On the Principles of Verifying the Soundness of Variant Transcriptions Collected in the Collated Book of Commentaries on Mao Poetry by Ruan Yuan

In his book Collated Book of Commentaries on Mao Poetry,Ruan Yuan collected and edited a large number of variant transcriptions of The Book of Songs,many of which have been accepted soundly by scholars.This paper mainly discusses the principles used by Ruan Yuan and others to verify the soundness of variant transcriptions of The Book of Songs,such as through the means of phonology,lexicology,as well as exegetics,in order to summarize the collators' strategies of ascertaining the right transcriptions from the wrong and unveil their outlook on language and lexis.