‘Guwen’ Lineage Discourse in the Northern Song

During the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), several proponents of guwen 古文, or Ancient-style Learning, began to appeal to a lineage of former worthies consisting of Mencius (fl. 4th c. bce), Xunzi (fl. 3rd c. bce), Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 bce–18 ce), Wang Tong 王通 (c. 584–617), and Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) to both justify their views of the Confucian dao and push for the adoption of specific strategies to expand guwen’s influence. Building upon earlier conceptions of these figures formulated in the Tang, Song guwen thinkers such as Liu Kai 柳開 (947–1000), Sun Fu 孫復 (992–1057), and Shi Jie 石介 (1005–1045) held the worthies up as models and asserted that their examples could guide current efforts to defend and reinvigorate the dao of the sages. Yet, despite their passionate endorsement of this lineage, it ultimately failed to achieve widespread acceptance among either guwen adherents or the wider elite. Indeed, by the middle of the eleventh century, writings using the lineage of former worthies to legitimate a particular intellectual position by and large disappear from the historical record.

The few studies that exist on guwen lineages have for the most part sought to situate them within the larger history of daoxue 道學 and Buddhist lineage discourse. The scholars operating within this framework have attempted to answer two key questions: What impact did Chan conceptions of lineage have over the formation of guwen lineages, particularly that expressed in Han Yu’s “On the Origin of the Way” (Yuandao 原道)?¹ And, to what extant did guwen lineages influence Zhu Xi’s later formulation of the “genealogy of the Way” (daotong 道統)?² These questions have moreover been asked, and answered, without a thorough consideration of the role lineage played in the guwen intellectual tradition.³

An important exception to this general approach can be found in He Jipeng’s study of guwen lineages, which discarded, appropriately in my view,⁴ this twofold problematic.⁵ He instead focused his research on elucidating the origins and subsequent development of this lineage discourse. In addition to demonstrating the existence of a number of precedents in Tang writings that antedated the rudimentary conception of lineage advanced by Han Yu, He assessed the more fully developed notions of lineage proposed by the followers of Han’s learning in the Song. The primary aim of He’s analysis was to determine the criteria that guwen intellectuals used in constructing lineages, and he maintained that they employed two distinct, yet related standards—wen 文 and dao 道. These two standards were related because to be included in any guwen lineage, a former worthy had to compose wen that elucidated the dao of the ancient sages; they were distinct in that guwen thinkers placed different degrees of emphasis upon the criteria of wen and dao in their respective accounts.

As the most comprehensive study of this discourse to date, He’s research represents an important contribution to our understanding of the guwen intellectual tradition. His analysis, however, is primarily descriptive in nature, and he by and large refrains from asking how conceptions of the former worthies figured into the intellectual arguments of the thinkers he investigates. In this article, I build upon He’s work by interrogating the purposes to which lineage was put by the supporters of guwen in the Northern Song.⁶ That is, I seek to determine both how lineage figured into guwen arguments from this period and how certain thinkers used it to promulgate their vision of the guwen intellectual agenda. I moreover attempt to explain the reasons behind its fairly limited appeal and eventual decline.

My analysis of Northern Song guwen lineage discourse proceeds in three parts. In Part One, I briefly examine how Han Yu and his followers in the Tang discussed the importance of the former worthies, particularly Mencius and Yang Xiong. In this section of the article, I highlight the significance of several ideas regarding the worthies that would figure prominently in later Northern Song conceptions.

In Part Two, I investigate the views of the three Song guwen thinkers who wrote the most extensively on this lineage—Liu Kai, Sun...