name of a literary genre — not knowing that Liú Xié 劉勰’s Wénxīn diāolóng (KR4i0001) already lists this rubric.

Just as yuèfǔ was originally the name of an office but has been used so long that everyone calls song-lyric “yuèfǔ” — Zōngxī necessarily binds himself to ancient meaning, which is to be too inflexible. Nevertheless, Zōngxī was originally well at home in the rules of literary craft, and his kǎozhèng is in fact more precise than Ángxiāo’s original book; those who discuss the literature of stone-and-bronze cannot but draw their cuttings from this work. Respectfully collated, Qiánlóng 42, 8th month (1777). Director-General Compilers: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Director-General Collator: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Jīnshí yào lì is the late-seventeenth-century capstone of the late-medieval jīnshí xué tradition of epitaph-composition theory and the third major work in the sequence: Pān Mǎoxiāo (Yuán), Wáng Xíng (early Míng), Huáng Zōngxī (early Qīng). Where Pān’s Jīnshí lì furnished the institutional framework and Wáng’s Mùmíng jǔ lì furnished the textual archive, Huáng’s Jīnshí yào lì furnishes the analytical articulation of principle. Huáng is explicit in his preface that he is correcting (a) Pān’s failure to state the rationale behind each rule, (b) Pān’s failure to distinguish settled rules from contingent usage, and (c) the silent absorption of post-Hán-Yù corruptions into the rules. The work therefore represents a programmatic late-seventeenth-century philological reform of the genre.

Composition window. Huáng’s death in 1695 sets the upper bound. The Jīnshí yào lì is part of his post-1664 retired-scholar production, in the same period as the Míngrú xuéàn (preface 1676) and his other major synthetic works. The work itself bears no internal preface date in the Sìkù recension; standard scholarship places it in his late maturity, ca. 1660–1695. The Sìkù editors’ praise of the work as more precise than Pān’s, while noting its over-strict adherence to ancient usage, situates it within the early-Qīng kǎozhèng turn that Huáng helped inaugurate.

The thirty-six rules cover the mùzhì míng genre in essentially the same scheme as Wáng Xíng — name, zì, surname-and-clan, native place, family origin, conduct-and-government record, posts, year of death, ages lived, wife(s), children, burial — but with explicit theoretical articulation of why each rule exists and where corruptions enter. The nine Lùnwén guǎnjiàn appendix is Huáng’s more general statement of prose theory, including the famous critique of bēi (stele) genre-naming.

Critical reception. The Sìkù editors register two specific criticisms: (1) Huáng credits the Bǐgàn tóngpán míng and the Xiàhóu Yīng shíguǒ míng as authentic, though both are well-known later forgeries (the Sìkù tíyào even calls them, respectively, “Sòng forgery” and “QíLiáng shadow-composition”); (2) Huáng’s denial that bēi is a literary genre-name overlooks Liú Xié’s KR4i0001 Wénxīn diāolóng chapter on lěibēi 誄碑. Despite these flaws, the Sìkù judgment is that “those who discuss the literature of jīnshí cannot but draw on this work.”

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 Jīn-shí yào lì with collation.
• Wáng Sī-rèn 王思任, Huáng Zōng-xī wén-lùn yán-jiū 黃宗羲文論研究. Bĕijīng: Zhōnghuá, 2009.
• Ono Kazuko 小野和子, Min-shin Kōkō shū 明清傳奇集 (Iwanami, 1976) — discussion of Huáng Zōng-xī’s late writings in genre context.
• Lynn A. Struve, The Ming-Qing Conflict 1619–1683: A Historiography and Source Guide (Ann Arbor: AAS, 1998) — Huáng Zōng-xī’s place in early-Qīng prose theory.
• William Theodore de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought and Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince by Huang Tsung-hsi (Columbia, 1993) — for Huáng’s overall intellectual programme.

Other points of interest

The Jīnshí yào lì completes the genre-trio (Pān/Wáng/Huáng) and is the only Qīng entry in the Sìkù’s 詩文評類 chapter for the jīnshí lì tradition. After Huáng, the tradition was effectively closed; later Qīng jīnshí xué shifted decisively to the antiquarian (kǎozhèng-bei) side, where works like Wáng Chāng 王昶’s Jīnshí cuì biān 金石萃編 were epigraphic catalogues rather than compositional manuals. Huáng’s appendix nine-item Lùnwén guǎnjiàn is sometimes cited separately as one of the most concise statements of Huáng’s general prose theory.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §27 (jīnshí xué); §30.5 (literary criticism).
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikidata Q11108557 (金石要例).