Hu Yinglin: Texts on Texts

Peter K. Bol
Harvard University

It is generally granted that the 17th century witnessed a shift in the manner in which classical texts were read and appropriated. Studies of literati readers and commentators often described this as a shift from a Neo-Confucian search for spiritual meaning to an Evidential Studies search for empirically demonstrable conclusions about texts and history.

Hu Yinglin’s place in this story is problematic. Some see him as an early example of this shift and early in the 20th century Gu Jiegang found in him an early model of doubting the authenticity of received texts, but he is more normally dismissed as a bibliophile, book collector, and conventional writer who had the very good fortune to have Wang Shizhen as a mentor. Hu came from a shidafu family - his father was a jinshi and provincial official - but Hu Yinglin himself never advanced beyond the juren degree. He remained at home in Lanxi (Jinhuafu, Zhejiang) but he was alert to national intellectual trends as he regularly traveled to the capitals and secondary centers.

Hu’s interest in the textual tradition included all categories of writing, but (at least in terms of comments on his own collection) was particularly concerned with works in the “philosophical” and “literary collection” categories. He was interested in the motives writers brought to the books they wrote and forged. He wrote on Buddhist and Daoist texts as well (one of his hao makes him a follower of the local cult of Great Immortal Huang). He has not a little in common with the greatest Jinhua literary intellectual of the 14th century, Song Lian (who also wrote on the forged texts in the philosophical bibliographic category). Jinhua (and Lanxi in particular) had seen a great revival of Neo-Confucianism beginning in the 1470s and continuing into the 1550s Zhang Mou (1437-1522) of Lanxi had been especially important to this, but within a generation some younger men had returned home as adherents of Wang Yangming ideas. Hu himself rejected Wang Yangmingism, but he did not cast himself as a conservative defender of the Zhu Xi school. The question for this paper is simpler to ask than to answer. What made the way Hu Yinglin read texts different from his contemporaries? What was Hu trying to accomplish through his erudite inquiries into texts? What was the significance of such efforts in intellectual culture, both locally and nationally?