3 - A history of Tung Chung-shu's literary corpus

Summary

In the preceding chapter we saw that Han sources attribute three works to Tung Chung-shu: Tung Chung-shu, Kung-yang Tung Chung-shu chih-yü, and Tsai-i chih chi. Yet the Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu appears to be a post-Han collection from not later than the sixth-century Liang dynasty. This chapter clarifies the relationship between this later collection and the Han works attributed to Tung Chung-shu by considering the received text within the broader spectrum of Tung's literary corpus. Bibliographies, catalogs of private collections, commentaries, acknowledged and unacknowledged quotations, paraphrases of Tung's writings, extant fragments, and various editions of Tung's works all shed light on the text's authenticity. For example, while Han citations of Tung's works that appear in the Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu substantiate reliable portions of the received text, Han descriptions of his writings suggest the reliability of essays that cannot be confirmed through direct testimony. Additional materials with which to study the received text that have hitherto not been explored are post-Han citations attributed to Tung Chung-shu that lack parallels in the Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu. These unattached fragments of Tung's writings preserved in various commentaries and encyclopedias have been virtually forgotten over the years. In this chapter I examine these writings to provide a second lens through which to examine the authenticity of the Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu. They will augment the chronology of the previous chapter that provided the historical context in which to consider the received text.