Tǐrén yàoshù 體仁要術
Essential Methods for Embodying Humaneness by 彭紹升 Péng Shàoshēng / Péng Jìqīng (著)
About the work
A one-fascicle late-Qīng lay-Buddhist fàngshēng 放生 (“animal-release”) tract by Péng Shàoshēng 彭紹升 (彭紹升, 1740–1796) of Chángzhōu 長洲 (Sūzhōu) — the leading Qīng-period lay Buddhist intellectual and Pure Land devotee. The work is a freestanding compilation of seven distinct documents pertaining to the Wénxīnggé fàngshēng huì 文星閣放生會 (“Animal-Release Assembly of the Star-of-Literature Pavilion”), the fàngshēng charity organized at Péng’s family-owned Wénxīnggé in Sūzhōu, founded by his great-grandfather Nányún fǔjūn 南畇府君 (= 彭定求 Péng Dìngqiú, 1645–1719) and revived by Péng Shàoshēng in the Qiánlóng 乾隆 39 (1774) reorganization that established the fàngshēngchí 放生池 (release-pond) at Mùxìngqiáo 木杏橋.
Abstract
The Tǐrén yàoshù — its title taken from the Yìjīng 易經 Wényán 文言 commentary on the qián 乾 hexagram, “the gentleman embodies humaneness, sufficient to lead other men” (jūnzǐ tǐrén zúyǐ zhǎngrén 君子體仁足以長人) — is a late-Qīng lay-Buddhist devotional work documenting and propagating the practice of fàngshēng as a lay path to rén 仁 (“humaneness”) in the joint Confucian–Buddhist register. The collected documents are:
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Wénxīnggé chóngzhěng fàngshēng huì yǐn 文星閣重整放生會引 — Péng Shàoshēng’s own preface, dated implicitly to or shortly after the Qiánlóng 39 (1774) reorganization. The preface establishes the budgetary framework of the reorganized fàngshēng huì: twelve monthly sīyuè 司月 organizers, each holding a subscription book to enrol annual donors at 360 cash per head; 12 such gǔ 股 (shares) yielding ca. 40 qiān (40,000) cash annually; the funds to be used for purchasing animals to release, with surplus going to feed the resident animals (sheep, swine, chickens, ducks at the Wénxīnggé itself). The bulk of the preface is then an eight-point apologetic answering the standard Confucian and folk objections to fàngshēng — closely paralleling the rhetorical strategy of Zhōu Mèngyán’s Jièshā sìshíbā wèn (KR6k0262), but in a more compact and Confucianizing register.
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Wénxīnggé jiàn fàngshēng huì shū 文星閣建放生會疏 by 薛起鳳 Xuē Qǐfèng — a shū (proclamation) for the founding of the fàngshēng huì, in classical-prose register, drawing on Yì-cosmogony (“Heaven and earth establish their positions; the great virtue is called life”; Lùnyǔ “Heaven gives life and the sage completes its capacity”) to ground the practice cosmologically.
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Bǎibù chéng wáng tú 百步成王圖 (lit. “the hundred-pace [path]-completing-the-king diagram”) and parallel illustrative materials.
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Fàngshēng huì sòng 放生會頌 — verse-eulogies of the practice.
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Bǐngxīn liúfàng 秉心流放 — an instructional verse identifying the Yì-cosmogony’s dàdé yuē shēng 大德曰生 (“the great virtue is called life”) with the Buddhist jièshā fàngshēng doctrine: “the Buddha’s word and Confucius’s word — different mouths, same sound: ‘the great virtue is life’; the heart of Confucius is the heart of the Buddha; rescue the life of [other] beings; restrain your own killing”.
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Wénxīnggé bāshū 文星閣八疏 — brief eight-fold precept against killing parallels.
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Péngshì fàngshēngchí bēi 彭氏放生池碑 — Péng Shàoshēng’s stele inscription for the family release-pond, recording its history: in Qiánlóng 17 (1752) Péng’s father (then Zhèjiāng tíxué 浙江提學, on home leave) ordered Péng’s elder brother 彭紹謙 Péng Shàoqiān and others to make a garden in the back of the family compound; over twenty years of accumulated released fish and devotional tending of the pond, the fàngshēngchí came to mature; Péng now has a stele cut to commemorate. The stele inscription closes with the four-line míng 銘: “the pond’s fish are tightly packed; the Péng family is sparsely scattered; the pond’s fish are growing in number; the Péng family is winding-and-continuing” — a remarkable invocation of the I-Ching’s twin biological-and-genealogical shēngshēng 生生 (“birth-after-birth”) principle as the joint frame of fàngshēng and lineage-continuity.
The work’s distinctive feature is its register: where 周夢顏 Zhōu Mèngyán’s Jièshā sìshíbā wèn speaks at the popular-religious level using Buddhist yīnguǒ 因果 categories, Péng Shàoshēng’s Tǐrén yàoshù speaks at the literati level, with Yìjīng cosmogony, classical-prose stele inscriptions, and Sūzhōu jūshìfójiào 居士佛教 institutional networks as its frame. The work is therefore the principal source for reconstructing High-Qīng literati lay-Buddhist fàngshēng practice as an organized religious-social institution.
Translations and research
- For Péng Shàoshēng’s broader oeuvre, see the entry in the Sìkù wèishōu shū 四庫未收書 supplements and the modern monograph by Yǔ Lìng-tao 喻嶺濤, Péng Shàoshēng yánjiū 彭紹升研究 (Beijing: Zōngjiào wénhuà chūbǎnshè, 2008).
- For the High-Qīng Sūzhōu lay-Buddhist fàngshēng tradition specifically, see Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- The Wénxīnggé survives at Sūzhōu’s Pánmén 盤門 area and remains a Pányúzhū 般若諸 lay Buddhist heritage site.
Other points of interest
- The Tǐrén yàoshù is the central institutional document of the late-Qīng Wénxīnggé fàngshēng huì — one of the longest-running lay-Buddhist charity organizations in late-imperial Jiāngnán, founded by Péng’s great-grandfather 彭定求 Péng Dìngqiú (1645–1719, Kāngxī 15 jièyuán 解元 and 16 zhuàngyuán 狀元) and continued by his son, grandson, and great-grandson Péng Shàoshēng.
- 彭定求 Péng Dìngqiú (the Nányún fǔjūn) was a leading Sòng-Míng Confucian Lù-Wáng school scholar and the editor of the Quán Tángshī 全唐詩 (1707) under imperial commission — making the Péng family one of the most distinguished Sūzhōu literati lineages of the late-imperial period and locating Péng Shàoshēng’s lay-Buddhist program directly within elite Confucian institutional culture.
- The closing Péngshì fàngshēngchí bēi establishes a unique parallel between fàngshēng (Buddhist liberation of animals) and zōngzú yánxù 宗族延續 (Confucian lineage-continuation) through the shared shēngshēng idiom — a previously-unremarked late-imperial articulation of jiātíng fójiào 家庭佛教 (household Buddhism) joining the two traditions at the level of family practice.