Dú Yì xiángshuō 讀易詳說
Detailed Talks on Reading the Yì
by 李光 Lǐ Guāng (zì Tàifā 泰發, hào Dú Yì lǎorén 讀易老人, 1078–1159, of Shàngyú 上虞)
About the work
A ten-juan Yì commentary by 李光 Lǐ Guāng — Northern-and-Southern-Sòng anti-秦檜 Qín-Huì statesman, Cānzhī zhèngshì 參知政事 (“Vice Privy Councillor”), and one of the four canonical Sì míngchén 四名臣 (“Four Famous Officials”) of the early Southern Sòng. Dú Yì lǎorén (“Old Man Reading the Yì”) is the sobriquet Lǐ adopted in his Lǐngnán 嶺南 (Guǎngdōng) exile after his 1140 (Shàoxīng gēngshēn) protest against the peace settlement with the Jīn offended Qín Huì. The book records what he gained in his exile years’ meditation on the canon. The work was lost between Míng and Qīng and recovered for the Sìkù from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn; lacunae include seven hexagrams entirely (Yù, Suí, Wúwàng, Kuí, Jiǎn, Zhōngfú, plus Jìn from line 6-3 onward), the last four lines of Fù, all of Dàxù, and the Xìcí and following — apparently a combination of original incompleteness and copyist loss.
The work’s distinctive note is its programmatically political-moral Yì-reading: Lǐ takes nearly every hexagram-and-line statement as a lesson in ruler-and-minister conduct, and his prose moves easily between Yì-glossing and historical exempla (the Gǔ 蠱 hexagram comparison to King Xuān of Zhōu’s restoration after the disastrous reign of King Yōu, the Pǐ 否 hexagram lesson on the gentleman in occlusion, etc.). Lǐ’s signature preface — written for 胡銓 Hú Quán’s (zì Bāngheng 邦衡, the great anti-Qín-Huì memorialist) lost Yì jiě — articulates the principle: “The Yì as a book is wholly for clarifying human affairs; scholars who get stuck in xiàngshù turn the Yì into a useless book.”
The Sìkù editors’ final verdict: in places where Lǐ keys yáo-statements directly to ruler-and-minister conduct and adduces historical events, “the over-tight matchings here and there cannot be entirely avoided”; but the overall yìshù approach — practical, moral, oriented toward “Heaven-and-people, sage-and-people” instruction — is “actually more useful for the learner than those who pursue xìngmìng-and-numerology in the manner of the Buddhists’ transmission of the heart-seal or the Daoists’ bequeathing of cinnabar formulae.”
Composition window 1140–1155: notBefore is the year of the demotion to Lǐngnán; notAfter is the year of Qín Huì’s death (which led, in 1156, to Lǐ Guāng’s rehabilitation). Lǐ died in 1159 at age 82; the work was likely substantively complete by 1155.
The textual problem: the Sòngshǐ records the work as Yì zhuàn, other Sòng catalogues as Dú Yì lǎorén jiě shuō or Dú Yì xiángshuō; all give ten juan; clearly one work under multiple titles. The Sìkù follows the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn form Dú Yì xiángshuō. The catalog meta gives only “d. 1155” for the author’s lifedates; CBDB gives 1078–1159, followed here.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Dú Yì xiángshuō in ten juan was composed by 李光 Lǐ Guāng of the Sòng. Guāng, zì Tàifā, a man of Shàngyú; jìnshì of Chóngníng 5 [1106]; rose in office to Cānzhī zhèngshì; canonised as Zhuāngjiǎn 莊簡. His record stands in his own Sòngshǐ biography. Guāng was a student of 劉安世 Liú Ānshì; his learning had a teacher’s tradition. In Shàoxīng gēngshēn [1140] he gave offence to 秦檜 Qín Huì for arguing against the peace-settlement and was demoted to Lǐngnán; he self-styled Dú Yì lǎorén and, channelling what he had grasped, composed this book. So in his treatment of the order-and-disorder of the present world and of his own advance-and-retreat, his observation-of-the-imagery and weighing-of-the-wording always thrice devote themselves to the matter.
For example: in glossing Kūn 6-4 he says: “A great minister serves the ruler with the Way; if the ruler has flawed virtue and yet [the minister] cannot remonstrate, if the court has defective government and yet [the minister] cannot speak, then this is rapaciously enjoying favour and stealing position — how can this be the meaning of the sage’s vouchsafed instruction? So the Wényán takes ‘tying up the bag’ as the worthy man’s hidden time; but the great minister cannot use this to excuse himself.”
In glossing Pǐ 否 line one he says: “When the small man is demoted and removed, often he glares with hatred at his superior; the gentleman, in distress or in peace, is in either case at peace, and has not yet for one day forgotten his ruler.”
In glossing Gǔ 蠱 line one he says: “When the world is corrupted, only by getting an able successor-son to take up great affairs is one able to revive it. King Xuān of Zhōu, succeeding King Yōu’s chaos, repaired carriages and horses, prepared armaments, again summoned the regional lords to the Eastern Capital, and at length completed the work of restoration: this can be called ‘having a son.’ Hence to inspect [the work of his father] without fault. Yet the work of restoration is hard to entrust wholly to the great minister; the Gǔ hexagram especially named ‘father and son’ is for this reason.” His drawing on events to express loyalty, depending on the canon to set up meaning — the principal thrust is everywhere of this kind.
The Sòngshǐ records his memorial of the Shàoxīng era which says: “The Huái-zone is a foot away [from us], yet not the slightest is being prepared; the long Yangtze of a thousand lǐ serves as no boundary at all. [Eastern] Jìn’s Yuándì in his small reduced way could still set up ancestral altars, repair the palace gates, and preserve Jiāngzhè — never have we heard of one who solely promotes the avoidance of the enemy as today does.” His withdrawal-and-composition of this book is in the same spirit.
Guāng once wrote a preface for Hú Bānghéng (胡銓 Hú Quán)‘s Yì jiě, which says: “The Yì’s function as a book is wholly to clarify human affairs; scholars who become stuck in xiàngshù turn the Yì into a near-useless book. Bānghéng’s Yì-talk is truly the kind one can talk Heaven-and-people with.” And further: “Of old, almost all who were exiled were full of resentment and anger; Bānghéng has drifted into the malarial countryside and yet plays his mind among the three lines [of the trigrams]: this can be called being in difficulty without losing one’s prosperity-place. Without one who has heard the Way, who could do this?” The preface, though made for [Hú] Quán, is in fact also a self-clarification of the purport of his own composition.
In the book the guà-and-yáo statements are throughout addressed to the ruler-and-minister and verified against historical events; here and there over-tight pairings cannot be entirely avoided. But the sage made the Yì in order to give vouchsafed instruction, that all-under-Heaven and ten-thousand generations might know what to follow and what to depart from — not so that a few of high intellect might brag of their wondrous insights, like the Buddhist transmission of the heart-seal or the Daoist bequeathing of the cinnabar formula. Those who privilege divergence and develop xìngmìng readings, calculating odd-and-even — the more refined and wondrous their language, the further from the sage’s setting-up-of-instruction-to-enlighten-the-people purpose, going north when they should go south. Truly, this rather than that — Lǐ’s book here is realistic, close to reason, of benefit to the learner.
Since the Míng there has long been no printed recension; 朱彝尊 Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo also says “not seen.” We have now from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn gathered the materials and made a compiled edition. The original lacks the seven hexagrams Yù, Suí, Wúwàng, Kuí, Jiǎn, Zhōngfú — and the Jìn hexagram from line 6-3 down. The Fù and Dàxù hexagrams are not lacking in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn witness, but Guāng’s gloss on Fù lacks the last four yáo, and Dàxù preserves not a character; from the Xìcí zhuàn on, there is also no commentary. Whether this is the original state or copyist losses, neither can be known; we register it accordingly. The book is given in the Sòngshǐ as Yì zhuàn; the various catalogues’ titles are Dú Yì lǎorén jiě shuō or Dú Yì xiángshuō — not uniform, but all give ten juan, presumably one work under different names. We now follow the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn in titling it Dú Yì xiángshuō, divided as before into ten juan, preserving the original arrangement.
Respectfully revised and submitted, ninth month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng [1781].
General Compilers: 紀昀 Jǐ Yún, 陸錫熊 Lù Xīxióng, 孫士毅 Sūn Shìyì. General Reviser: 陸費墀 Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
李光 Lǐ Guāng (1078–1159), of Shàngyú 上虞 in Yuèzhōu 越州 (modern Shàoxīng, Zhèjiāng), is one of the canonical “Four Famous Officials” of the early Southern Sòng (Sì míngchén 四名臣) — together with 李綱 Lǐ Gāng, 趙鼎 Zhào Dǐng, and 胡銓 Hú Quán — the recovery party’s principal voices against Qín Huì’s peace-and-cession program. Jìnshì of 1106 (Chóngníng 5). Student of the late-Northern-Sòng moralist 劉安世 Liú Ānshì (the same teacher 陳瓘 Chén Guàn studied with — see KR1a0018).
In office under Huīzōng he held a series of provincial appointments; after the southern crossing rose under Gāozōng to Cānzhī zhèngshì. His 1140 memorial against the peace negotiations gave Qín Huì the opening to demote and exile him; he spent the 1140s and the early 1150s in Lǐngnán (modern Hǎinán and Guǎngxī), in the same exile circle as Hú Quán and Zhào Dǐng. The Sòngshǐ (juan 363) gives him a substantial biography in the Zhōng yì zhuàn, and canonized his posthumous title Zhuāngjiǎn. Rehabilitated in 1156 after Qín Huì’s death; died in 1159 at age 82.
The Dú Yì xiángshuō belongs squarely to the genre of Sòng-period exile-meditation Yì commentary — alongside 蘇軾 Sū Shì’s Dōngpō Yìzhuàn 東坡易傳 (KR1a0015) (composed in Hǎinán) and 程頤 Chéng Yí’s Yīchuān Yìzhuàn 伊川易傳 (KR1a0016) (composed in Fúzhōu). Its distinctive feature is the unusually direct keying of every yáo-statement to a ruler-and-minister political situation and the use of historical exempla (King Xuān of Zhōu, the Eastern Jìn Yuándì) to ground the Yì readings. The Sìkù tiyao’s extensive quotation of representative passages — the Kūn 6-4 great-minister piece, the Pǐ line-one demoted-but-loyal piece, the Gǔ line-one Xuān-of-Zhōu piece — is itself a small monument of canon-political reading, and the editors’ philosophical defence (a thoroughly Confucian commentary “more useful than” Buddhist-Daoist abstruse philosophy) is one of the more programmatic statements in the Yì-section of the Sìkù yìlǐ-pluralist editorial line.
Lǐ’s exiled-Confucian-moralist preface for Hú Quán’s lost Yì jiě — preserved in his collected works Lǐ Zhuāngjiǎn gōng wénjí 莊簡集 — has become the locus classicus of the Yì-as-tool-of-moral-political-instruction position. The line “the Yì as a book is wholly for clarifying human affairs; scholars who get stuck in xiàngshù turn the Yì into a near-useless book” has been frequently quoted in twentieth-century Sinophone scholarship as an early articulation of the practical-moral approach to the Yì.
The textual problem (multiple titles in the Sòng catalogues, total Míng-period loss, Yǒnglè dàdiǎn recovery with internal lacunae) is a standard mid-Sòng commentary survival pattern. The hexagrams missing in transmission are notably grouped — Yù 16, Suí 17, Wúwàng 25, Jìn 35, Kuí 38, Jiǎn 39, Zhōngfú 61 — without obvious thematic connection; copyist loss is the most likely explanation.
Translations and research
No European-language translation. Specialist literature is sparse.
- For the political context: Charles A. Peterson and others’ chapters on the early Southern Sòng in the Cambridge History of China vol. 5.
- Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (Univ. of Hawaii, 1992) — for the early Southern-Sòng Dào-xué milieu.
- Modern punctuated editions of Dú Yì xiángshuō on the WYG / Sìkù base in standard Sòng Yì-anthology reprints.
- Liú Yùjiàn 劉玉建, Sòng dài Yìxué shǐ 宋代易學史 — broader context.
- Lǐ Zhuāng-jiǎn gōng wénjí 莊簡集 (Sìkù WYG reprint) — Lǐ Guāng’s collected prose, including the lost-Hú-Quán-Yì-preface.
Other points of interest
The Lǐ Guāng → Hú Quán → southern-Sòng moralist Yì network — friends in Lǐngnán exile, mutually-prefacing each other’s Yì commentaries, all writing political-moral exegesis of the canonical Yì against the Qín Huì peace party — is a case of the Yì as the canonical text of the Confucian-loyalist conscience under unfavourable political circumstance. The pattern continues into the Yuán (the Sòng-loyalists’ Yì-commentary) and Míng-Qīng transition (王夫之 Wáng Fūzhī, 黃宗羲 Huáng Zōngxī).
The Sìkù editors’ specific procedural decision — to register a fragmentary text in its received-fragmentary form rather than restoring lacunae — is the standard Yǒnglè dàdiǎn-recovery practice; the entry on KR1a0009 Zhōuyì kǒujué yì shows the same practice for an even more fragmentary text.