Xué Yì jì 學易記
Records of Studying the Changes by 李簡
About the work
The Xué Yì jì is a nine-juàn collected commentary on the Yìjīng compiled by Lǐ Jiǎn 李簡 of Xìndū 信都 (Héběi) in the late-Jīn / early-Mongol-Yuán transition. Modeled openly on Lǐ Dǐngzuò’s 李鼎祚 Zhōuyì jíjiě 周易集解 (KR1a0009) and Fáng Shěnquán’s 房審權 Yìhǎi 義海, it gathers glosses from sixty-four named commentators — from Zǐxià 子夏 down through Wáng Bì 王弼, Hán Bó 韓伯, Kǒng Yǐngdá 孔穎達, Hú Yuán 胡瑗, Zhōu Dūnyí 周敦頤, Shào Yōng 邵雍, the Chéngs 程顥/程頤, Sū Shì 蘇軾, Zhū Xī 朱熹, Zhāng Shì 張栻, Yáng Wànlǐ 楊萬里, down to the late-Jīn northern Yì circle of Zhāng Tèlì 張特立 (Zhāng Zhōngyōng 中庸) and Liú Sù 劉肅 (Liú Yì’ān 佚菴). Each entry is signed with the commentator’s name; entries that distil the sense of several commentators carry the note “jiān cǎi” 兼採 (jointly drawn from); unsigned passages represent Lǐ’s own glosses. The work is one of the principal medieval witnesses to the by-then-lost Wǔshí jiā jiě 五十家解 of Yáng Bīnfū 楊彬夫 and the Sānshí jiā jiě 三十家解 of Shàn Fēng 單渢, fragments of which it preserves.
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Xué Yì jì in nine juàn was composed by Lǐ Jiǎn of the Yuán. Jiǎn’s native place is unclear. His own preface says: “In the jǐwèi 已未 year I temporarily filled the post of deputy magistrate of Tài’ān.” Jǐwèi is the sixth year of Yánvyòu 延祐 (1319), which is to say the time of Rénzōng 仁宗. (Editor’s note: this identification is in fact a Sìkù error — see Abstract below.) The book draws on sixty-four houses of Yì exposition, from the Zǐxià Yìzhuàn 子夏易傳 down to the discussions of Zhāng Tèlì 張特立 and Liú Sù 劉肅, and in each case explicitly notes the surname. Where the discussions of several commentators are gathered into a single passage, this is annotated “jointly drawing on so-and-so”; entries that are not annotated are Jiǎn’s own new glosses. The general manner is in imitation of the example of Lǐ Dǐngzuò’s Jíjiě 集解 and Fáng Shěnquán’s 房審權 Yìhǎi 義海.
His own preface says: “While at Dōngpíng 東平 I joined Zhāng Zhōngyōng, Liú Yì’ān, and Wáng Zhònghuī in gathering and excerpting various Yì expositions. Zhāng and Wáng aimed at economy of expression; Liú’s intention was to bring all readings back to a single doctrine; what your servant excerpted, by contrast, would rather err on the side of inclusiveness, leaving final selection to those who would come after.” It also says: “In the jǐwèi year I went back over what I had earlier collected and reapplied selection — beginning broadly and ending in concision — so this work was not lightly written.” Hence what is said in it is for the most part substantial and unbranching.
The Wǔshí jiā jiě 五十家解 of Yáng Bīnfū and the Sānshí jiā jiě 三十家解 of Shàn Fēng, which he saw, are now both lost; even of the sixty-four houses he lists, the original books are mostly dispersed and missing. Because of what Jiǎn collected, perhaps one in ten of these have come down to us, so his contribution is by no means below that of Dǐngzuò and Shěnquán.
Respectfully collated, the seventh month of the forty-fourth year of Qiánlóng (1779). 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 reconstructed from Lǐ Jiǎn’s own preface, which is dated zhōngtǒng jiànyuán gēngshēn 中統建元庚申, autumn, seventh month — i.e. the founding year of Khubilai’s Zhōngtǒng era, 1260. Inside this preface he says he moved his household from Mount Tài’s foothills to Dōngpíng 東平 in rényín 壬寅 (1242), spent several years there in a circle of Yì expositors (Zhāng Tèlì, Liú Sù, Wáng Zhònghuī), and later, in jǐwèi 已未, took up office as deputy magistrate of Tài’ān 泰安, where he revised the work into final form. Read against the preface’s own gēngshēn date (1260), this jǐwèi year is unambiguously 1259, not the cycle-later jǐwèi of Yánvyòu 6 = 1319.
The Sìkù editors’ identification of jǐwèi with 1319 (under Yuán Rénzōng) is therefore in error: it places Lǐ Jiǎn a full sexagenary cycle later than the preface itself does, and is incompatible with the preface’s own dating. The editors apparently took for granted that the work had to belong to the early-fourteenth-century revival of Yìxué and selected the next cycle. The dating window adopted here therefore runs from the manuscript’s substantial completion in the late 1240s through the 1260 preface. Lǐ Jiǎn is properly placed in the late-Jīn / early-Mongol-Yuán northern Yì milieu of Dōngpíng 東平 — the same regional circle as Yuán Hàowèn 元好問, whose manuscript-preservation activity is partly responsible for the survival of this corpus.
The other major item the preface confirms is the work’s role as a textual repository: of the sixty-four named commentators, several — including the Wǔshí jiā jiě of Yáng Bīnfū and the Sānshí jiā jiě of Shàn Fēng — were already lost in independent circulation by Lǐ’s own day, and the Sìkù editors single him out as one of a small group of medieval Yì compilers (Lǐ Dǐngzuò, Fáng Shěnquán, Lǐ Jiǎn) responsible for the partial transmission of those lost houses’ readings.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature in Western languages located. The work is occasionally cited as a quotation source in Chinese histories of Yìxué (Zhū Bóhūi 朱伯崑, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ) and in studies of the lost Wǔshí jiā jiě tradition.
Other points of interest
Lǐ Jiǎn’s preface is itself a small but valuable piece of intellectual-historical evidence for the Dōngpíng Yì circle of the 1240s–1250s, which mediated the survival of Northern Sòng and Southern Sòng Yì learning across the dynastic break. The Sìkù dating error noted above is a representative case where the editors’ assumed periodization (inserting the work into Yánvyòu Yìxué) overrode the work’s own internal evidence.