言慚金石 My Words Shame the Bronze
太宗又曰：「朕才愧珪璋，言慚金石。至於內典，尤所未聞。口占敘文，誠為鄙拙。太宗又曰：「朕才愧珪璋，言惭金石。至于内典，尤所未闻。口占叙文，诚为鄙拙。
逐句解 Line by line
Taizong said further: “My talent is ashamed before the jade sceptres, and my words before bronze and stone.”
⚠ 珪璋 — the jade tablets a nobleman held at court, and by extension a man of the finest quality. 金石, bronze and stone, means inscriptions: the writing that gets cast or carved because it is worth keeping. So the emperor says his words are not fit to be inscribed. They were inscribed. The stone version was cut within a few years and people are still copying it. 愧 and 慚 are both to feel shame, one in each half of the pair.
“As for the inner canon, I have heard particularly little of it.”
⚠ 內典 — the inner books, which is how Chinese distinguishes Buddhist scripture from the outer Confucian classics. The vocabulary is itself a small statement about which set is home. And the admission is real. He has just written eighty lines about a religion and he says he barely knows it. Both halves of that are true, and the preface's careful Confucian frame is the evidence.
“To compose a preface aloud is truly coarse and clumsy of me.”
⚠ 誠為 — truly is. The middle character is the copula here, read wéi, to be; not wèi, for the sake of, which the bare chain gives and which would make the sentence say he did it on behalf of coarseness. 鄙拙 — rustic and unskilled. It is the third time he has called his own composition rough: he said it before dictating, again when he named it, and again now.
The emperor apologises, at length, and the terms he chooses are precise. His talent shrinks before jade sceptres; his words shrink before bronze and stone — meaning inscriptions, the writing that gets carved because somebody thought it worth keeping.
⚠ It was carved. The stone version was cut within a few years, and students of calligraphy have been copying the piece for thirteen centuries. The novel lets him say his words are not fit for stone, in the sentence immediately before the reader remembers that they are on it.
⚠ And the middle admission is honest and checkable. As for the inner canon, I have heard particularly little of it — the inner books being Buddhist scripture, as against the outer Confucian classics, which is itself a statement about which set the language treats as home. He has written eighty lines about a religion he says he hardly knows, and the preface's own Confucian frame proves him right.