Zǐyán Yìzhuàn 紫巖易傳
Master Zǐyán’s Commentary on the Yì
by 張浚 (Zhāng Jùn, zì Déyuǎn 德遠, hào Zǐyán 紫巖, posthumous title Zhōngxiàn 忠獻, 1097–1164, of Miánzhú 綿竹)
About the work
A ten-juan Yì commentary by 張浚 Zhāng Jùn — the great Southern-Sòng anti-Jurchen statesman, principal architect of the early Southern-Sòng northward campaigns, and moralist of the recovery vision. Zǐyán is his sobriquet. The work was self-collated by Zhāng in two successive drafts; he annotated the second draft personally with the note “the corrections in this version are very many; on the sixth day of the fourth month of Shàoxīng wùyín [1158/04/06], it is now the settled text.” His great-grandson 張獻之 Zhāng Xiànzhī transcribed it for the family library and appended a Dú Yì zá shuō 讀易雜說 (“Miscellaneous Talks on Reading the Yì”) as the tenth juan, making the present ten-juan textus.
The Sìkù tiyao notes that 朱熹 Zhū Xī’s xíngzhuàng 行狀 of Zhāng Jùn already records the work as a complete ten-juan corpus including both Yì jiě and Zá shuō, even though Xiànzhī’s postface (dated Jiādìng gēngchén = 1220) places his transcription long after Zhāng Jùn’s death. The editors infer that Xiànzhī merely transcribed a pre-existing ten-juan textus; he did not edit or compile.
Doctrinally, the work is one of the more philosophically substantial Southern-Sòng Yì commentaries: prose “of pure quality, every account of yīnyáng motion-and-rest fitted to the rectitude of yìlǐ,” in the editors’ phrase. The Sìkù editors register one significant reservation: 胡一桂 Hú Yīguì notes that Zhāng adopts 劉牧 Liú Mù’s KR1a0011 Hé-tú-as-9 / Luò-shū-as-10 assignment (against the 蔡元定 Cài Yuándìng / Zhū Xī Hé-tú-as-10 / Luò-shū-as-9 assignment), a position that Zhū Xī himself rejected in his Yìxué qǐméng programme. Yet Zhū, in writing Zhāng Jùn’s xíngzhuàng, says only that Zhāng was “especially deep on the Yì, Chūnqiū, Lúnyǔ, and Mèngzǐ” — not mentioning the descent from Liú Mù — “perhaps having tactfully avoided” (dài huì zhī yú 殆諱之歟). The Sìkù editors’ wording is delicate; they are recording a moment in which Zhū Xī suppressed an inconvenient lineage detail in order to preserve the political-moral hagiography of Zhāng Jùn as the great anti-Jurchen statesman.
The composition window 1140–1158 covers the slow accumulation of the two drafts: notBefore is a conservative lower bound for Zhāng’s serious Yì-scholarship after his retirement to Yǒngzhōu 永州 in the early 1140s; notAfter is the dated completion of the second draft (1158/04/06). The catalog meta gives only “d. 1164”; CBDB confirms 1097–1164.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Zǐyán Yìzhuàn in ten juan was composed by 張浚 Zhāng Jùn of the Sòng. Zǐyán is Jùn’s sobriquet. His great-grandson 張獻之 Zhāng Xiànzhī’s postface says: “Zhōngxiàngōng sank his heart in the Yì and once composed a commentary on it, in two successive drafts. He himself wrote on the second-draft autograph: ‘The corrections in this version are very many; on the sixth day of the fourth month of Shàoxīng wùyín, I, So-and-so, having now committed it to writing, this is the settled text.’ Xiànzhī once transcribed it, attaching the Dú Yì zá shuō, in ten juan in all, and stored it at home.” Going by this, the Zá shuō in one juan would seem a piece [Xiànzhī] supplemented. But examining Xiànzhī’s postface, it bears the date Jiādìng gēngchén [1220]; whereas Master Zhū in writing Jùn’s xíngzhuàng already states that there is Yì jiě and Zá shuō together making ten juan. So Xiànzhī did no more than transcribe; he did not in fact edit-and-compile.
The book’s diction stands on pure ground; throughout, where it speaks of yīnyáng’s motion and rest, it always fits the rectitude of meaning-and-pattern. The last juan is what is called Zá shuō. 胡一桂 Hú Yīguì objects that [Zhāng’s commentary] takes 劉牧 Liú Mù as principal; and indeed, examining what is said about the Hé tú, this is true. Master Zhū does not adopt Mù’s reading; but in writing Jùn’s xíngzhuàng he says only that Jùn was “especially deep on the Yì, the Chūnqiū, the Lúnyǔ, and the Mèngzǐ” — not saying that his Yì descends from Mù. Perhaps he tactfully avoided this.
Respectfully revised and submitted, ninth 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
張浚 Zhāng Jùn (1097–1164), of Miánzhú 綿竹 in Hànzhōu 漢州 (modern Sìchuān), is one of the principal political figures of the early-and-mid Southern Sòng — jìnshì of 1118 (Zhènghé 8) and a leading anti-Jurchen statesman through five reigns. The Sòngshǐ (juan 361) carries his canonical biography. He is not to be confused with the late-Northern-Sòng anti-Wáng-Ānshí official Zhāng Dūn 張惇.
After the southern crossing in 1127 he served Gāozōng as Zhī Shūmì yuàn shì 知樞密院事, and later led the imperial expeditionary armies in the failed 1131 Fùzhōu 富州 and 1140 Yánchéng 郾城 campaigns against the Jīn; his alliance with the moderate-faction chancellor 趙鼎 Zhào Dǐng and his programmatic anti-秦檜 Qín-Huì stance kept him on a long cycle of demotion-and-recall through the 1130s and 1140s. His son 張栻 Zhāng Shì (1133–1180) is the canonical “Master Nánxuān” 南軒 of Southern-Sòng Dàoxué. 朱熹 Zhū Xī, on Zhāng Jùn’s death in 1164, composed the canonical xíngzhuàng memorialising his career; the relationship between Zhū Xī’s hagiography of Zhāng Jùn (as the political-moral prototype of the recovery party) and Zhū’s reservations about Zhāng’s actual Yì-doctrine (the Liú Mù lineage on the Hétú) is recorded delicately in the Sìkù tiyao’s “perhaps tactfully avoided.”
The Zǐyán Yìzhuàn belongs to Zhāng’s middle-and-late retirement years at Yǒngzhōu 永州 in modern Húnán (1141–1158, with intermissions). The two-draft compositional history — autograph-attested to a final completion of 1158/04/06 — is unusually well-documented for a Southern-Sòng Yì commentary; the dating note is one of the most precisely fixed in the entire KR1a corpus.
Doctrinally, Zhāng’s reading combines:
- 劉牧 Liú Mù’s Hé-Luò assignments (9-as-Hétú, 10-as-Luòshū) — the position canonical-classics scholarship later rejected in favour of 蔡元定 Cài Yuándìng’s reverse assignment.
- A philosophical yìlǐ exposition of yīnyáng motion-and-rest — the locus that the Sìkù editors single out as “of pure quality” (chún cuì 醇粹).
- A moral-political situational reading keyed to the affective-political dynamics of the yáo-positions, broadly in the Yīchuān Yìzhuàn 伊川易傳 (KR1a0016) line but independent in detail.
The Zá shuō tenth juan — substantively part of the work as Zhū Xī already saw it in the early 1160s — is a free-standing collection of Yì-philosophical observations not keyed to specific hexagrams; comparable in genre to 司馬光 Sīmǎ Guāng’s Wēngōng Yì shuō 溫公易說 (KR1a0013) general-discussion materials and to the prefatory pieces in Wúyuán Zhōuyì jiě 吳園周易解 (KR1a0019).
The work’s reception in the Southern Sòng was significant — 晁公武 Cháo Gōngwǔ records it; the 魏了翁 Wèi Liǎowēng / 胡一桂 Hú Yīguì line engages it; the family transmission through Zhāng Shì made it a quasi-school commentary of the Hú-Xiāng Yuèlù 嶽麓 academy circle that Zhāng Shì led. Zhū Xī’s complex relationship with both father and son shapes the work’s later canonical reception.
Translations and research
No European-language translation. Specialist literature.
- Charles Hartman, Han Yu and the T’ang Search for Unity (Princeton, 1986); The Making of a Confucian Hero (manuscript) — for context on hagiographic-classical Confucianism in the Southern Sòng.
- Liú Zǐjiàn 劉子健 (James T. C. Liu), Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih (1021-1086) and his New Policies (Harvard, 1959); China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (Harvard, 1988) — for Zhāng Jùn’s political milieu.
- Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (Univ. of Hawaii, 1992) — the standard English-language treatment of the Zhū Xī–Zhāng Shì–Zhāng Jùn family-and-doctrine triangle.
- Modern punctuated editions on the WYG / Sìkù base.
- Liú Bīn 劉斌 / Wáng Tiějūn 王鐵軍 articles in Zhōuyì yánjiū on the Zhāng Jùn / Zhāng Shì Yì lineage.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù editors’ “perhaps tactfully avoided” remark — registering Zhū Xī’s silent passage over Zhāng Jùn’s Yì descent from Liú Mù in the otherwise comprehensive xíngzhuàng — is one of the most subtle indictments in the tiyao corpus of the way Zhū Xī’s hagiographic interventions in Sòng intellectual history could omit doctrinal facts that complicated his canon-making. The editors leave it as a huì 諱 (taboo-avoidance / discreet silence) rather than as overt criticism.
The dramatic two-draft autograph note “the corrections in this version are very many; on the sixth day of the fourth month of Shàoxīng wùyín, … this is now the settled text” is one of the most precisely-dated authorial closure notes in the KR1a corpus and confirms that, even for a major commentary like Zhāng’s, the Southern-Sòng author-and-text relationship could be a long, much-revised, and personally-superintended one.