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| Not Just So Exquisite: Disputes over Literature and Neo-Confucianism Between Zhu Xi and Lü Zuqian via Annotations of Sansu’s Collected Works Edited by Lü Zuqian |
| Ci Bo |
| Center for Jiangnan Culture Studies, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China |
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Abstract As a typical example of the “Song type culture”, Su Shi was highly valued in the Southern Song Dynasty. His imperial examination texts were so different that they had the effect of sensationalizing the audience. Therefore, the anthology of Sansu’s proses became popular, and Lü Zuqian even praised him as “the master of imperial examinations”. Lü Zuqian himself was a famous scholar in the field of imperial examination and was extremely fascinated by Su’s writing. He once tried to imitate and create proses on the style of Su Shi, proses compiled with the title Donglai Boyi. During his tenure as a supervisor of the imperial college, Lü Zuqian followed the method of annotating readings handed down by his family to analyze Sansu’s argumentative articles one by one. He creatively applied marks and symbols to quickly grasp the article structure by revealing the general idea, to understand the theme of the argumentative prose, and compiled the book Annotations of Sansu’s Collected Works. Although the form of this book is not as perfect as The Key to Ancient Chinese Prose, it is a preliminary attempt in the history of anthology review.Although Zhu Xi also found the value of Su Shi’s proses from the perspective of the imperial examination, he was more alert to the grand occasion that those proses would sweep the world. In view of the fact that Su’s writings were popular and widely accepted, Zhu Xi was worried that Su’s scholarship would occupy the ideological territory by virtue of the influence of proses and imperial examinations, which would degrade the learning of Zhou Dunyi and the Cheng brothers he advocated. For the sake of his strong appeal to respect Taoism, he rejected Su’s works as “exquisite”, belittled Su Shi’s proses as a decaying link in the evolution of the Northern Song literature, regarded Su’s scholarship as an ideological heresy other than Neo-Confucianism, and completely ignored the independence and essence of literature and Taoism respectively. This is undoubtedly a selective disregard of the value and significance of prose itself, so it is difficult to gain recognition in the debate with Cheng Xun, Wang Yingchen, Rui Ye, Lü Zuqian and other scholar bureaucrats. Lü Zuqian’s thought of reconciling literature with Neo-Confucianism reflects a strong eclecticism. In the early Southern Song Dynasty, when “Xin Xue” became forbidden, and the competitive landscape of “Luo Xue”, “Shu Xue” and “Xin Xue” in the Northern Song Dynasty changed into a situation in which “Cheng Xue” and “Su Xue” became increasingly popular. Lü Zuqian focused on bridging the gaps in the theories of various schools, so as to improve the relationship between literature and Neo-Confucianism.“Exquisite” as a formal feature of prose, is a positive rhetorical behavior that mobilizes all positive techniques in order to improve the effect of lexical expression. Literary writing needs to be refurbished, so as to be able to make various changes and bring forth new ideas. Zhu Xi judged literary expression based on the needs of Taoism and rejected the rhetorical behavior of paying attention to the skills of writing. This is the prejudice of the Taoists who value Taoism over writing. Lü Zuqian, under the guidance of the concept of studying Su Shi and with the help of Annotations of Sansu’s Collected Works, carefully analyzed Sansu’s articles, outlined the ideas, marked key points, summarized the general ideas chapter by chapter, and incorporated the ever-changing article skills into various patterns. In this way, the annotation of the anthology has the significance of textual construction. Lü Zuqian promoted the standardization and finalization of the writing in the imperial examination field through comprehensive prose activities, such as prose imitation, anthology criticism, and method inspiration. He himself thus became a central figure in the founding period of prose theory.
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Received: 10 October 2022
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2023, Vol. 53 
