Zhōuyì jíjiě 周易集解
Collected Explanations of the Zhōuyì
by 李鼎祚 Lǐ Dǐngzuò (mid-Táng, of Zī zhōu 資州)
About the work
The single most important Táng-period anthology of pre-Táng Yì commentary, compiled by 李鼎祚 Lǐ Dǐngzuò of Zī zhōu (modern Zī zhōng 資中, Sìchuān) sometime after 755 CE while serving as Zhùzuòláng 著作郎 (“Director of Compositions”) in the Imperial Library (Bìshū shěng 祕書省). The work systematically gathers commentary from thirty-five named pre-Táng masters and from the Jiǔjiā Yì 九家易 (“Nine-Houses Yì”) and Qián záodù 乾鑿度 — preserving substantial fragments of the otherwise-lost Hàn xiàngshù 象數 commentaries (孟喜 Mèng Xǐ, 焦贛 Jiāo Gàn, 京房 Jīng Fáng, 馬融 Mǎ Róng, 荀爽 Xún Shuǎng, 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán, 宋衷 Sòng Zhōng, 虞翻 Yú Fān, 陸績 Lù Jì, 干寶 Gān Bǎo, 王肅 Wáng Sù, 姚信 Yáo Xìn, 王廙 Wáng Yì, 張璠 Zhāng Pán, 向秀 Xiàng Xiù, 侯果 Hóu Guǒ, 蜀才 Shǔcái, 翟元 Dí Yuán, 崔憬 Cuī Jǐng, etc.). Lǐ programmatically describes his project in the preface as kān Fǔsì zhī yěwén, bǔ Kāngchéng zhī yìxiàng 刋輔嗣之野文，補康成之逸象 — “to prune 王弼 Wáng Bì’s wild words and supply what is missing from 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán’s images” — i.e. a corrective restoration of xiàngshù against the yìlǐ 義理 monopoly that had been imposed by 孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá’s zhèngyì a century earlier (KR1a0007).
Without this book, the entire Hàn Yì tradition would be unrecoverable: virtually every Qīng kǎozhèng recompilation of a Hàn Yì school (王應麟 Wáng Yīnglín on Zhèng KR1a0003, 惠棟 Huì Dòng’s augmented Zhèng KR1a0004, 姚士粦 Yáo Shìlín on Lù Jì KR1a0005, 張惠言 Zhāng Huìyán on Yú Fān, 馬國翰 Mǎ Guóhàn on virtually all of them) draws principally on quotations preserved here. The Sìkù tiyao judges it “truly a precious antique manuscript” (zhēn kě bǎo zhī gǔ jí 真可寶之古笈).
The textual history is complex: Lǐ’s own preface gives the work as eighteen juàn (ten of jíjiě + one appended Lüèlì of Wáng Bì + six of a separate work Suǒyǐn 索隱 + the preface = the original “eighteen-juàn” claim, which the Sìkù editors decode as 10 + 1 + 6 with the preface counted separately). The Hàn-Táng bibliographies record seventeen juàn; 晁公武 Cháo Gōngwǔ and 李燾 Lǐ Tāo of the Sòng saw a ten-juàn recension; 朱睦㮮 Zhū Mùwēng’s 1557 preface (嘉靖丁巳) likewise gives ten. 毛晉 Máo Jìn’s Jígǔgé 汲古閣 print of the late Míng arbitrarily redivided the surviving ten juàn into seventeen to make the count match the Tángshū entry, and thereby produced the present recension. The lost Suǒyǐn was a separate auxiliary work covering passages where the canonical text and commentaries were difficult to reconcile (“kǎ ér páng yǐn 錯綜旁引”); it was already lost by the early Sòng.
Lǐ’s compilation reorders the canonical text in a peculiar way: he prefixes each of the sixty-four hexagrams with the relevant fragment of the Xùguà zhuàn 序卦傳 (the Wing explaining the order), modelled on the Máoshī 毛詩 practice of prefixing each ode with its xiǎo xù 小序 — an editorial choice that became standard in the xiàngshù tradition.
Composition window 755–800: notBefore is the conventional terminus post quem (the Jiù Tángshū jīngjí zhì records up to Kāiyuán prosperity and does not contain this work, hence Lǐ is post-An-Lushan); notAfter the conventional terminus ante quem of the late-eighth-century Yì school’s reception of the work.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Zhōuyì jíjiě in seventeen juàn was composed by 李鼎祚 Lǐ Dǐngzuò of the Táng. The Tángshū contains no biographical entry for him, and the beginning and end of his life are unrecorded. Only by the title-and-rank line at the end of his preface do we know that his office was Zhùzuòláng of the Imperial Library (Bìshū shěng zhùzuòláng 祕書省著作郎). According to 袁桷 Yuán Jué’s Qīngróng jūshì jí 清容居士集, there is at Zī zhōu a “Dǐngzuò Reading Terrace” (Dǐngzuò dúshū tái 鼎祚讀書臺) — from which we know him to have been a Zīzhōu man, and no more. 朱睦㮮 Zhū Mùwēng’s preface calls him Bìgé xuéshì 祕閣學士, on what authority is unknown. His period also cannot be established. The Jiù Tángshū Jīngjí zhì records all four-section works current under Kāiyuán; the present compilation is not in it — so we know he is a man post-Tiānbǎo.
The Xīn Tángshū Yìwénzhì gives the book at seventeen juàn; 晁公武 Cháo Gōngwǔ’s Dúshū zhì says: “What I now have is only ten juàn; beginning and end are wholly entire and nothing is lost — surely later hands consolidated it?” The Jīngyì kǎo quotes 李燾 Lǐ Tāo as saying: “Dǐngzuò’s self-preface gives just ten juàn, with no losses.” Zhū Mùwēng’s preface, written in jiājìng dīngsì (1557, Jiājìng 36), likewise claims the self-preface gives ten juàn, agreeing with Lǐ Tāo’s account. The 毛晉 Máo Jìn Jígǔgé edition currently in circulation, however, gives “seventeen juàn,” and its preface also says “Wáng’s Lüèlì appended at the end, comprising eighteen juàn in all” — wholly at odds with the various authorities, sowing considerable doubt.
We have now examined the preface itself. It says: “And as for the [matter of the] hexagrams and lines and Tuàn and Xiàng — the principles touch the deeply mysterious; the canonical text and the Wényán exhaust what writing can do. Separately I have composed an Suǒyǐn 索隱 [Searching the Hidden]; the warp and weft of root and shoot, the phonetics and meanings, are both preserved” — and so on. From this, the Jíjiě proper is ten juàn, plus the appended Lüèlì one juàn = eleven juàn; there is, separately again, an Suǒyǐn in six juàn; together they make seventeen juàn. What the Tángshū records is therefore the Suǒyǐn and Lüèlì taken in together — not in fact a corruption. By the Sòng the Suǒyǐn was scattered and lost; the print editions also dropped the Lüèlì; only the Jíjiě in ten juàn survived. So the Sòng records do not match the Tángshū count. With Máo’s print, the ten juàn were finally recut as seventeen so as to match the Tángshū wording, and the preface’s “ten juàn” was changed to “eighteen juàn” so as to include the Lüèlì — and so it now no longer matches Zhū Mùwēng’s preface either.
In short, since the Sòng no one investigated the preface’s phrase “separately I have composed Suǒyǐn”; doubters doubted in error, emenders emended in error. Even those who proved that the original was ten juàn could not explain why the Tángshū had said seventeen, and so the more they explained, the more confused the matter became. We now examine and correct the question in detail to dispel future doubts. As to the ten-juàn recension — we have not seen it, and in the meantime register the work under the Máo edition. Splittings and combinings of juàn-divisions do not bear on the great purpose, and need not all be retroactively corrected.
The book still uses 王弼 Wáng Bì’s [arrangement of the] base canon, except that it scatters the Xùguà zhuàn among the heads of the sixty-four hexagrams [as prefatory notes] — modelled on the Máoshī practice of distributing the Xiǎo xù prefatory matter among the odes. The masters quoted include: Zǐxià 子夏, 孟喜 Mèng Xǐ, 焦贛 Jiāo Gàn [Jiāo Yánshòu], 京房 Jīng Fáng, 馬融 Mǎ Róng, 荀爽 Xún Shuǎng, Zhèng Yuán 鄭元 [= 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán], 劉表 Liú Biǎo, 何晏 Hé Yàn, 宋衷 Sòng Zhōng, 虞翻 Yú Fān, 陸績 Lù Jì, 干寶 Gān Bǎo, 王肅 Wáng Sù, 王弼 Wáng Bì, 姚信 Yáo Xìn, 王廙 Wáng Yì, 張璠 Zhāng Pán, 向秀 Xiàng Xiù, 王凱沖 Wáng Kǎichōng, 侯果 Hóu Guǒ, 蜀才 Shǔcái, 翟元 Dí Yuán, 韓康伯 Hán Kāngbó, 劉巘 Liú Yǎn, 何妥 Hé Tuǒ, 崔憬 Cuī Jǐng, 沈驎士 Shěn Línshì, Master Lú 盧氏 (note: in the Suí jīngjí zhì a Zhōuyì zhù by “Master Lú” appears under that anonymous form), 崔覲 Cuī Jǐn, 伏曼容 Fú Mànróng, and 孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá (note: the foregoing thirty-two are as identified in Zhū Mùwēng’s preface) — together with 姚規 Yáo Guī, 朱仰之 Zhū Yǎngzhī, and 蔡景君 Cài Jǐngjūn (note: these three further identified by 朱彝尊 Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo in supplementary investigation) — thirty-five masters in all. The self-preface says: “I prune Fǔsì’s wild words; I supplement Kāngchéng’s omitted images” (kān Fǔsì zhī yěwén, bǔ Kāngchéng zhī yìxiàng 刋輔嗣之野文，補康成之逸象).
Once Wáng’s school was firmly established, Hàn-period Yì learning consequently perished; and that scholars a thousand years on can still verify the original meaning of the drawing-of-the-trigrams, depends entirely on the survival of this book. It is in truth a precious antique manuscript.
Respectfully revised and submitted, seventh month of the forty-fifth year of Qiánlóng [1780].
General Compilers: 紀昀 Jǐ Yún, 陸錫熊 Lù Xīxióng, 孫士毅 Sūn Shìyì. General Reviser: 陸費墀 Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
李鼎祚 Lǐ Dǐngzuò is one of the most consequential mid-Táng Yì scholars and one of the most poorly documented: no entry in either the Jiù Tángshū or the Xīn Tángshū liè zhuàn, no surviving funerary inscription, no Tang-poetry corpus mentioning him. He signs his own preface as Bìshū shěng zhùzuòláng — a junior compositional post in the Imperial Library — and the only other secure datum is 袁桷 Yuán Jué’s Yuán-period record of a “Dǐngzuò Reading Terrace” at Zī zhōu (modern Sìchuān). The internal evidence places him post-755 (the An Lushan rebellion): his work is absent from the Jiù Tángshū bibliographic monograph (which records up to the high-Kāiyuán). The conventional reckoning places his active life in the second half of the eighth century. His own preface presents the work as a programmatic restoration of the xiàngshù tradition against the yìlǐ monopoly imposed by the zhèngyì commission a century earlier (KR1a0007).
The work’s structure: under the 王弼 Wáng Bì arrangement of the base text, with each hexagram’s own Xùguà zhuàn fragment prefixed (after the Máoshī xiǎo xù model), Lǐ assembles passage-by-passage commentary from his thirty-five masters. The signal preserved-fragments are of 虞翻 Yú Fān (the most extensively cited; 張惠言 Zhāng Huìyán’s later Yú shì Yì 虞氏易 is principally a redaction of these), of 荀爽 Xún Shuǎng (the jíjiě preserves perhaps two-thirds of the surviving Xún material), of 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán (the largest single block of surviving Zhèng Yì fragments), of 陸績 Lù Jì, 侯果 Hóu Guǒ, 崔憬 Cuī Jǐng, and the Jiǔjiā Yì 九家易. The “Nine-Houses Yì” itself is a Hàn or post-Hàn composite drawing on nine masters of the Hàn line — its identity is not stable across the bibliographic record, and what reaches us is what Lǐ Dǐngzuò chose to call by that name.
The Suǒyǐn 索隱 (“Searching the Hidden”), Lǐ’s separate auxiliary work, is recorded by him in the preface as a six-juàn companion treating “the [conjoined] warp-and-weft of root-and-shoot, phonetics and meanings”; it was already scattered and lost by the early Sòng and is known only from the Sìkù editors’ decoding of his preface. (Several Qīng evidential scholars searched for it without success; the Suǒyǐn is the canonical exemplar of a “completely lost auxiliary by an extant author” in the Yì corpus.)
The textual history then runs through 晁公武 Cháo Gōngwǔ’s ten-juàn witness, 朱睦㮮 Zhū Mùwēng’s 1557 print (also ten juàn), 毛晉 Máo Jìn’s Jígǔgé late-Míng repagination as seventeen juàn, and the Sìkù WYG re-edition. The 1557 Zhū Mùwēng preface — preserved at the head of the WYG _000.txt and reproduced as a small monument of mid-Míng Yì-bibliographic argument — is itself a major source for the Sòng-Yuán reception of the work and its identification of pre-Táng Yì schools.
The Qīng evidential reception of the Jíjiě is enormous. Sūn Tángshū’s 孫堂書 Hàn Wèi èrshíyī jiā Yì zhù 漢魏二十一家易註 (Qīng) is essentially a redaction of Jíjiě citations under master-by-master heads. Zhāng Huìyán’s Yú shì Yì (1808 preface) is a redaction of the Yú Fān citations. 馬國翰 Mǎ Guóhàn’s Yùhán shānfáng jíyì shū draws on Jíjiě citations across the canon. The standard modern critical edition is Lǐ Dàoxiáng 李道湘 / Wáng Fēnghǎi 王豐海 et al. at Zhōnghuá shūjú or the Bei-dà punctuated text in the Shísān jīng zhùshū corollary set; the Cài Jié 蔡傑 et al. modern collation is also widely cited.
Translations and research
No complete European-language translation of the Jíjiě exists; selected Yú Fān, Xún Shuǎng, and Zhèng Xuán fragments preserved by Lǐ are translated in scholarly studies of those individual masters.
- Lǐ Dàoxiáng 李道湘 (ed.), Zhōuyì jíjiě jiàoshì 周易集解校釋 (Bashu shushe / various reissues) — modern punctuated edition with collation against Máo Jìn, Sun Xīngyǎn 孫星衍, and Sìkù recensions.
- Cài Jiéhǎ 蔡杰 (or Yáng Jiāluò 楊家駱 ed.), Sìkù WYG-base reprint with collation — a standard scholar’s text.
- Zhāng Huìyán 張惠言, Yú shì Yì lǐ 虞氏易禮 / Yú shì Yì 虞氏易 (preface 1808) — Qīng kǎozhèng redaction of the Yú Fān citations.
- Sūn Tángshū 孫堂書, Hàn Wèi èrshíyī jiā Yì zhù 漢魏二十一家易註 (Qīng) — master-by-master redaction.
- Lín Zhōngjūn 林忠軍, Xiàngshù Yìxué fāzhǎn shǐ 象數易學發展史 (Qí Lǔ shūshè, 1994) — standard Sinophone history; relies extensively on Jíjiě citations for the Hàn-Wèi-Wú section.
- Bent Nielsen, A Companion to Yi jing Numerology and Cosmology (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) — multiple entries (Yú Fān, Xún Shuǎng, Hóu Guǒ, etc.) drawing on Jíjiě citations.
- Zhū Bóqūn 朱伯崑, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ 易學哲學史, vol. 1 (Huáxià, rev. 1995) — chapter on the Jíjiě and Tang-period xiàngshù revival.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù editors’ textual reconstruction of how the seventeen / ten / eighteen juàn-counts arose — by reading “別撰索隱” (“separately composed Suǒyǐn”) in Lǐ’s preface as the missing piece all earlier commentators had overlooked — is a small but elegant specimen of kǎozhèng method on bibliographic numbers. The argument has been generally accepted.
The naming “Master Lú” 盧氏 in the Jíjiě citation pool is the only surviving witness to a Zhōuyì zhù recorded anonymously in the Suí jīngjí zhì — the master himself is no longer identifiable.
The work’s privileged status in the Qīng Hàn xué programme — 惠棟 Huì Dòng, 張惠言 Zhāng Huìyán, Sūn Tángshū, 馬國翰 Mǎ Guóhàn, 李道平 Lǐ Dàopíng (whose Zhōuyì jíjiě zuǎn shū 周易集解纂疏 of 1842 is the most ambitious Qīng sub-commentary on Jíjiě) — make this the single most-cited Táng Yì source in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship.