Shēn Péi Shī Shuō 申培詩說
Master Shen Pei’s Explanations of the Odes attributed to 申培 (撰, attributed); actual author 豐坊 (actual author, 偽作)
About the work
A short single-scroll text classifying each poem of the Shījīng 詩經 by the three modes of the Six Arts (六義): fù 賦 (direct exposition), bǐ 比 (comparison), and xìng 興 (evocation). Each entry supplies a brief historical-allegorical explanation in the tradition of the Hàn-dynasty moralistic exegesis — attributing poems to named historical actors (King Wen 文王, his consort Tàisì 太姒, the Duke of Zhou, etc.) and classifying the rhetorical technique poem by poem. The text covers 周南, 召南, 魯, 邶, 鄘, 衛, 王, 鄭, 齊, 魏, 唐, 秦, 陳, 檜, 曹, and the three Sòng sections. The text is attributed to 申培 (ca. 219–135 BCE), founder of the Lǔ School (魯詩學) of Shījīng interpretation; modern scholarship unanimously regards it as a forgery by the notorious Míng classicist 豐坊 (ca. 1492–1563).
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source. The text is not included in the Sìkù quánshū 四庫全書 and has no Sìkù 提要. It is an extra-catalog item in the Kanripo digital corpus.
Abstract
The Shēn Péi Shī Shuō 申培詩說 purports to be a record of the expository interpretations given by 申培 (also called Shēn Gōng 申公), the founding master of the Lǔshī 魯詩 (Lu School) tradition of Shījīng commentary. 申培, a native of Lǔ 魯 (modern Qūfù 曲阜, Shāndōng), studied the Shījīng under Fúqiū Bó 浮丘伯, himself a disciple of Xúnzǐ 荀子. During the reigns of Emperors Wén 文帝 and Wǔ 武帝 of the Western Hàn, he became the pre-eminent authority on the Shījīng in the Lǔ transmission; summoned to the capital by Emperor Wǔ around 135 BCE at an advanced age (reportedly eighty), he was appointed Tàizhōng Dàifū 太中大夫. His genuine scholarly writings — 《魯故》 (Lǔ gù) in 25 juàn and 《魯說》 (Lǔ shuō) in 28 juàn, both recorded in the Hànshū yìwénzhì 漢書藝文志 — are entirely lost; only fragments survive in later compilations (the Qīng scholar Mǎ Guóhán 馬國翰 reconstructed three juàn of 《魯詩故》 in his Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū 玉函山房輯佚書).
The extant Shēn Péi Shī Shuō is almost certainly a forgery composed by 豐坊 (Fēng Fāng 豐坊, ca. 1492–1563), the mid-Míng classicist notorious for fabricating pseudo-ancient texts — most famously a stone-inscribed “Lǔ-school prefaces” to the Shījīng (Lǔshī Shīxù 魯詩詩序), various stone-inscribed Hétú 河圖 and Dàxué 大學 texts, and purportedly recovered Korean and Japanese editions of canonical works. The interpretive method in the Shī Shuō — systematically labelling each poem as fù, bǐ, or xìng and attaching a brief historical narrative — has no clear support in genuine Hàn-dynasty traces of the Lǔ school and reflects Míng literary scholarship rather than Hàn philology. The Sìkù quánshū compilers excluded the text entirely, implicitly recognizing it as spurious. The text was edited and studied by Bruce Rusk in his research on Fēng Fāng’s forgeries.
The text is preserved in the Kanripo digital corpus as an extra-catalog item (no matching entry in the standard KR4 catalog metadata). It is also available on the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org) under the title 申培詩說. The ctext.org version is textually consistent with the Kanripo copy, showing only minor character variants.
The interpretive framework — attributing each Fēng 風 poem to a specific historical actor in the early Western Zhōu and classifying it as fù, bǐ, xìng, or a combination — closely parallels the approach of the Máo prefaces (Máo Shī Xù 毛詩序) while systematizing the assignment of the three modes for every poem in a way not found in any extant Hàn source. This tidiness itself is a hallmark of forgery.
Translations and research
- Rusk, Bruce. The Rogue Classicist: Feng Fang (1493–1566) and his Forgeries. PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2004. The fundamental study of Fēng Fāng’s forgery activities; discusses the fabricated classical texts attributed to ancient authorities, including the Lǔ-school Shījīng materials.
- Rusk, Bruce. “Faking China’s Past: Ming Anthologies and the Problem of Contaminated Datasets.” HKU Scholars Hub (based on lecture material). Addresses the wider scholarly problem of Fēng Fāng’s forgeries entering digital corpora.
Other points of interest
The text is a significant case study in the textual history of Shījīng scholarship: it was cited by some Míng and early Qīng scholars as evidence for the Lǔ-school interpretation before being recognized as inauthentic. The fabrication of a systematic fù-bǐ-xìng classification attributed to an ancient authority reflects the Míng tendency to project a kind of clean analytical framework onto the Shījīng interpretive tradition.