Mao Jin and his Jigu Library are an immortal legend of Chinese book collection culture in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. Mao Jin’s Jigu Library is famous for its great number of book collections. Meanwhile, the quality and number of its carved books are at the top in the history of ancient book collections of China.
Mao Jin devoted his life to Buddhism. According to historical records, as early as Wanli and Tianqi periods of the Ming Dynasty, Mao Jin worshipped the Buddha Tathagata at home. His rooms were used either for practicing Buddhism, or for collating books, or for issuing Buddhist texts. He took "Everywhere there are sacred objects that protect us" as the logotype of the Jigu Library, and named himself "DuSu Lay Buddhist". Out of such devotion and enthusiasm for Buddhism, Mao Jin generously donated money to monks and made monks as his regular visitors to the Jigu Library. At the same time, he contributed money, collated books, or issued books. After his death, his three sons followed in his footsteps and carved more than 300 types of Buddhist classics.
Mao Jin carved a wide range of books, and he paid as much attention to traditional Confucian classics, historical records, philosophical writings and miscellaneous works as Buddhist scriptures. As Ye Dehui wrote in a book,"Mao Jin of Changshu, for his Guji Library, was the most famous book collector in the Ming Dynasty. At that time, many people searched for Mao Jin’s carved works and spread them widely, including "Thirteen Classics","Seventeen History Records",“Jin Dai Mi Shu”, anthologies of Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, as well as Taoist collections".
Scholium of the Thirteen Classics and the Seventeen History Records, as the most important part of Mao Jin's book carving, almost ran through his whole book carving career. He had poured a lot of energy and financial resources into these works. The two works have a supreme position in Chinese classic literature. Before the end of the Ming Dynasty, books were usually carved and printed by the central government or local governments, and there had been no precedent for independently carving and printing works by an individual.
There are many more books carved by the Jigu Library. For example, Jin Dai Mi Shu, which led book collectors to the tide of carving book collections and contributed to the artistic and literary circles, contains 157 kinds of books, most of which were carved in Chongzhen period. Song Poetry by Famous Writers is the earliest carved collection of poems. So Mao Jin is deemed as “the first scholar fully engaged in poetry collation and consciously compiling and studying poems”, and "the scholar with the greatest achievements and most profound influence in the field of poetry collation prior to the Qing Dynasty”. Sixty Plays, the earliest and largest drama collection in the history of Chinese dramas, is praised by Huang Shang as "a far-sighted and far-reaching cultural highlight, widely covering popular literature beyond official history”.
Previous studies believed that Mao Jin carved more than 600 kinds of books and accumulated 109,067 blocks during his lifetime. However, recent data collection and statistics find that the total number of Mao's books should be more than the above figures. In addition to the above noticeable achievements, Mao Jin also helped people at that time carve their writings.
Issued on Feb. 16, 2022
Jiang Weiguo, Changshu CPPCC member