Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ 周易古占法
The Ancient Divinatory Method of the Zhōuyì
with appendix Zhōuyì zhāngjù wài biān 周易章句外編 (“Outer-Edition Chapter-Punctuation of the Zhōuyì”)
by 程迥 Chéng Jiǒng (zì Kějiǔ 可久, jìnshì 1163, of Shāsuí 沙隨 in Nínglíng 寧陵, later of Yúyáo 餘姚)
About the work
A pair of short Sòng Yì treatises by 程迥 Chéng Jiǒng — a Lóngxīng 1 (1163) jìnshì and middle-rank Déxīngxiàn chéng 德興縣丞 (“Vice Magistrate of Déxīng County”), notable in the Sòng-Yuán Yì-tradition principally because 吳澄 Wú Chéng (a leading early-Yuán Confucian) recorded that “Chéng Jiǒng was for Master Zhū a senior; Master Zhū served him with the rite of teacher.” Chéng Jiǒng is therefore conventionally counted as one of the late-Northern-Sòng / early-Southern-Sòng Yì-teachers from whom the formative-Zhū-Xī Yì tradition substantively inherits.
The two works comprise:
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Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ (“The Ancient Divinatory Method of the Zhōuyì”) in one juan, eleven essays. Programmatic exposition of the divinatory hermeneutic, drawing on 邵雍 Shào Yōng’s jiā yī bèi 加一倍 (“doubling”) method and developing the Xìcí and Shuōguà materials into a systematic zhàn (divination) procedure. Uses nì shù 逆數 (“inverse-counting”) for prognostication.
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Zhōuyì zhāngjù wài biān (“Outer-Edition Chapter-Punctuation of the Zhōuyì”) in one juan. Miscellaneous essays on the Yì together with records of ancient and contemporary divinatory verifications. Internal evidence (one entry referring to “[Chéng] Jiǒng having composed Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ, and its preface introduction”) confirms this is a separate work from the gǔ zhàn fǎ, not its second juan as some manuscript transmissions misleadingly title it.
The Sòngshǐ Yìwén zhì correctly records the two works as separate one-juan compilations. Manuscript transmission through later collectors had wrongly conjoined them as “two juan” of a single Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ (titling them as shàng and xià); the Sìkù editors restore the proper bibliographic distinction. 陳振孫 Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí already saw the conjoined form: “Chéng Jiǒng Kějiǔ composed… discussion of divination-method, miscellaneous records of divinatory cases, especially detailed.”
The composition window 1163–1190 covers Chéng Jiǒng’s mature scholarly career after his jìnshì: notBefore the jìnshì date that the catalog meta records (1163); notAfter the conventional terminus consistent with Zhū Xī’s incorporation of Chéng Jiǒng’s doctrines into the Yìxué qǐméng (compiled with 蔡元定 Cài Yuándìng, completed 1186). The Sìkù tiyao explicitly notes that “Master Zhū’s Qǐméng extensively used [Chéng Jiǒng’s] examples.”
Tiyao
We respectfully submit that Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ in one juan and Zhōuyì zhāngjù wài biān in one juan were composed by 程迥 Chéng Jiǒng of the Sòng. Jiǒng, zì Kějiǔ. Originally his family lived at Shāsuí in Nínglíng [modern Hénán]; later they moved to Yúyáo [modern Zhèjiāng]. He received the canon from 聞人茂德 Wénrén Màodé of Jiāxīng and 喻樗 Yù Chū of Yánlíng. Jìnshì of Lóngxīng 1 [1163]. Office: Déxīngxiàn chéng. His record stands in the Sòngshǐ Rúlín zhuàn.
This book has no printed recension in the world; the various copies that book-collectors have transmitted are all in two juan. The first juan is titled “Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ shàng” — eleven essays in all. The second juan, miscellaneously discussing Yì readings and recording ancient-and-modern divinatory verifications, is titled “Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ xià”; and is also titled “Zhōuyì zhāngjù wài biān.” Within it is an entry that says: “[Chéng] Jiǒng having composed Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ, the preface introduces…” — so this is plainly not the lower juan of the divinatory-method work.
Examining the Sòngshǐ Yìwén zhì, it records Jiǒng’s Gǔ Yì zhàn fǎ and Zhōuyì wài biān as two books, both in one juan. Then it must be that only the first juan of eleven essays is Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ, and that the second juan in itself is the Zhōuyì zhāngjù wài biān; later hands erroneously joined them into a single book and so falsely added “shàng-juan” and “xià-juan” markers.
But 陳振孫 Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí records under “Chéng Jiǒng’s Zhōuyì”: “Composed by Chéng Jiǒng Kějiǔ. His discussion of divination-method and his miscellaneous records of divination-events are particularly detailed.” So the conjoined-into-one was already current in the Sòng. The chaos in transmission has its causes.
Jiǒng’s doctrine roots in Master Shào’s “doubling” method, drawing on the Xìcí and Shuōguà to bring out its meaning; he uses inverse-counting (nì shù) to honour divination and to know what comes. The general purport is fully laid out in his self-preface. Afterwards Master Zhū in composing Qǐméng extensively used his examples. 吳澄 Wú Chéng says: “Jiǒng to Master Zhū was a senior; Master Zhū treated him with the shī (teacher) rite.”
Respectfully revised and submitted, twelfth 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
程迥 Chéng Jiǒng (zì Kějiǔ 可久), jìnshì of 1163, was a teacher of 朱熹 Zhū Xī in the senior-junior sense the Yuán Confucian 吳澄 Wú Chéng records: “Master Zhū served him with the rite of teacher” (Zhūzǐ yǐ shīlǐ shì zhī 朱子以師禮事之). The relationship is one of substantive intellectual lineage rather than formal pupillage — Chéng Jiǒng was about a generation older than Zhū Xī, and the two corresponded as colleagues; but Wú Chéng’s witness places Chéng Jiǒng among the immediate predecessors who shaped the formative-Zhū Yì-doctrine.
Chéng Jiǒng’s intellectual antecedents are 聞人茂德 Wénrén Màodé (a Jiāxīng Confucian, a student of the early-Southern-Sòng 李侗 Lǐ Tóng circle), and 喻樗 Yù Chū (1097–1167, zì Zǐcái 子才, of Yánlíng — a substantial early-Southern-Sòng Dàoxué figure with his own surviving corpus of Confucian-classics commentaries). The Wénrén Màodé / Yù Chū transmission line places Chéng Jiǒng in a particular branch of the early-Southern-Sòng Dàoxué network, with a distinctive interest in the divinatory-cosmological dimension of the Yì tradition.
The Zhōuyì gǔ zhàn fǎ programme is methodologically distinctive: Chéng Jiǒng treats the Yì as primarily a divinatory text (rather than a moral-ethical commentary, in the 程頤 Chéng Yí yìlǐ line) and revives the Hàn xiàngshù divinatory apparatus by way of Shào Yōng’s jiā yī bèi doubling method. The use of nì shù (inverse-counting) is the technical innovation: for any given hexagram-and-line situation, one can count back from the divined hexagram to identify the source-state, enabling prognostication of unknown initial conditions from divined outcomes.
Zhū Xī’s Yìxué qǐméng 易學啟蒙 (compiled 1186 with 蔡元定 Cài Yuándìng, KR1a0042 / KR1a0046) absorbed Chéng Jiǒng’s divinatory-method framework substantively. The Sìkù tiyao’s recognition of this lineage is significant: it places the divinatory-method dimension of the Zhū-line Yì programme in continuity with a particular Southern-Sòng predecessor rather than as Zhū Xī’s individual innovation.
The Zhōuyì zhāngjù wài biān is the more textually heterogeneous of the two works — a bǐjì-style miscellany of Yì-readings and divinatory-verification records, similar in genre to the latter portion of 司馬光 Sīmǎ Guāng’s Wēngōng Yì shuō 溫公易說 (KR1a0013) and to the zá shuō portions of other Sòng-period Yì texts. The “ancient and contemporary divinatory verifications” recorded here are a small but valuable Sòng-period source for actual Yì-divinatory practice.
The textual problem (the conjoining-into-two-juan-as-if-one-work, the shàng / xià misleading titles) — already present in Chén Zhènsūn’s witness in the early Southern Sòng — is a small case-study of how unprinted manuscript-only Sòng texts could quickly fall into bibliographic confusion.
Translations and research
No European-language translation. Specialist literature.
- Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (Univ. of Hawaii, 1992) — context for Chéng Jiǒng’s place in the formative-Zhū network.
- Joseph A. Adler, Reconstructing the Confucian Dao: Zhu Xi’s Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi (SUNY, 2014) — the broader picture of Zhū Xī’s Yì-and-cosmological inheritance.
- Modern punctuated reissues on the WYG / Sìkù base.
- Liú Yùjiàn 劉玉建, Sòng dài Yìxué shǐ — chapter context on Chéng Jiǒng and the divinatory-method tradition.
Other points of interest
The Wú Chéng note — “Master Zhū served Chéng Jiǒng with the rite of teacher” — is one of the more specific bits of intellectual-genealogical information about the formation of Zhū Xī’s Yì-doctrine, and supplements the standard Sòngshǐ Dàoxué zhuàn genealogy (李侗 Lǐ Tóng → Zhū Xī, with Chéng Yí through 楊時 Yáng Shí–Lǐ Tóng) with a divinatory-method strand running through Chéng Jiǒng.
The Zhāngjù wài biān’s “ancient and contemporary divinatory verifications” sub-genre is one of the few Sòng-period sources for actual divinatory case-records — a counterpoint to the much larger Yì-philological-and-philosophical literature.