Duan Yucai

Duan Yucai

Duan Yucai (1735-1815), an exegetist and Confucian classics scholar in Qing Dynasty, was named Maotang (Ruoying). In his later years, he was also named Yanbei Jushi (Yanbei Jushi), changtanghu Jushi (changtanghu Jushi), Qiaowu old man and Jintan native of Jiangsu Province. Grandfather Gong Zizhen. Qianlong Ju Ren has served as county magistrate of Yuping County, Guizhou Province, Wushan County, Sichuan Province, etc. He led the disease back home, lived in Fengqiao, Suzhou, and studied behind closed doors. Duan Yucai was once a teacher of Dai Zhen. He was fond of learning Confucian classics and was good at exploring subtle principles and gaining extensive knowledge. He is good at writing, phonology and exegesis, but also good at collation. He can distinguish right from wrong in all primary schools. He is an outstanding scholar among the masters of Hui school.

His personal works include shuowenjiezizhu, Liushu phonology table, guwenshangshu Zhuanyi, maoshiguxun zhuandingben, jingyunlouji, etc.

Duan Yucai's portrait is taken from the first episode of biography of scholars in Qing Dynasty.

Life of the characters

In 1735, Duan Yucai was born in Datou village, west gate of Jintan, Jiangsu Province. He had one elder sister, two younger brothers and one younger sister. Although his father was a private school teacher, his income was low. As his father teaches outside all year round, his mother does all the housework. The whole family was dressed in coarse cloth and lived from barley porridge all the year round. They seldom ate white rice. They were very poor.

In 1748, when he was 13 years old, he studied in Anding Academy in Yangzhou.

Qianlong 24 years (1759), 25-year-old Zhongju person, Ren Guozijian teaching, into the metropolitan examination, repeatedly failed. It was introduced that Duan Yucai was a teacher in Beijing. After reading Gu Yanwu's five books on phonology, he was interested in the study of phonology, so he taught and studied at the same time, which lasted about 10 years. When he was in Beijing, his teacher was Dai Zhen, and he met Qian Daxin, Shao Jinhan, Yao Nai and other scholars. After returning to Li, he had to intersect with Liu Taigong, Wang Zhong and Jin Bang.

In the 35th year of Qianlong's reign (1770), Li bu quan was appointed the magistrate of Yuping County in Guizhou Province. Two years later, he was transferred to Sichuan Province and successively served as the magistrate of Fushun, Nanxi and Wushan counties. During his official career, he always carried the "six Book Phonology table" around him. When he finished his public affairs until midnight, he often put lights in the cage, or used his breath to boo things for warmth, editing and revising articles. After 10 years, he resigned and returned to his hometown on the grounds that his parents were old and sick, and he lived in Fengqiao, Suzhou. He devoted himself to writing and collecting books. He was only 47 years old.

In 1790, when he entered the capital for the second time, he got to know Wang Niansun and Wang Yinzhi's father and son, and discussed phonology and exegesis.

In 1793, he moved to the branch garden outside changmenwai in Suzhou. Duan Yucai, who was born in a humble family, has always remembered his ancestral motto of "no tillage, no happiness, no support, no support". He has always enjoyed writing all his life. He overcomes many difficulties and devotes himself to annotating Shuowen.

In April of 1794, Qianlong had a bad fall on his right leg and became disabled. At that time, Duan Yucai once said to his friends, "shuowenjiao will be successful in three years. It can be said that zuoqiu was blind, and he had "Guoyu"; Sun Tzu Bin's foot was in the art of war; Duan's bad foot was in shuowenjiao. " After that, his health went from bad to worse. He felt uncomfortable in spring, summer and autumn, especially in spring, with sores, sores and scabies, blurred eyes and weak heart pulse. With a little effort, he could not sleep at night, and his left arm was painful. At this time, Duan Yucai was most worried about whether the annotation of Shuowen could be completed. He once told his friends that he was still ill, worried that it would be difficult to complete the annotation, and that he was lack of energy. If I die after I finish, I'm glad. When Duan Yucai finished his annotation of Shuowen, he told his students that he was like a spring silkworm. He had woven cocoons and had to wait to die.

After more than 30 years of time to complete the "Shuowen Jiezi Zhu" 30 volumes. Jiaqing 20 years (1815) may "shuowenjiezizhu" Book engraved, in order to engrave this book into print, he spent all his savings.

Yihai (1815), in the 20th year of Jiaqing, died of poverty and disease on September 8, at the age of 81.

Main achievements

academic achievements

Philosophical thought

Seeking truth from facts is the common banner and life belief of scholars of Qianjia school. Duan Yucai is Dai Zhen's eldest disciple. Although he failed to write a series of philosophical works like his teacher, he basically followed the academic style of Anhui school initiated by Dai Zhen in terms of academic ideal and route, and made his unique contribution. In particular, his spirit of pursuing true knowledge in the study of classical Chinese is interlinked with Dai Zhen. He said: "anyone who writes a book will only seek to be true, not to be better than his predecessors, but to be famous. If we want to be famous in order to be better than our predecessors, then we don't believe it. It's unreasonable for us to believe it. Although I don't want to be famous, I don't want to be better than others, and I sincerely want to be right, then the success of the book should be believable. "

From the philosophical point of view, Duan Yucai also inherited Dai Zhen's anti song Confucianists' viewpoint, insisting that "the Qi of yin and Yang is Tao", "seeking truth from things", and opposing "insisting on seeing truth". He said in shijingzhaiji: "when I was young, I read the notes on Zhongyu in sizishu, and I believed them for fear that I would not believe them. That is to say, Zhuang is suspicious. Even if you read the words of the six classics and Confucius and Mencius and annotate them with the words of the four sons of he, you can see that their heart, reason, nature and way of speaking are very different from those of the six classics and Confucius and Mencius. The six classics say that reason lies in things, while the Confucians of Song Dynasty say that reason lies in mind, and that nature is reason; the six classics say that Tao is Yin and Yang, while the Confucians of Song Dynasty say that yin and yang are not Tao, and that reason generates Yin and Yang, which is called Tao. The more precise the words are, the more difficult it is to follow them. As a result, people insist on making sense of their opinions, which hinders political affairs. " Dai Zhen, in his book Mencius character Yi Shu Zheng, repeatedly criticizes the song Confucianists' view that reason comes from heaven and has a heart. He thinks that song Confucianists' opinions bring disaster to the country and the people, and even lead to the evil result of "killing people with reason".

Supported by the academic idea of "seeking truth", Duan Yucai criticizes the writing methods of Wang Yinglin '. Both Wang Yinglin and Gu Yanwu are famous for their erudition, while Gu Yanwu's five books on phonetics once introduced Duan Yucai into classical linguistics. However, influenced by Dai Zhen, Duan Yucai understood the true meaning of learning and no longer praised his ability for erudition. Instead, he took the pursuit of true knowledge and ten point of view as his belief in life. He said: "Wen Zhidong, the original master, said: knowing ten is not true knowledge, but knowing one is true knowledge. To understand its essence, to analyze its right and wrong, and to check all the books without any hindrance, on the contrary, my heart is calm, and every word is safe, which is also the status of heaven and the atmosphere of all things. What he has said for a long time has all the true knowledge. Therefore, he entertains himself and his relatives near, and entertains others far away. He is calm and clear-cut, and is happy and smooth. No doubt he will be able to do so after he has been handed down. "

Not only that, Duan Yucai also believes that through the pursuit of true knowledge, one can make friends with the ancients by God and with the descendants by God, so that one's life can transcend the time limit and enter the eternal realm: "if one's wife has experience and surpasses the ancients, she will hate the ancients for not seeing me. If she thinks that the ancients have words and deeds, she will think about the future generations. If she is good at this, she will hate the future generations It's not visible The value ideal of seeking the eternal meaning of short life in the pursuit of true knowledge shows that the academic activities of Qianjia scholars were not only the result of external political oppression, they found spiritual sustenance in textual research.

Duan Yucai did not simply repeat the teacher's point of view, but developed Dai Zhen's theory on the issue of "seeking truth". He believes that "the pursuit of truth" is a historical process. In principle, the future generations are better than the previous generations. Through research, the future generations have to be different from their predecessors, which is caused by the general law of the pursuit of truth and is not intended to be difficult for their predecessors. He said: "the author of the book is very lucky to believe that the world's future generations are true, not that the world's future generations may not be true. Zuoshi is not happy with Gongyang and Guliang, but Du is not happy with liuxuan. Zhuzi is lucky to be slandered today. A man of noble character seeks to be trustworthy, not to be trusted by others. Seek truth, and dare not be true. That's really why the sun rises. " Compared with Dai Zhen's self-confidence of "ten points of view", Duan Yucai understands that "Zhenshi" is not easy to obtain, and with the development of the times and the deepening of academic research, "Zhenshi" is also developing.

Study on Confucian classics

Duan Yucai didn't write systematic philosophical works on the study of Confucian classics, but he expounded his political and ethical thoughts and put forward some ideas to break through the traditional Confucian classics by analyzing the specific meaning and sentences in the classic texts such as spring and Autumn Annals, Zuo Zhuan and Da Xue, especially the systematic study of the succession of Ming Shizong. When Duan Yucai wrote shijingzhaiji in his later years, he expressed his views on exegesis, name and object, system and people's feelings and physics, and claimed that he "did not dare to be lax with his old age". Duan Yucai's research on names and objects, exegesis and system mainly shows the spirit of "seeking truth", while his concern for "the physics of people's feelings" expresses the ideal of "seeking Tao".

Duan's extensive and profound primary school is the methodological support of Duan's Confucian classics. In the early Qing Dynasty, Gu Yanwu once said, "Neo Confucianism is also Confucian classics." It means that "giving up Confucian classics is irrational learning". Similarly, we can say that giving up primary school is no Confucian classics learning. Duan's primary school serves for the interpretation of classics, and the primary school is a tool for the management of classics. Duan's primary school is Wei'an, and his achievements in Confucian classics are also rich. In Duan Yucai's view, the history of the study of Confucian classics is really a history of the application of linguistic tool logic around Qun Jing.

The language logic of Zhou Lihan's reading examination (1794). The most important contribution of Duan Yucai's Zhouli handukao is that he put forward the style of annotating Zhouli in Han Dynasty for understanding Zhouli: the three types of "Hanzhu zhengdu" in Zhouli handukao Xu. Duan said: "there are three examples of Chinese annotations, which are based on the correct reading of words

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