Qiónglóu yíngǎo jiéchāo 瓊樓吟稿節鈔
A Selected Excerpt of the Jade-Tower Recitation Drafts by 陶善 (Chángzhōu Táo Shàn Qìngyú, 著), excerpted by an anonymous Hǎitiān jīngshè 海天精舍 disciple
About the work
A single-juǎn selected excerpt (jiéchāo 節鈔) from the personal poetry collection of 陶善 Táo Shàn 陶善 (1736–1780, zì Qìngyú 慶餘, hào Qiónglóu 瓊樓) of Chángzhōu 長洲 (Sūzhōu) — a member of the Sūzhōu Pure Land lay-Buddhist circle around 彭紹升 / 彭際清 Péng Jìqīng. The excerpt was prepared by an unnamed disciple of the Hǎitiān jīngshè 海天精舍 (“Sea-Sky Hermitage”) on the basis of the surviving manuscript drafts after Táo’s death.
Abstract
Péng Jìqīng’s preface to the work, dated gēngzǐ zhòngchūn yuè jǐ wàng 庚子仲春月幾望 (= near the full moon of the 2nd month of Qiánlóng 45 = mid-March 1780), records the genesis: returning from the south, Péng learned that his friend Qiónglóu had died twenty days earlier; he made offerings of “white-water and a single plum-blossom” and a jìwén funeral text, then assembled Táo’s surviving poetic manuscripts. Of the several volumes recovered, Péng pruned (shān ér cún zhī 刪而存之) and preserved some ninety-plus poems, retaining the manuscript title Qiónglóu yíngǎo. The jiéchāo (extract) reproduced in the Xùzàngjīng contains the most explicitly Buddhist-Pure-Land of these.
Péng’s preface — a small capolavoro of late-Qīng Pure Land poetic criticism — divides Táo’s poetic œuvre into three phases:
- early youth, when “with sentiment lodged in wind-and-flowers, with feeling vested in mountains-and-rivers, the diction was clear and remote, untouched by worldly dust”;
- middle period, when Táo “read the books of the sages and the Buddhist patriarchs, and gradually came to prune the rhetorical flourish and press toward the inner”;
- late period, when, having attained “Confucian wèijǐ zhī xué” (learning-for-oneself), Táo composed the shí shǒu 十首 (ten poems matching Péng’s closed-retreat sequence), in which “penetration of the fǎyuán 法源 (source of dharma) and the cleansing of all doubts” had become directly visible at the brush-tip.
The opening surviving poem in the jiéchāo is Sōng 松 (“Pine”), dated jǐchǒu 已丑 (= Qiánlóng 34 / 1769) — the earliest dateable verse preserved. It describes a winter-pine on an east-facing peak: “Lonely the gentleman’s integrity does not bend; how unwilling to receive ennoblement at the rank of dàifū; while all other trees waste away, the dragon-branch’s green grows the more dense” — a programmatic statement of the yǐnyì 隱逸 (reclusive) ethic that would have appealed to Péng’s emerging lay-Buddhist programme. Subsequent poems traverse Pure Land devotional themes, yǒngshǐ 詠史 (verse-on-history), and xián-commemorative pieces.
Preserved in the Xùzàngjīng 卍續藏 as X1213. The dating bracket adopted (1755–1780) covers Táo’s mature poetic period; specific dated verses range from 1769 to 1780.
Catalog-vs-external dating note: CBDB person id 70170 records Táo Shàn (1736–1795). The 1736 birth-year is consistent with all available evidence. The 1795 death-year, however, conflicts with Péng Jìqīng’s contemporary 1780 testimony in the present preface: Táo had died twenty days before the second-month full moon of gēngzǐ (1780). Péng’s first-person 1780 attestation is followed here as authoritative; the CBDB death-year of 1795 is presumably an error.
Translations and research
- Goossaert, Vincent. “Late Qing Buddhist Lay Movements.” In Modern Chinese Religion II. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Other points of interest
The inclusion of Táo Shàn’s personal poetry collection — alongside Péng Jìqīng’s own Guānhé jí jiéchāo KR6p0129 and Cèhǎi jí jiéchāo KR6p0130 — in the Xùzàngjīng documents the late-Qīng lay-Buddhist tradition’s commitment to poetry-as-Buddhist-practice and to the canonical preservation of Pure Land lay-circle literary outputs.