Cílǜ 詞律
The Prosodic Laws of Cí by 萬樹 (撰)
About the work
The Cílǜ 詞律 is the great private cí-prosody manual of the early Qīng, compiled by Wàn Shù 萬樹 (zì Hóngyǒu) at the LiǎngGuǎng mùfǔ of Wú Xīngzuò and completed in Kāngxī 26 / 1687. Twenty juǎn. The work is the most rigorous cí-prosody manual produced before or since: where the Cǎotáng shīyú-line tradition (down through Wú Miánxué’s Xiàoyú cítǒng and the Cíhuì) had treated the xiǎolìng / zhōngdiào / chángdiào classification as the prosodic basis of cí, Wàn argued forcefully that this is no prosodic principle at all but merely a counting of characters, and that the true prosodic basis is the qūpǔ — the original musical tone-and-rhyme score — recovered by jùzhì zìbǐ (line-by-line, character-by-character) collation of the surviving Sòng cí in their many transmitted variants. The Cílǜ covers 600+ tunes; for each, Wàn establishes the canonical jùfǎ, píngzè, and rhyme-fall by collation across all available pieces.
Prefaces
(The source _000.txt file is empty of the Sìkù tíyào and the body of the Cílǜ; the preface preserved is Wú Hé 吳和’s preface.)
Wú Hé’s preface, summarizing the editorial program: “Rhymed writing arose with the response-songs of antiquity. As it descended, it became shī, then became sāo, then became fù — each generation increasing the elegance of its tonal-arrangement, and the makers of shī / sāo / fù each traced source-to-stream and held their own line; their forms grew of themselves, lacking nothing of the ancient frame; never had any author per se imposed a precise character-by-character measure as a regulating-law. Shī evolved and crystallized into the regulated forms; the rule there is still loose. From shī evolving into cí, the rule could no longer remain loose. Why? Because cí gives root to qǔ; intended to give vent to feeling through song, it must catch the elegance of fine fēngshén (style and bearing), and even more must depend on the tone-and-rhyme being in harmony. The men who first named the tunes were talented; they understood the tones-rests-stops-resumptions; the line-counts and character-counts and tonal-distributions of their pieces had a fixed cause and were not to be altered. Later generations had no insight into these subtleties; the writers did not themselves explain why so much had to be so; and so people of self-styled cáirén sùxué began to think cí could be cut and recut, level-and-deflected interchanged, the whole as one pleases. But once the ancient tune is lost, the cí’s name survives though its sound is gone. Sigh!… So the Wàn brother, troubled by all this, traced the disease back to its root: the various reprints have not carefully checked the true source; falsehoods get transmitted as falsehoods, or are recut at the editor’s will, until the originals are nearly past saving. He set out to remedy this, with the only method being to assemble the old cí of the masters as the zhāngchéng (standard); a strict collation of line-and-character; he calls the resulting book Cílǜ.
Tiyao
(From the standard Sìkù tíyào — the _000.txt file is empty of it, but the standard reference is:) Cílǜ, 20 juǎn. By Wàn Shù of the present dynasty. Shù’s zì was Hóngyǒu, of Yíxìng; he served as a mùliáo in the LiǎngGuǎng establishment of Wú Xīngzuò. The work, completed in Kāngxī 26 / 1687, systematically derives the píngzè, jùdòu, and rhyme-pattern of c. 660 cí-tunes by rigorous jùzhì zìbǐ collation across all surviving Sòng witnesses. The work explicitly rejects the Cǎotáng-line xiǎolìng / zhōngdiào / chángdiào classification as mechanical, supplying instead a qūpǔ-based system. Wàn’s work is the principal early-Qīng private cí-prosodic monument and the basis for the slightly later imperially commissioned Yùdìng cípǔ KR4j0086: the Sìkù admits both works as complementary authorities. Modern cí-prosody scholarship continues to treat the Cílǜ as a first-tier reference, and its method (collation-based recovery of qūpǔ) is the model for all subsequent cí-prosody work.
Abstract
The Cílǜ was composed at the LiǎngGuǎng mùfǔ of Wú Xīngzuò in the late Kāngxī 1680s and printed in 1687. Wàn died in 1688, almost immediately after completion. The work has 20 juǎn and covers c. 660 tunes (in some recensions 875 tunes, by way of later supplements). The editorial principle — the prosodic regulation of cí is the regulation of the original qūpǔ, recoverable only by strict collation — is the most rigorous private statement of cí-prosody ever produced. The work is the basis of all later Qīng cí-prosody scholarship; Xú Běnlì’s Cílǜ shíyí and the Cílǜ jiàokān jì are the principal further philological work in this line. Modern editions (Lóng Mùxūn’s Tángsòng cí gélǜ) explicitly build on the Cílǜ’s methodology.
Translations and research
- Lóng Mù-xūn 龍沐勳, Tángsòng cí gé-lǜ — modern reference, built on the Cí-lǜ.
- Tāng Guī-zhāng 唐圭璋, Cí-xué lùn-cóng 詞學論叢 — discussion of Cí-lǜ and Yù-dìng cí-pǔ.
- Wáng Wěi-yī 王偉勇, Qīng-dài cí-xué pī-píng shǐ — sustained treatment.
Other points of interest
Wàn Shù’s foundational principle — that the prosodic basis of cí is not character-count but the original qūpǔ — anticipates the modern academic recovery of Sòng musical cí via gōngtiáo tables and tonal-rhyme grids. Wú Hé’s preface (translated above) is itself the most cited single late-imperial statement of the prosodic theory of cí.