Zhōuyì běnyì jíchéng 周易本義集成
Collected Achievement of the Original Meaning of the Zhōu Changes by 熊良輔
About the work
The Zhōuyì běnyì jíchéng is a Yuán subcommentary in twelve juàn arranged around Zhū Xī’s 朱熹 Zhōuyì běnyì 周易本義 (KR1a0036). Its author, Xióng Liángfǔ 熊良輔 (zì Rènzhòng 任重, hào Méibiān 梅邊) of Nánchāng 南昌, studied first under his fellow townsman Xióng Kǎi 熊凱 (Yáoxī xiānsheng 遥溪先生) and later under Gōng Quánfēng 龔泉峰. The work was substantially complete by 1311 and printed in 1322 after Xióng’s friends defrayed the woodblock costs. Although the Běnyì is its main object, Xióng draws freely on Zhū Xī’s Yǔlù 語錄, on Chéng Yí’s 程頤 Yìchuán 易傳, and on miscellaneous earlier expositions, with the result that — as the Sìkù editors note — there are quite a few places where the Jíchéng tacitly diverges from the Běnyì even while professing to be its “wing-feather.”
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Zhōuyì běnyì jíchéng in twelve juàn was composed by Xióng Liángfǔ of the Yuán. Liángfǔ, zì Rènzhòng, hào Méibiān, was a man of Nánchāng. In the fourth year of Yánvyòu (1317) he was once recommended at the prefectural examination; the further course of his official career is unclear. The book is prefaced by Liángfǔ’s own preface, which states: “In dīngsì 丁巳 I was offered as a tribute candidate in Yì; like-minded friends, trusting in my presumptuous discourses and pitying my long labor, met the printing costs and had it cut to blocks.” The dīngsì year is precisely the fourth of Yánvyòu, and the Yuán reinstitution of the provincial examination began in the jiǎyín 甲寅 year of Yánvyòu (1314); this was therefore its second sitting.
A check of the “Election Monograph” of the Yuán shǐ 元史·選舉志 shows that the regulations at the time required Hàn 漢 and southern (Nánrén 南人) candidates to sit two questions on doubts of the Classics and one on the meaning of a Classic; for the Yì the regulation specified the use of the Chéng 程 and Zhū 朱 commentaries together with the older glosses and subcommentaries — it was not yet the Míng-period system that confined candidates to Chéng and Zhū alone, before later setting Chéng aside in favor of Zhū exclusively. Hence, although the broad import of this book aims to wing-feather the Běnyì, places where it diverges from the Běnyì are also numerous.
Huáng Yújì’s 黃虞稷 Qiānqǐng táng shūmù 千頃堂書目 says that, in addition to this work, Liángfǔ also produced an Yì zhuàn jí shū 易傳集疏, no longer transmitted. On examination, the Yì zhuàn jí shū was in fact composed by Xióng Kǎi 熊凱 of the Yuán. The Jiāngxī tōngzhì 江西通志 records that Kǎi, zì Shùnfū 舜夫, a man of Nánchāng, opened a private school in míngjīng 明經 for forty years and was at that time called Yáoxī xiānsheng 遥溪先生; his fellow townsman Xióng Liángfǔ studied under him. Liángfǔ in his own preface likewise says that he received the Yì from Mr Xióng of Yáoxī, in agreement with the Tōngzhì. The two are emphatically two different men with two different works, and Yújì, on the strength of their shared surname, common district, and contemporaneity, mistakenly fused them into one.
Respectfully collated, the fifth month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng (1781). Editor-in-chief: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief proofreader: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
Composition can be dated with unusual precision. Xióng’s own preface (Zhōuyì běnyì jíchéng xù 周易本義集成序) is dated zhìzhì rénxū 至治壬戌 (1322); it explicitly says the manuscript was complete in 1311 (zhìdà xīnhài 至大辛亥), with the printing made possible only later when his fellow students Liú Zhúxī 劉竺溪 (Liú Zhífāng 劉直方) and others underwrote the cost. The bracket adopted here therefore runs from the manuscript’s completion (1311) to the printed preface (1322).
The preface also clarifies the place of the work in Yuán Yìxué. Xióng locates himself within a Zhū Xī orthodoxy mediated by the Yáoxī school: Chéng Yí’s Yìchuán preserves the Yì of Confucius, while Zhū Xī’s Běnyì recovers the Yì of King Wén and the Duke of Zhōu, the two ultimately reducible to the same Yì of Heaven and Earth. He frames his own labor as a corrective to the diffuseness of contemporary “many-school” eclecticism: he originally compiled a thirteen-juàn manuscript titled Jí shū 集疏, edited and approved by Gōng Quánfēng, then revised it into the twelve-juàn Jíchéng. The Sìkù editors’ notice (translated above) is to date the most authoritative biographical and critical statement on the work, and corrects Huáng Yújì’s conflation of Xióng Liángfǔ with his teacher Xióng Kǎi.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located in Western languages. The work is treated in standard Chinese histories of Yìxué (Zhū Bóhūi 朱伯崑, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ vol. 3) as a representative — and openly heterodox — example of Yuán-period Zhū Xī school Yì commentary.
Other points of interest
Xióng’s preface preserves a small but historically valuable witness to the early years of the revived Yuán examination system: it confirms that the second sitting of the provincial examination took place in 1317, only three years after its restoration in 1314, and that Yì candidates at that date were still expected to handle Chéng, Zhū, and the older subcommentary tradition together — a regulatory detail also noted by the Sìkù editors against the Yuán shǐ.