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Scholarly Culture in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China Scholarly Culture in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40046467 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Scholarly Culture in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China A dissertation presented by Nathan Vedal to The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2017 © 2017 Nathan Vedal All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Peter K. Bol Nathan Vedal Scholarly Culture in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China Abstract This dissertation traces the development of scholarly disciplines in late imperial China. This project focuses on linguistic study during a period when philology was woven into a comprehensive system of analyzing language, music, and cosmology. Historians typically assert that China underwent an important intellectual transition in the 18th century, arising from a new emphasis on the philological analysis of texts. I argue instead that the intellectual shift over the course of the 15th through 19th centuries can be more accurately understood as a change in methods of studying language, rather than a newly found attention toward it. Philology flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries, but was not an isolated field, as it would come to be in the 18th. Instead, it drew methods and materials from various intellectual traditions such as cosmology and music. Current notions of intellectual development in late imperial China have tended to anachronistically map later disciplinary demarcations onto the past. I demonstrate, on the basis of a large body of influential yet understudied philological texts from the 16th and 17th centuries, that intellectual change in this period should be defined primarily by shifts in reasoning and methodology, rather than by transitions in fields of scholastic interest. 16th century scholars believed that everything in the world belonged to a greater coherent system, the underlying unity of which provided a universal basis for producing knowledge. This mode of thinking, which drew on methods from disparate fields, was written out of the intellectual history of China, beginning with 18th century court scholars who saw in it the reasons for the decline of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Nevertheless, its implications for the history of scholarship in China are significant. For instance, phonetic methods for describing linguistic iii sound emerging at the end of the 19th century drew directly from 16th century discussions of Sanskrit and cosmology. The totalizing mode of thought that characterized 16th and 17th century scholarship in China was not, as is commonly held, an impediment to linguistic and scientific thought. Instead, it fostered innovative approaches to describing the nature of language. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Figures and Tables / vi Acknowledgments / vii Introduction / 1 Chapter 1: Cosmological Phonology in Ming China: Scholarship before the Rise of “Evidential Learning” / 29 Chapter 2: Neo-Confucianism and New Ways of Understanding the History of Language / 96 Chapter 3: Letters from the Western Regions: Grappling with Phonetic Scripts in Late Imperial China / 141 Chapter 4: “There is Music in the Heart of Man”: Late Imperial Concepts of Musical and Linguistic Sound / 176 Chapter 5: “The Marvel of Natural Harmony”: Literary Phonology in 16th and 17th Century China / 214 Chapter 6: Opera, Language Standardization, and Phonetic Methods in Late Imperial China / 250 Conclusion: Diagrams in Ming Knowledge / 298 Bibliography / 318 v FIGURES AND TABLES Figures Figure Intro. 1: The Chinese syllable. Figure 1.1: Latin letters in Wu Jishi’s rhyme tables. Figure 1.2: Luoshu diagram. Figure 2.1: An excerpt from the preface to Liushu jingyun. Figure 2.2: The opening of Wei Jiao’s revised Daxue. Figure 2.3: Zhuan script form of ‘to obtain’ [de ]. Figure 2.4: Zhao Yiguang’s preface to Shuowen changjian, illustrating archaic variant characters. Figure 3.1: An explanation of standalone vowels in Siddham script from the early Chinese primer on Siddham, Xitan ziji. Figure 3.2: A Sanskrit “rhyme table” from an extant portion of Zhao Yiguang’s Xitan jingzhuan. Figure 4.1: Transcription of Zhu Xi’s Shijing music. Figure 4.2: Transcription of Liu Lian’s Shijing music. Figure 4.3: Transcription of Wu Jishi’s Shijing music. Figure Conc. 1: Xuanyun tu (に). Figure Conc. 2: Shier huo yinglü yuantu (). Figure Conc. 3: Wuyin fenshu zhi tu (). Figure Conc. 4: Wuyin fenshu zimu tu (). Figure Conc. 5: Hetu shu qi yi liu (). Figure Conc. 6: Heyin tu (). Figure Conc. 7: Liuyi xiangguan tu (). Figure Conc. 8: Wanguo yinyun huotu (). Figure Conc. 9: Sanshi yun fen liuqi tu shuo (). Tables Table 2.1: The Six Principles of Character Formation, as Codified by Xu Shen Table 2.2: Thematic categories compared in Wei Jiao’s Liushu jingyun and Wang Yingdian’s Tongwen beikao. Table 2.3: Wei Jiao’s Liushu jingyun, as it is categorized in various Ming bibliographies. Table 4.1: Pitches of the fixed Chinese musical scale. Table 4.2: Relative pitches in Chinese music. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to my dissertation committee, in particular Peter Bol, whose encouragement and critical readings were integral to the writing of this dissertation. One could not ask for a more supportive mentor. Detailed suggestions and careful evaluations from Ann Blair and Michael Szonyi, as well as Victor Mair and Willard Peterson at a later stage, have shaped this project in innumerable ways. I am grateful to the staff of the Harvard-Yenching library, especially Kuniko Yamada- McVey, Ma Xiaohe, James Cheng, and Sharon Yang, as well as Martin Heijdra at the Princeton University East Asian Library. Thanks are due, as well, to the staff of the following libraries: National Library of China (in particular, Liu Bo), Capital Library (Beijing), Peking University Library, Beijing Normal University Library, National Central Library (Taibei), Fu Ssu-nien Library at Academia Sinica, National Taiwan Normal University Library, Imperial Household Library of Japan, National Archives of Japan, National Diet Library, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia and University of Tokyo Library, T!y! bunko, Sid! bunko at Kei! University, Seikado bunko, Sonkeikaku bunko, and Jinbunken at Kyoto University. Research trips to these libraries were made possible due to the generous funding of the following organizations: Friends of the Princeton University Library, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard Asia Center, and Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. vii INTRODUCTION Writing in the mid-17th century, Xiao Yuncong (c. 1596–1673) proposed a program for the would-be philologist, intent on studying the language of ancient texts. According to Xiao, one should master, in this order: the hexagrams and divination methods of the Yijing, the principles of qi and yin-yang theory, mathematics, musical pitches, and finally traditional Chinese methods of phonology.1 Only the last of these has any clear relation to the study of language as we understand it today. Xiao was no outlier, however. The study of language, which captivated scholars throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, was bound up with subjects which bear little relation to our current approach to linguistic research. This dissertation explores why scholars in the 16th and 17th century established connections between seemingly incompatible fields. I identify disciplinary interconnectedness as a fundamental characteristic of scholarship from this period, an approach based on the notion that the underlying coherence of all things in the world provided a universal system for creating knowledge. Opening a work of 16th-century Chinese scholarship transports one into a vastly different world from the present. A study of astronomy could double as a treatise on morality. A tract on music might contain a discussion of prognostication.2 As early as the 18th century, such amalgamations were characterized as cobbled together with no apparent reason (douding , in the words of Qing scholars). The premise of this dissertation is that 16th-century scholars perceived such connections between seemingly different subjects for a reason. Intellectual change in China has often been traced according to which disciplines (according to our modern 1 Xiao Yuncong , Yi cun へ, SKQS CMCS, p. 7a. 2 Cf. Wang Bangzhi , Lülü zhengsheng , SKQS CMCS. 1 definitions) attracted the greatest attention at a given time. By delineating boundaries and shifts in notions of discipline I offer a new and productive way to understand intellectual change in China. As modes of knowledge production changed, so too did the connections between and boundaries surrounding disciplines. The standard narrative of late imperial Chinese intellectual history claims that an important transition took place in the 18th century, following the consolidation of the Qing state. In its simplest form, the argument claims that scholars from the 14th through 17th centuries neglected concrete evidence-based learning in favor of abstract metaphysical speculation. Scholars
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