Yìxué biàntōng 易學變通
The Penetration of Variation in the Learning of the Changes by 曾貫
About the work
A late-Yuán Yìjīng commentary in six juàn by Zēng Guàn 曾貫 (zì Chuándào 傳道) of Tàihé 泰和, recovered by the Sìkù editors from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典. The work proceeds purely on principle (yìlǐ 義理): each chapter discusses the meaning of a hexagram and its six lines as a unified whole, and adduces parallel phrasing from other hexagrams to triangulate the bases of similarity and difference. Zēng makes occasional use of component-trigram (hùtǐ 互體) analysis and preserves older glosses (gǔyì 古義) where they help, but his approach is essentially expository and ethical rather than numerological. His own life carries the work’s claim to attention: he resigned the Yuán office of records officer in Shàoxīng during the late-Yuán turmoil, raised a local militia, and was killed in battle defending Lóngquán 龍泉.
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Yìxué biàntōng in six juàn was composed by Zēng Guàn of the Yuán. Guàn, zì Chuándào, was a man of Tàihé. In tiānlì xīnsì (1331) he was elevated at the provincial examination, and held office as records officer (zhàomó 照磨) in Shàoxīng prefecture 紹興府. At the close of the Yuán, in the disturbances, he abandoned office and lived at home; the people of his locality elevated him to lead a righteous militia. Later, defending against the bandit forces at Lóngquán, he was defeated in the field, but maintained his loyalty and died in the cause. The matter is set out in the Jiāngxī tōngzhì 江西通志.
His writings on the Four Books — the Sìshū lèi biàn 四書類辨 and the Xué Yōng biāozhǐ 學庸標旨 — and others are all destroyed and untransmitted; only Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 Jīngyì kǎo records a Zhōuyì biàntōng 周易變通 by his hand, also marked as lost. Now examination of the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn shows that under each hexagram of the Zhōuyì it incorporates much of Guàn’s exposition; what it heads the work with is in fact Yìxué biàntōng 易學變通. We thus know that Yízūn had not seen the original book, and so the title he records is slightly in error. We have respectfully gathered and arranged the material into six juàn. Eight hexagrams — Yù 豫, Suí 隨, Wúwàng 无妄, Dàzhuàng 大壯, Jìn 晉, Kuí 睽, Jiǎn 蹇, Zhōngfú 中孚 — are missing in the Dàdiǎn itself; we have no means now of collation and supplementation for them, and have provisionally let the lacunae stand.
The book purely uses the principles to expound the Yì. Its layout has each chapter discussing the meaning of one hexagram and its six lines as a whole, and further raising other hexagrams whose verbal commentary is close in meaning, three- and five-times triangulating in order to seek the basis of their similarities and differences. For example, on Qián 乾: “Qián’s six lines do not speak of fortune, because they are nowhere not fortunate. Initial Nine handles itself with ‘do not yet act’ — that is the fortune of Initial Nine. Top Nine handles itself with ‘no regret’ — that is the fortune of Top Nine. The being-seen of two, the flying of five, the fault-free of three and four, are all of this kind. The position may exceed the central, but where the sage handles it there is nothing not central; the position may fall short of the upright, but where the sage handles it there is nothing not upright. What is called firm-strong, central-upright, pure-essential — what fortune is greater than this?”
On Kūn 坤 he writes: “Some doubt that ‘royal affairs’ at Six in the Third refers to the affairs of Six in the Fifth. But Qián takes the way of the ruler as its theme, Kūn the way of the minister; royal affairs are properly the affairs of the great-man at Nine in the Fifth. So in Kūn both the third and the fifth lines have admonitory phrasing from the sages — they thereby uphold the body of the minister-subject’s standing, with deep solicitude.”
On Gèn 艮: “Tūn lín 敦臨 and tūn gèn 敦艮 are both fortunate. Why? Tūn — solidity — is the way of generosity. Be solid in governing others, and there is none who will not submit; that is Lín 臨. Be solid in governing oneself, and there is nothing not cultivated; that is Gèn. In handling oneself, can one bear to handle it with thinness?”
All such items establish meanings that are pure and upright. His finer dissections often go beyond the glosses of earlier Confucians; he occasionally deploys the trigram-internal (hùtǐ 互體) method, and where the older glosses help he preserves them, holding the balance especially well. Among expositors of the Yì he can be called clear and substantive. Moreover his completing of benevolence and choosing of righteousness leave him without shame as a perfect man — yet the Yuán shǐ 忠義傳 omitted his record, a serious breach of completeness. We now collect and recover his surviving writing and inscribe it in the canon, not only because the work itself is sufficiently weighty, but also so as to make manifest his great moral act, drawing out the hidden light of latent virtue.
Respectfully collated, the ninth 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 bracketed by Zēng’s career. He passed the provincial examination in 1331 (the Sìkù gives tiānlì xīnsì 天厯辛巳, an internally inconsistent era-and-cycle combination — xīnsì 辛巳 falls in 1341 by cycle, but the Tiānlì reign-period was already replaced by Zhìshùn 至順 in 1330; the cycle datum is the more reliable, placing him in Zhìshùn 2 = 1331); he died in battle at Lóngquán in the late-Yuán uprisings, conventionally placed in the early 1350s. The dating bracket here therefore runs from his examination success (1331) to his death (taken as 1352). The work was composed during his official career and at home thereafter; the Sìkù notice does not itself fix a tighter date.
The transmission profile is parallel to that of KR1a0084 (Xiè Méng): listed as lost by Zhū Yízūn (with a slightly garbled title — Zhōuyì biàntōng rather than Yìxué biàntōng), substantially recovered from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn by the Sìkù editors, with a small set of missing hexagrams (eight in this case — Yù, Suí, Wúwàng, Dàzhuàng, Jìn, Kuí, Jiǎn, Zhōngfú) reflecting Dàdiǎn lacunae. The Sìkù notice combines bibliographic recovery with hagiographic recovery: the editors are explicit that part of their motivation in restoring the work is to redress the Yuán shǐ’s failure to record Zēng’s martyrdom in its Loyalty and Righteousness monograph.
Doctrinally, the work belongs to the late-Yuán yìlǐ tradition — methodologically close to the Chéng–Zhū line but more comparative in method (hexagram-against-hexagram rather than line-by-line) and willing to draw on the older xiàngshù (component-trigram) toolkit where it illuminates ethical reading. The cited glosses on Qián, Kūn, and Gèn are representative.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature in Western languages located. The work is sometimes cited in Chinese-language treatments of late-Yuán Yìxué and of late-Yuán Jiāngxī Confucian loyalism (e.g. studies of the Tàihé circle of Yuán-Míng transition figures).
Other points of interest
The pairing in the Sìkù between the Yìxué biàntōng and Zēng’s biography in the Jiāngxī tōngzhì is one of the more pointed eighteenth-century attempts to use the editorial recovery of a fragmentary text as the occasion for moral-political restitution to a forgotten loyalist — a motive the Sìkù editors are unusually candid about.