Dú Yì kǎoyuán 讀易考原
An Inquiry into the Origins for Reading the Changes by 蕭漢中
About the work
A short Yuán-period treatise in one juàn on the structural underpinnings of the Yìjīng: how the hexagrams are partitioned between the upper and lower scriptural sections, how they are paired, and the order in which they stand. Composed in the Tàidìng 泰定 reign (1324–1328) by Xiāo Hànzhōng 蕭漢中 (zì Jǐngyuán 景元) of Tàihé 泰和, the work consists of three treatises (piān 篇) — on partition (fēnguà 分卦), on pairing (héguà 合卦), and on hexagram-order (guàxù 卦序) — followed by a discussion of the thirty-six “lodges” 三十六宮 and the mechanism of yīnyáng waxing and waning. Xiāo neither overtly attacks nor follows the canonical Xùguà zhuàn 序卦傳: instead he reframes the Yì’s structure through Shào Yōng’s 邵雍 xiàntiān 先天 round-diagram (yuántú 圓圖), placing Qián-Kūn-Kǎn-Lí at the four cardinals as the master-hexagrams of the upper scripture, and Duì-Gèn-Xùn-Zhèn at the four corners as the master-hexagrams of the lower scripture. The work survives only because Zhū Shēng 朱升 (1299–1370) appended it to his own Zhōuyì pángzhù 周易旁注; after Zhū’s host work was damaged, Xiāo’s appended text was extracted and re-issued independently by the Sìkù editors.
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Dú Yì kǎoyuán in one juàn was composed by Xiāo Hànzhōng of the Yuán. Hànzhōng, zì Jǐngyuán, was a man of Tàihé. The book was completed in the Tàidìng period (1324–1328). It comprises three treatises: one on the partitioning of hexagrams; one on their pairing; one on hexagram-order. He does not openly attack the Xùguà zhuàn, but he also does not adopt the Xùguà’s explanation. The general import is that on the round-diagram, Qián, Kūn, Kǎn, and Lí occupy the four cardinal positions and serve as the master-hexagrams of the upper scripture; Duì, Gèn, Xùn, and Zhèn occupy the four corners and serve as the master-hexagrams of the lower scripture. He goes back through the diagram, distributing the discussions: on why thirty hexagrams in the upper scripture and thirty-four in the lower, the proportions of fewer and more, partition and combination, are not interchangeable; and on why, after Qián and Kūn, the next hexagrams must be Tún 屯 and Méng 蒙, and after Tún and Méng the next must be Xū 需 and Sòng 訟 — the order being incapable of disturbance. At the back of the juàn is a discussion of the thirty-six lodges and the mechanism of yīnyáng waxing and waning, set forth so as to illuminate the work’s general meaning.
Hànzhōng’s book was not particularly well known; only when Zhū Shēng 朱升 of the early Míng composed his Zhōuyì pángzhù 周易旁注 was its text first gathered and appended to the back juàn. Shēng’s own note says: “I have respectfully condensed it into two diagrams of the upper and lower scriptures cut to stone, and recorded the original text below them, in order to broaden its transmission.” This work, then, as edited by Shēng, does not exhaust Hànzhōng’s old text. Now Shēng’s book is itself defective and incomplete, while Hànzhōng’s, attached to it, has on the contrary survived; the present edition is the text extracted from Shēng’s book and circulated separately. Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 Jīngyì kǎo lists it in three juàn — evidently taking each treatise as one juàn — but in fact there is no separate three-juàn recension.
Although Xiāo’s exposition likewise derives from Master Shào, his elaboration of the hexagram-order is conceptually rigorous; it is in any case still a meaning grounded in the canonical text, and as compared with the rambling and inexhaustible black-and-white-disc and odd-and-even-numerology speculations, it is plainly different in kind.
Respectfully collated, the seventh month of the forty-fifth year of Qiánlóng (1780). 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
Date of composition is fixed by the Sìkù notice to the Tàidìng reign (1324–1328), which is consistent with CBDB’s attestation of Xiāo’s activity at 1325. The work’s reception history is unusually transparent and is set out in detail by the Sìkù editors (translated above): self-effacing in circulation during the late Yuán; rescued from oblivion in the early Míng by being appended (in compressed form) to Zhū Shēng’s Zhōuyì pángzhù; preserved through the deterioration of its host work; finally restored to independent transmission by the Sìkù. The Zhū Yízūn three-juàn citation in the Jīngyì kǎo is corrected by the Sìkù editors as a misreading of the work’s three internal treatises.
Doctrinally, the work belongs to the late-Yuán Shào Yōng tradition’s Zhū-Xī-aligned wing: it accepts the xiàntiān round-diagram as a structural truth about the Yì but applies that truth narrowly to canonical exegetical questions (partition, pairing, order) rather than treating the diagram as a free-standing cosmology. The Sìkù editors’ explicit defense of Xiāo against the more elaborate xiàngshù speculations of his contemporaries reflects the eighteenth-century editors’ general preference for xiàngshù readings that stay close to the text.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature in Western languages located. In Chinese-language scholarship the work figures occasionally in studies of Yuán Yìxué (Zhū Bóhūi 朱伯崑, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ vol. 3) and in textual studies of Zhū Shēng’s Zhōuyì pángzhù as a secondary witness to its compositional layering.
Other points of interest
The work’s transmission is a small but neat case study in textual ecology: a minor work surviving by parasitism on a host commentary, then outliving the host. The Sìkù notice’s editorial intervention to disentangle the two — and to re-issue Xiāo as an independent author — is one of the cleaner examples of Sìkù editorial recovery work in the Yì-class.