The Background to the First Modern Li Wengong Ji 李文公集

Tang Studies 25 (2007) THE BACKGROUND TO THE FIRST MODERN LIWENGONGJI*X0~ T. H. BARRETT SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON The Ii U7engongji (hereafter Collected UJOrks)of Li Ao *$fJ (772/3-ca. 836) is unusual among major Tang collections as having first been published in a modern typeset edition not in China but in Japan. This first modern edition, by Kunugi Tadashi Jj] 7J IE, appeared as recently as 1987 as the "materials" volume for a projected study of Li Ao by the same author that has not to my knowledge ever been completed.! Kunugi's name is not one that will be familiar to most students of Japanese Sinology, and indeed his curriculum vitae as given in the colophon to his book shows that he has spent most of his educational career outside university education apart from undertaking some teaching at Komazawa University 1~1'* ~, though in his acknowledgments to various helpful individuals on his first page he does name a much better known figure attached to that institution, Nakamura Sh6hachi r::p;f1~J\, as a one time senior fellow-student.2 His study is not a variorum edition, but a reading of the text of the Sibu congkan [9:g~~fU reprint of the Collected UJOrks as kambun, with kaeriten and traditional punctuation. It is accompanied on the lower half of each page by a fully construed "writing out" (kakikudashi) of the text in Japanese form, with occasional jurigana offering a Japanese gloss on the meaning of some of the characters reproduced therein. Kunugi's postscript identifying the Sibu congkan as his source for the text does, however, add the information that in construing it he has had recourse to the Shohei sosho {f§.IjZ ~_ edition's reading of the text as kambun.3 Any editor of the text today hoping to produce the ultimate modern version of Li's literary legacy would doubtless feel obliged to consult at the very least the Ming editions (no earlier editions ofLi Ao's works exist) that may be found in Chinese libraries but not in Japan. But since, conversely, Kunugi's edition has consulted a Japanese edition almost completely unknown to the Chinese scholars who have attempted to describe the transmission 1 Kunugi Tadashi, Ri Ko no kenkyu: shiryo hen *~O)1iJfJi:-fi~-t*j. Tokyo: Hakutei sha, 1987. 2 Kunugi is not, however, among the contributors to Nakamura's retirement volume, Komazawa daigakugaikokugo bu ronshu ,~1i]1i**~~§tflf~§ffiJ~ 43, March 1996. 3 Kunugi, Ri KOJ 259. In fact, as we shall see, Kunugi does not invariably follow the kaeriten provided by this Japanese edition, but it has clearly acted as an important resource for him. 147 Barrett: Li UJengong ji of Li's writings, for the moment a brief note explaining the materials underlying Kunugi's publication would seem to be in order, so that the value of his work can be better understood.4The remarks below, while (I trust) sufficient for this limited purpose, are based solely on notes taken in Japanese libraries in 1974 during the writing of a doctoral dissertation on Li Ao, subsequently checked against the even more limited resources available in Britain, and so do not by any means address all possible problems connected with this corpus of textual material. When not otherwise specified, the exemplars consulted were those of the Seikad6 bunko ~ ~~X)$, Tokyo, whose unquestioning hospitality to a young British researcher I still recollect with gratitude, as I do the assistance of the library staff of all other institutions visited.5 Although it is possible to advance some reasonable hypotheses about the contents of some of the lost Song editions of Li's works-for example, to deduce that references to an edition in twenty fascicles rather than the current eighteen need not imply that some of his writings were lost after the Song-only a couple of pieces of Song evidence concerning the transmission of his Collected WOrks were considered important enough by the editors of the publications ancestral to Kunugi's edition to warrant inclusion with the main text.6 These two pieces were by Ouyang Xiu ~~{~ (1007-1072), who was not...