Hu Shi (1891.12.17-1962.2.24)
Today marks the 130th anniversary of Hu Shi's birth. As an advocate of vernacular literature and one of the advocates of the New Culture Movement, Hu Shi had a profound influence on Chinese thought and scholarship.
"My profession is actually my interest, and the more interests I have, the more I can't help but receive books." Leaving aside Hu Shi's fame and achievements, just being able to do interest as a profession has reached the ideal of many people.
The joy of finding books
Hu Shi
I am not a bibliophile, but a bookish student who loves to read and can use books, when I buy books by myself, I always buy reference books first, and then I buy a book, and when I change a line, I have to buy another kind of book. I'm sixty-nine years old this year, and I still don't know what kind of business I am? What about Chinese philosophy? Or the history of Chinese thought? Or is it the history of Chinese literature? Or is it the history of chinese fiction? Notes on water? A History of Chinese Buddhist Thought? History of Zen Buddhism in China? What I call "this line" is actually my interest, and the more interested I am, the more I can't help but receive books. When I left Beiping eleven years ago, I already had a hundred boxes of books, about 10,000 or 20,000. A few hours before I left Beiping, I used to think secretly: I am not a bibliophile, but I am a bibliophile. It's a pity to collect so many books and give them up, bring them, because you can't take them with you by plane. As a result, only some notes were taken, and among the 10,000 or 20,000 books, a book was selected as a souvenir of 10,000 or 20,000 books, which was the fragment of "Dream of the Red Chamber". There are only sixteen times in four books, and these four "Dream of the Red Chamber" can be said to be the oldest manuscripts in the world. After collecting books for decades, I only brought four copies at the end, which was equivalent to surrendering my weapons as a soldier, and I also became a trick called Hanako without sticks and monkeys.
In the past eleven years, my friends have sent me a lot of books, plus the new books I have bought over the years, and I have piled up the place where I live now, but these are all irrelevant books, and I have no books in my own industry. To find materials, it is also necessary to rely on the library of the Institute of History and Language of the Academia Sinica and other libraries, such as the library of National Taiwan University and the "Central Library" to save the emergency.
Collected Writings of Hu Shi, published by Huacheng Publishing House, 2013
I have also tasted the pain of not being able to find a book
As an old book student who uses books, I have the joy of finding books all my life, but I have also tasted the pain of not being able to find books. In July of the ninth year of the Republic of China (1920), when I began to write the "Examination of the Water Margin", the only materials I referred to were Jin Shengsi's seventy-one copies of "Water Margin", "Zheng Si Kou" and "Water Margin Later Biography", etc., as for the one hundred copies, one hundred and ten copies, one hundred and fifteen copies, one hundred and twenty-four copies of "Water Margin", I had not seen them. When my "Water Margin" came out, Japan only discovered the 115th and 100th copies, 110 copies and 120 copies of the Water Margin. At the same time, I also found one hundred and fifteen copies and one hundred and twenty-four copies myself. Doing the work of examination, it is very pitiful to have no books. When examining "Dream of the Red Chamber", everyone knows a lot of materials, and the "Dream of the Red Chamber" that is commonly seen is a hundred and twenty copies. This kind of one hundred and twenty returns is not really "Dream of the Red Chamber". When Cao Xueqin died in her forties, she only wrote eighty times, and later cooperated by Cheng Weiyuan and Gao Hu, one contributing money and one contributing, completing the last forty times. Qianlong's fifty-six years of movable type arranged the first version of one hundred and twenty times, the "Preface" of Cheng you and Gao Duo before the book, saying that everyone in the world wants to see the whole book of "Dream of the Red Chamber", in the first eighty times, Dai Yu is not dead, Bao Yu is not married, everyone wants to know how the book ended? But no one found the full "Dream of the Red Chamber". Recently, Cheng Cheng and Gao Er found a large volume of old books on a sugar stall, and under close inspection, it was the last forty times of "Dream of the Red Chamber" that the world has searched for, so it was specially revised and published together with the first eighty times.
But there are very few such clever things in the world, so I suspect that the statements in the Preface are unreliable.
Examination of "Dream of the Red Chamber"
When I examined "Dream of the Red Chamber", I once raised two questions, which are worth studying for those who study red studies: First, who is the author of "Dream of the Red Chamber"? What kind of person is the author? What is his family history? Is there any information available in family biographies? Are the bustling worlds that Cao Xueqin wrote about have a basis? Or do you talk nonsense behind closed doors? Second, the version of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is eighty times? Or a hundred and twenty times? Where did the last forty times come from? At that time, there were seven or eight kinds of "Dream of the Red Chamber" research, and Yu Pingbo and Gu Jiegang helped me find materials. Initially, it was found that in the fifty-seventh year of Qianlong (1792), there was a B version of Cheng Weiyuan's preface, which also contained Gao Yan's preface and seven introductions, and later found that the first edition published a year earlier proved that the last forty times were continued by Gao Hu, and Cheng Weiyuan paid for the printing of movable type. It is also known from many other materials that Cao Xueqin's family was a weaving hereditary post in Jiangnan, which was specially woven for the imperial family to be clothed by the imperial family, for the imperial queen, concubines, princes, and grandchildren, or for the emperor to reward his subordinates.
Later, when cleaning up the Forbidden City, a number of documents were found in a secret drawer of the Kangxi Emperor, and it was known that Cao Xueqin's grandfather Cao Yin was equal to an agent sent by the emperor to inspect the dynamics of the people's hearts and minds, or the retirement of the chancellor, from which it can be seen that the Cao family is a large family. There is a passage in "Dream of the Red Chamber" that says that Wang Xifeng and Aunt Li talked about the emperor's southern tour and stayed at the Jia family, which can be known as the true facts. Later, through the guidance of a Mr. Zhang in Henan, I found Yang Zhongxi's "Poetry of Xueqiao" and "Eight Flags Scripture", as well as the records about The Love Xinjue Luo Sect Room Duncheng and Dun Min, and knew that Cao Xueqin's name was Xia, the number Xueqin, and was Cao Yin's grandson, and then I found the "Eight Banners of Poetry Copy", "Xi Dynasty Ya Song Collection", found the poems given to Cao Xueqin by Dun Cheng and Dun Min's brothers, and found Dun Cheng's "Four Song Tang Collection", which is an undeleted copy of the book, which contains the poem of "Forty Years of Hua Fu Meditation". The date of the following paragraph is JiaShen (i.e., the 29th year of Qianlong Jiashen, 1764 in the Western CALENDAR). From here, we can know the age of Cao Xueqin's death, and his age is about forty years old.
In the sixteenth year of the Republic of China, when I returned from Europe and the United States and lived in Shanghai, someone wrote to me that he wanted to sell me a copy of the "Commentary on the Stones of Fat Yan Zhai", and at that time I thought that I had a lot of information and ignored it. Soon after, he and Xu Zhimo opened a Crescent Bookstore in Shanghai, and the man sent the book to me again, which turned out to be a hand-copied reappraisal of Jia Shu Nian, although it was only sixteen times, but it included many important historical materials. It reads: "The Chinese New Year's Eve noon, the book is not completed, and Celery dies of tears." The sentence of "A Noon August Tear Pen" indicates that Cao Xueqin died in the winter of the 27th year of Qianlong, that is, on February 12, 1763 in the Western calendar. The poem "The words seem to be blood, and ten years of hard work is unusual" fully depicts the mood when Cao Xueqin wrote "Dream of the Red Chamber". Li Yanzhai may be Cao Xueqin's wife or friend. Since February of the seventeenth year of the Republic of China, I published "New Materials for Examining the Dream of the Red Chamber", everyone has noticed the "Stone Record of the Commentary on the Fat Yan Zhai". However, later, in the twenty-second year of the Republic of China, I borrowed from Mr. Xu Xingju a copy of the "Stone Record" that Gengchen Qiu Dingben Fat Yan Zhai had read and commented on, which was the Qianlong Twenty-five Year Edition, eighty times, of which sixty-four and sixty-seven times were missing.
About the History of Rulin
Now let me turn to my examination of the History of Rulin. The History of Rulinwai is a book that scolds the education system at that time and criticizes the imperial examination system in the political system. At first, I found only one volume (4 pieces), two volumes of poems (131 pieces), and one volume of words (47 pieces) in Wu Jingzi's "Wenmu Shanfang Collection", and used this as material. However, a hundred years ago, Jin He, a great poet in China, said that he had collected the "Collection of Wenmu Mountain Houses" and had five volumes of wen when he was in the "History of Ru Lin". However, most people say that there is no engraving of the "Wenmu Shanfang Collection", I don't believe it, so I asked people to look for it in the bookstore in Beijing, and after looking for it for several years without results, I found it in the bookstore with the scripture hall in the seventh year of the Republic of China. I used this collection to refer to Anhui's "Chronicle of Quanjiao County", wrote a 18,000-word "Wu Jingzi Annals", Chinese novel biographical materials, none of which can be more than this, the fourteenth year of the Republic of China I typeset this book out.
If you compare Cao Xueqin and Wu Jingzi, I think Cao Xueqin's thoughts are very ordinary, while Wu Jingzi's thoughts are beyond the times at that time, with a strong sense of resistance. In the "History of Ru Lin", Wu Jingzi severely criticized the education system and had his more scientific concepts.
The attitude of true book collection is to accept everything
The previous talk is to find books without a plan, and it is even more fun to find books with a plan. The so-called planned search for books is to use the method of "bold assumptions and careful verification" to find books. Now take my example of finding a monk in the Divine Society, which is a book I have planned to find. The Shenhui monk was the Seven Ancestors of Zen Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty, and I discovered the importance of the Shenhui monk from the Huineng and Shenhui biographies of the Song Dynasty, and at that time I made a bold assumption that the information about the Shenhui monks could only be found in Japan and Dunhuang. Because during the Tang Dynasty, Many Japanese people sent people to study in China, and they must have brought back a lot of historical materials. After "careful verification", it was later found in Japan that Zongmi's "Yuanjue Dashu Copy" and "Zen Source Interpretation Collection", and several volumes of materials on the monks of the Shrine were found in the National Library in Paris and the British Museum in London.
Knowing that the shenhui monks were from Xiangyang, Hubei Province, they went to Luoyang and Chang'an to spread Mahayana Buddhism, and pointed out that Chen's two capital Dharma ancestors at that time were not Zen masters, and the six ancestors huineng in Guangdong were the true Lineage of Zen Buddhism. However, these accusations of the Divine Society were not trusted by the government at that time, but on the contrary, they degraded the Divine Society. Just then, when the Anshi Rebellion occurred, Tang Xuanzong avoided Sichuan, and Emperor Suzong summoned Guo Ziyi to quell the rebellion, at this time the state finances were poor, and the army's salary had to be replaced by Du Mu, so there must be a senior monk who preached the Dharma and was happy to accept Du Mu. The monks of the Congregation took on the task of carrying out this task. Guo Ziyi regained the two capitals (Luoyang and Chang'an), and the source of military salaries had to be attributed to the Divine Society. After the Anshi Rebellion was settled, Emperor Suzong invited the gods to enter the palace to be raised, and the gods would be the seven ancestors of Zen Buddhism, so the gods would be the vanguard of the Southern Sect, the destroyer of the Northern Sect, the founder of the new Zen School, the creator of the Tantra, and no second person in the history of Chinese Buddhism had such a great merit. The "Collected Works of the Monks of the Divine Society" that I have studied and edited is expected to be published next year by the Institute of History and Linguistics of academia sinica.
Finally, based on my personal experience of searching for books for decades, I found that the scope of our past collection of books was narrow, and the goal of collecting books in the past was concentrated on collecting antiques, and novels and the like were definitely not among the collections. But we must understand that the attitude of truly receiving books is to receive everything.
Editor: Li Jiaping
Review: Du Xiaoye