Tài shàng gǎn yìng piān jí zhù 太上感應篇集注
Collected Annotations on the Most-High’s Stimulus-Response Tract
compiler unattested in the printed text; printing prefaced 1706 by the Kāngxī Grand Secretary 陳廷敬 (Chén Tíngjìng, 1639–1712), at the request of his Hanlin colleague Zhā Dànyuǎn 查澹遠 (a gōngzhān 宫詹 = Tutor of the Imperial Tutorial Service)
The “Collected Annotations” (集注) recension of the Gǎn yìng piān, transmitting the canonical text of the merit-tract as a single piece together with assembled glosses drawn from earlier commentators (Sòng zhuàn, Yuán jí, Míng jiǎng) — the structure being, for each line, first an exposition of the principle (義理), then an illustrative anecdote (事實), occasionally with a further interpolated saying (他說) for amplification. The compiler’s name has been deliberately omitted from the printed edition (“感應篇集註不書撰人名氏” — Chén Tíngjìng’s preface), a self-effacing convention common among devout merit-tract editors. The compiler is identifiable from Chén’s preface as Zhā Dànyuǎn 查澹遠, an unrelated Hanlin colleague who showed Chén the manuscript “on a day at the Imperial Library” and whom Chén describes as taking the work “to his bosom, looking with rapt attention as though some divine spirit kept him company.”
Prefaces
Preface (Chén Tíngjìng). “The Confucian’s learning is for the seeking of chéng 誠 (sincerity), and chéng threads through the beginning and end of his learning. The tradition says, ‘without sincerity there is no thing’ — how much more so the great matter of learning! The Six Classics are all books that urge the good and forbid the wicked, that lead to the auspicious and avoid the inauspicious; yet of those who study and practise their text till old age, few illumine it in their hearts and put it into action in their lives — the cause is, in a word, want of sincerity. Heaven and man are one, and what they together produce is chéng. Therefore raise a thought and Heaven oversees it; speak a word and Heaven hears it; do a deed and Heaven sees it; the recompense of fortune-and-misfortune comes back categorically, only by chéng. Confucius said: ‘good unaccumulated suffices not for fame; evil unaccumulated suffices not to destroy the body.’ Master Dǒng said: ‘good and evil at their pinnacle flow with Heaven and Earth and answer back and forth.’ …Of those who in past or present have spoken on stimulus-response, none has been more fully and clearly articulate than this. — One day in the Inner Library I met Zhā Dànyuǎn gōngzhān with a single bound volume in his hands, looking at it with rapt attention, as though some divine spirit kept him company. Going up I looked: it was the Gǎn yìng piān jí zhù, and the compiler’s name was not entered. The annotation first laid out the principle and then verified it from cases, sometimes adducing other sayings to extend it — its style was sparing and not leaky, detailed but not muddled, near-and-clear in its application, useful for warning and stirring the world; men could be encouraged forward in the right and chastened in their oblique inclinations. There is no difference between this and the directive of the Six Classics. Dànyuǎn loved it so — by such sincerity, then, gloomy chambers and corner cracks all become as if Heaven and the gods were sending down their attention — its assistance to our Confucian chéngxué is by no means small. Praising the book as suitable for stirring the age and rousing customs, I joined Dànyuǎn in contributing funds to the engraving, and Dànyuǎn asked me to mark its main intent at the head of the volume. Lóngjí Kāngxī forty-fifth year, sixth month, first day, dīnghài [day]; Zézhōu Chén Tíngjìng wrote.” (= summer 1706.)
Abstract
A late-Kāng-xī collected-commentary edition of the Gǎn yìng piān, originally privately circulated by an anonymous editor (subsequently identified by Chén Tíngjìng’s preface as Zhā Dànyuǎn), and brought to the press in 1706 with the joint funding and the public endorsement of one of the highest-ranking Confucian officials of the era. The book is conceptually the Confucian-orthodox counterpart to Huì Dòng’s evidential Jiānzhù recension at KR5i0013: where Huì anchors his glosses on Hàn-era kǎozhèng materials, the Jízhù anchors them on Sòng-school yìlǐ and case-illustration. Both editions were taken into the Dào zàng jí yào in 1809 and from there became the canonical Daoist-canonical pair of Gǎn yìng piān commentaries.
The terminus a quo is somewhere in the late-Kāng-xī period, no earlier than the maturity of Zhā Dànyuǎn (the gōngzhān title implies senior Hanlin status, c. post-1670); terminus ad quem is Chén’s 1706 preface. Chén’s preface itself is the printing-preface, not the composition date, but the compilation cannot have been long earlier given the work’s freshness in 1706.
The base Gǎn yìng piān is preserved in canonical form (1277 characters, the standard Sòng recension); its transmission catechism at the close — yǔ shì xíng sān zhě 語視行三者 (“words, sight, action”) — is the kernel that Chén’s preface seizes on as the link between Daoist gǎnyìng and Confucian chéng.
Translations and research
- See works cited under KR5i0013 (Brokaw, Sakai, Yang Lien-sheng).
- For Chén Tíng-jìng’s role in the Kāng-xī Confucian publishing programme see Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, s.v. “Ch’en T’ing-ching.”
Other points of interest
The deliberate suppression of the compiler’s name was a common Qīng convention for merit-tract editions, with the editor signalling that the work belongs not to himself but to its anonymous moral order. Chén’s preface is itself a textbook miniature of late-Kāng-xī orthodox-Confucian moral theory, drawing the explicit equivalence gǎnyìng = chéng and so legitimising Daoist morality literature within the Sòng-school framework.
Links
- Kanseki Repository KR5i0014
- Printing-preface: 陳廷敬.