The Seal of the Unity of the Three — Vol. 2 - The Golden Elixir

1
Commentaries
This chapter of the Bibliographic Catalogue lists all the extant commentaries
to the Cantong qi that are known to me. It includes the main
details on the authors, dates, and editions of 38 commentaries, of
which 34 are extant in print and the others in manuscript. The individual
works are listed in an approximate chronological order. Each entry
reports the title of the text; its author; any prefaces and postfaces; its
editions and reprints; and, where applicable, references to entries in
premodern and modern bibliographic works. Premodern bibliographic
works that contain descriptions of texts or of editions (instead of mere
citations of their titles) are marked with an asterisk (*).
Several entries report the formal features—page layout and
numbers of columns and characters—that are useful, and sometimes
crucial, to distinguish different editions from one another. Citations
of “rare exemplars” (shanben 善 本 ) are followed by references to
general catalogues published in the People’s Republic of China or in
Taiwan, and, where available, to the catalogues of the individual
libraries that hold them.
Reeditions of individual commentaries arranged according to the
ordering of the Ancient Text—for example, Yao Ruxun’s reedition of
Chen Zhixu’s commentary (no. 9, edition no. 4)—are listed under the
original work. On the contrary, compilations of multiple commentaries
arranged according to the ordering of the Ancient Text (nos. 17,
18, and 34, whether they cite the earlier commentaries integrally or in
part) are assigned independent entries, as they constitute new works
from the viewpoint of bibliography. The same applies to the only
work known to me (no. 30) that contains both an earlier commentary
arranged according to the ordering of the Ancient Text and a new,
complete commentary by a different author.
For other conventions and for the abbreviations used in this
chapter, see above, pp. 15 ff.
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