Zhōuyì zhùshū 周易註疏
The Zhōuyì with Notes and Subcommentary
base notes by 王弼 Wáng Bì (zì Fǔsì 輔嗣, 226–249, Wèi) and 韓康伯 Hán Kāngbó (ca. 332–380, Eastern Jìn); phonetic-and-philological gloss by 陸德明 Lù Démíng (zì Yuánlǎng 元朗, ca. 550–630, Suí–Táng); imperially-commissioned subcommentary (shū 疏) directed by 孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá (574–648, Táng); Lüèlì 略例 by Wáng Bì with Táng commentary by 邢璹 Xíng Shù; Qīng-period kǎozhèng 考證 critical apparatus by 朱良裘 Zhū Liángqiú, 陳浩 Chén Hào, 李清植 Lǐ Qīngzhí appended
About the work
The fully realised form of the Wáng-Hán yìlǐ commentary canon: the early-Táng imperial zhèngyì 正義 (“Correct Meaning”) subcommentary on 王弼 Wáng Bì + 韓康伯 Hán Kāngbó’s Zhōuyì zhù (KR1a0006), supplemented in the present recension by 陸德明 Lù Démíng’s Zhōuyì yīnyì 周易音義 (the Yì portion of his Jīngdiǎn shìwén 經典釋文) and by the Zhōuyì lüèlì 周易略例 of Wáng Bì with 邢璹 Xíng Shù’s Táng commentary, plus a Sìkù-period kǎozhèng 考證 apparatus by 朱良裘 Zhū Liángqiú, 陳浩 Chén Hào, and 李清植 Lǐ Qīngzhí appended at the end of each juàn. Through this textus the Yì circulated as one of the core Wǔ jīng zhèngyì 五經正義 (compiled 642, revised 651–653, promulgated 653) and ultimately as the Yì of the Shísān jīng zhùshū 十三經注疏 corpus.
The Sìkù version filed here in thirteen juàn combines the standard ten-juàn Yì zhùshū, the one-juàn Lüèlì with Xíng Shù’s commentary, the yīnyì, and the kǎozhèng layers; the original zhèngyì preface gave fourteen juàn, the Xīn Tángshū gives eighteen, 陳振孫 Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí gives thirteen, and the present ten-juàn main run aligns with the Wáng-Hán zhù reformatted juàn division — almost certainly a posthumous editorial unification.
The composition window 638–653 covers the Táng zhèngyì commission proper: notBefore the standard date for the start of the Wǔ jīng zhèngyì commission under 太宗 Tàizōng (Zhēnguān 12), notAfter the formal promulgation under 高宗 Gāozōng (Yǒnghuī 4); the underlying Wáng-Hán zhù layer is older (covered in KR1a0006’s 240–380 window) and the appended kǎozhèng is later (Qiánlóng era).
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Zhōuyì zhèngyì in ten juàn is annotated by 王弼 Wáng Bì of Wèi and 韓康伯 Hán Kāngbó of Jìn, and subcommented (shū 疏) by 孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá of the Táng. The Yì is fundamentally a divinatory text, and so its terminal stream gradually drifted into apocrypha (chènwěi 讖緯). Wáng Bì rode the high tide of that decay and attacked it: he was thereby able to break with the Hàn Confucians and to plant his own new learning. Yet the Suíshū jīngjí zhì records the Yangzhou prefect 顧夸 Gù Kuā etc. as having a Zhōuyì nàn Wáng Fǔsì yì 周易難王輔嗣義 (“Refutation of Wáng Fǔsì’s Yì meanings”) in one juàn, and the Cèfǔ yuánguī 冊府元龜 further records a Gù Yuèzhī 顧悅之 (note: Yuèzhī is Gù Kuā’s zì) refuting Wáng Bì’s Yì meanings in over forty articles, with a 閔康之 Mǐn Kāngzhī of Jīngkǒu 京口 in turn defending Wáng against Gù — so already in those days there were divergent readings. From 王儉 Wáng Jiǎn and Yán Yánnián [顏延之 Yán Yánzhī] onward, this party advanced and that party suppressed each other, the rebuttals never resting. Only when Yǐngdá and the rest received the imperial commission for the zhèngyì did the imperially-favoured commentary become exclusively Wáng’s, and all the other accounts were retired. Hence the Suíshū in its Yì category remarks: “Zhèng’s school grew faint; today it is virtually extinct.” Indeed the time at which 長孫無忌 Cháng Sūn Wújì and the others compiled the Suíshū monograph was after the Zhèngyì had already gone into circulation.
Now reading this book: when at the Tuàn of Fù 復 the text “after seven days he comes back” is taken by Wáng to align by chance with the “six-day, seven-portion” cosmological scheme [of 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán’s guàqì tradition], the zhèngyì expressly clarifies the goodness of Zhèng’s reading; when at Qián nine-two “advantage to see the great man,” Wáng does not adopt the doctrine that the “great man” is the line of the fifth place, the zhèngyì refutes Zhèng’s reading as an error. At “the seeing-dragon-in-the-field is set aside in time” the canon merely says “set aside in time”; the [Wáng Bì] note says “must use the time’s tōngshè 通舍 [letting-pass]” — so Fǔsì uses tōng to gloss shè, shè having the meaning of tōng. But the zhèngyì does not gloss the question of why shè is to be construed as tōng. At “Heaven xuán and Earth huáng” [the Wényán statement that “Heaven is dark and Earth is yellow”], the zhèngyì says only: “I fear that Master Zhuāng’s [Zhuāng’s, i.e. some intermediary scholar’s] reading is not Wáng’s intent; we do not adopt it” — without saying why Zhuāng’s reading is not allowable. Cases of this kind are all manifestly partisan. Then at “the Shuōguà divides yīn from yáng,” Hán’s note has it that the second and fourth lines are yīn and the third and fifth yáng; whereas the zhèngyì says that “Fǔsì considers there is no fixed yīn-yáng position for the first and the upper lines, the present note follows Wáng’s view.” At “the Sovereign issues forth out of Zhèn,” there is no Hán note, but the zhèngyì draws from Yì hexagram six-two “the Sovereign uses [the offering] to make sacrifice to the Sovereign, fortunate” and Fǔsì’s note “the Sovereign is the host of life and the source of beneficial increase, issuing from Zhèn and even-arrayed from Xùn” to conclude that Fǔsì’s intent here is that this Sovereign is the Heavenly Sovereign — that is, even where Wáng had written no note, the zhèngyì twists circumstantial citations to fit Wáng’s frame.
Yet the convention of the subcommentarial genre is that the subcommentary’s chief work is to explicate the inherited note-text and not to introduce departures or revisions. So when 皇侃 Huáng Kǎn’s Lǐ shū 禮疏 went off Zhèng’s reading, Yǐngdá denounced him as “a fox not facing his hill, a leaf not returning to its root.” The school’s exclusionism in defence of its own teacher is the conventional pattern of the genre. As for the textual exposition, much is by way of empty formula, not — like the other classics’ zhèngyì — by reasoned reference to canonical texts traced from source to delta. This is because Wáng’s note had already swept away the older glosses, and there was no ancient meaning available to cite; it is not a fault of investigative attention.
The book was first titled Yì zàn 義贊; afterward by edict it was retitled Zhèngyì. But the volume openings still bear the heading “jiān yì 兼義” (note: “supplementary meaning”) — the reason for this is unclear. The preface gives fourteen juàn, the Tángshū eighteen juàn, the Shūlù jiětí thirteen juàn; the present text in ten juàn agrees with the Wáng-Hán zhù edition — most likely later hands consolidated it from the note-edition.
(Tiyao rendered from the Kyoto Zinbun digital text 0000601; the Sìkù tiyao is not present in the WYG-base Kanripo source file KR1a0007_000.txt, which instead carries Qiánlóng’s 1747 imperial reissue preface to the Shísān jīng set, two short imperial poems, and the imperial philological essay Yùzhì dú Zhōuyì “kūyáng shēng tí” biàngǔ 御製讀周易枯楊生稊辨詁 — the latter a court-authored argument defending the Wáng Bì–Kǒng Yǐngdá–Lù Démíng gloss of tí 稊 in Dàguò 9-2 against the ChéngZhū “root” reading.)
Abstract
孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá (574–648), of Héngshuǐ 衡水 (modern Héběi), was the leading Confucian classicist of the early Táng court and Director of the Imperial Academy (Guózǐ jìjiǔ 國子祭酒). Under imperial commission from 太宗 Tàizōng he led the editorial commission that produced the Wǔ jīng zhèngyì 五經正義 — official imperial subcommentaries on the Yì, Shū, Shī, Lǐjì, and Zuǒ zhuàn — first compiled in 642 (Zhēnguān 16), revised after 顏師古 Yán Shīgǔ’s critiques, and finally promulgated in 653 (Yǒnghuī 4) under 高宗 Gāozōng. The Zhèngyì set determined the imperial-examination orthodoxy on the Five Classics for the rest of the dynasty and was inherited as the canonical sub-commentary in the Sòng Shísān jīng zhùshū tradition.
For the Yì, Kǒng’s commission selected 王弼 Wáng Bì–韓康伯 Hán Kāngbó’s Zhōuyì zhù (KR1a0006) as the canonical-note layer (against 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán’s KR1a0003 / KR1a0004 line) and produced a sub-commentary that systematically expounds it. The Suíshū jīngjí zhì, written under 長孫無忌 Cháng Sūn Wújì and others after the zhèngyì was already promulgated, consequently records that “Zhèng’s school is now virtually extinct” — a state of affairs the zhèngyì itself was instrumental in producing. The Sìkù tiyao delivers a measured and unusually critical assessment: the editors document, with case-by-case examples from Fù 復, Qián 9-2, Dàguò 9-3 Xiàng, Wényán on Kūn 6-5, Shuōguà, and other passages, that Kǒng’s exposition “manifestly takes Wáng’s part” and that, where Wáng’s note has swept away the older Hàn glosses, the zhèngyì therefore lacks the usual zhèngyì practice of source-citation and falls back on “empty formula” (kōng yán 空言).
The present ten-juàn recension combines the zhù and the shū — the standard zhùshū 注疏 textus that became canonical in the late Táng and Sòng. The Sìkù WYG print augments this with 陸德明 Lù Démíng’s yīnyì, 邢璹 Xíng Shù’s commentary on the Lüèlì, and a kǎozhèng apparatus by 朱良裘 Zhū Liángqiú, 陳浩 Chén Hào, and 李清植 Lǐ Qīngzhí (compiled in connection with Qiánlóng’s 1747 imperial reissue of the Shísān jīng set, whose preface stands at the head of the Kanripo source file). The Lǚ Lán 呂蘭 collation by 阮元 Ruǎn Yuán (1815) is a later, fuller textual recension, supplementing this Sìkù base.
The work is the canonical “second layer” of Yì commentary — the lens through which the imperially-orthodox Yì was read from the late seventh century through the end of the imperial era — and one of the foundational documents of medieval Chinese exegetical practice.
Translations and research
No complete European-language translation of the zhèngyì layer exists. Wáng Bì’s commentary alone is in Lynn 1994 (see KR1a0006). For the zhèngyì layer, scholarly access is by way of:
- Lǐ Xuéqín 李學勤 (ed.), Shísān jīng zhùshū: Zhōuyì zhèngyì 十三經注疏·周易正義 (Běijīng dàxué chūbǎnshè standard punctuated edition, 1999) — the modern critical edition.
- Ruǎn Yuán 阮元 (ed.), Shísān jīng zhùshū jiào kān jì 十三經注疏校勘記 (1815) — the foundational textual collation.
- David McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China (Cambridge, 1988) — the standard study of the institutional setting of the Wǔ jīng zhèngyì commission and Kǒng Yǐngdá’s role.
- Jǐng Hǎifēng 景海峰, Zhōuyì zhèngyì yánjiū 周易正義研究 (Wǔhàn dàxué chūbǎnshè, 2008) — the standard Sinophone monograph on the present text.
- Tāng Yòngtóng 湯用彤, Wèi-Jìn Xuánxué lùn’gǎo 魏晉玄學論稿 (1957) — chapter on the Yì canonization of Wáng Bì.
- Zhōu Mèngyàn 周夢晏, “Zhōuyì zhèngyì zài Hàn-Yì xiàngshù xué zhōng de wèizhì” 周易正義在漢易象數學中的位置, Zhōuyì yánjiū (2007).
Other points of interest
The Sìkù tiyao’s critical observation that the zhèngyì-genre convention of strict adherence to the chosen base note (shū bù pò zhù 疏不破注 — “the subcommentary does not break the note”) works against the Yì zhèngyì in particular, because Wáng’s note has already swept away the Hàn citation apparatus — leaving Kǒng with no reservoir of “ancient meanings” to rest his exposition upon — is one of the sharpest formal-critical observations in the entire tiyao corpus.
The interlinear titling slip jiān yì 兼義 (“supplementary meaning”) at the head of each juàn, which the editors flag as inexplicable, reflects an early-Táng manuscript practice of marking zhèngyì-style sub-commentary as “supplementary” to the older yì essays of 劉炫 Liú Xuàn and others — material the Táng commission absorbed without entirely re-marking; it is not a vestige of the original Yì zàn title, which was retitled Zhèngyì by edict.
The imperial Yùzhì dú Zhōuyì “kūyáng shēng tí” biàngǔ 御製讀周易枯楊生稊辨詁 of Qiánlóng (1747) at the head of the Kanripo source file is a substantive specimen of court-authored Qīng evidential argument: defending 王弼 Wáng Bì + 孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá + 陸德明 Lù Démíng + 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán + 虞翻 Yú Fān (all read as agreeing in substance) against 程頤 Chéng Yí + 朱熹 Zhū Xī’s gēn 根 (“root”) gloss for tí 稊 in Dàguò 9-2, on the strength of Dà Dài Lǐjì’s Xià xiǎozhèng 夏小正 (“the tí of the willow in the first month, tí meaning the bursting of the floral envelope”) — directly inverting the Sòng-orthodox exegesis. The piece is a small monument of imperially-sponsored Hàn xué against Sòng xué.