Zhōuyì túshuō 周易圖說
Charts and Discussions on the Zhōu Changes by 錢義方
About the work
A late-Yuán Yìjīng chart-corpus in two juàn by Qián Yìfāng 錢義方 (zì Zǐyí 子宜) of Wúxīng 吳興, completed in zhìzhèng bǐngxū 至正丙戌 (1346). The upper juàn carries seven charts; the lower juàn twenty further charts. Methodologically Qián stands in the xiàngshù tradition of Chén Tuán 陳摶 → Mù Xiū 穆修 → Lǐ Zhīcái 李之才 → Shào Yōng 邵雍, but with two significant departures from the received synthesis: he insists that the Yì derives only from the Hétú 河圖, not from the Luòshū 洛書 (which he treats as a separate, later document about the Nine Domains jiǔ chóu 九疇 and not the basis of the hexagrams), and he reads Zhū Xī’s 朱熹 careful attribution of the prior- and posterior-heaven positions to Shào Yōng (rather than directly to Fú Xī and King Wén) as a sign of latent hesitation that Qián himself moves to overcome.
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Zhōuyì túshuō in two juàn was composed by Qián Yìfāng of the Yuán. Yìfāng, zì Zǐyí, was a man of Húzhōu 湖州. He once passed the jìnshì examination, but his official career cannot be examined. The work was completed in the sixth year of Zhìzhèng (1346). The upper juàn has seven charts; the lower juàn twenty. Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 Jīngyì kǎo lists it as one juàn — probably an error of transmitted copying.
His doctrine holds that the Hétú is the basis of the making of the Yì. The Dàzhuàn 大傳 says: “the river produced the chart, the Luò produced the writing — the sages took them as their model.” This means that the sages, taking principle and pushing through to number, found the two mutually communicable, and so spoke of them together; it does not mean that the making of the Yì simultaneously took the Luòshū as its source. He further cites Master Zhū as saying that there is some “manufactured” quality to the round-diagram (yuántú 圓圖), and that one might wish to lift the square-diagram (fāngtú 方圖) out and place it outside the round; and he further holds that Master Zhū’s Yì běnyì, in attributing the prior- and posterior-heaven positions necessarily to Master Shào, seems still to carry a flavor of dissatisfied insufficiency. He therefore, “without measuring his own poverty of equipment, has had something to say.”
This work is, compared with other houses, closer to reason; nonetheless, it still reasons on the basis of charts and writings transmitted from Chén Tuán onward. In fact, although the Hétú and Luòshū are mentioned in the canonical scriptures, the present fifty-five-dot and forty-five-dot diagrams — whether they really are the ancient charts and writings or not — find no overt confirmation in the canonical scriptures at all. To cite the Zuǒzhuàn’s mention of the Sānfèn 三墳 and assert that this is the book of Máo Jiàn 毛漸, or to cite the Zhōulǐ’s mention of the Liánshān 連山 and Guīcáng 歸藏 and assert that this is the book of Liú Xuàn 劉炫: the studious antiquarian would have his doubts. Moreover, the Xìcí speaks of the Luòshū but does not say that it is the Hóngfàn 洪範’s nine domains; the Hóngfàn speaks of the nine domains but does not say that they are the Luòshū. Lú Biàn’s 盧辯 commentary on the Dàdài lǐjì 大戴禮記 was the first to say that the nine chambers of the Bright Hall (míngtáng 明堂) take their pattern from the writing on the tortoise; this doctrine arises in the Northern Zhōu. Ruǎn Yì 阮逸 forged the Guān Lǎng yìzhuàn 闗朗易傳 and gave it currency; the doctrine of the Luòshū’s text being forty-five dots first began to be transmitted at that point, and the nine domains were thereupon also fused with the Yì. Yìfāng knew that the nine domains are not the Yì, but did not know that the Luòshū is not originally the nine domains; his discrimination is not yet finely calibrated.
As to his statement that, since the Hàn, only Mèng Xǐ 孟喜, on the basis of the Yì wěi jīlǎn tú 易緯稽覽圖, expounded the Yì by making Lí, Kǎn, Zhèn, and Duì each preside over one direction and the remaining sixty hexagrams each preside over six days and seven fractions of a day — this being the beginning of charts in the Yì — and that for a thousand desolate years thereafter, until Chén Tuán took as his basis the Yì’s own Tàijí–Liǎngyí–Sìxiàng–Bāguà and the doubling thereof, together with the Tiāndì dìngwèi 天地定位 saying, to make the four large and small horizontal-and-round diagrams transmitted to Mù 穆 [Xiū] and Lǐ [Zhīcái] and on to Master Shào; and that Shào further took the Dì chū hū Zhèn 帝出乎震 saying as the basis of the posterior-heaven round-diagram, and reused the hexagrams of the great horizontal diagram into the PǐTài 否泰 inverted-and-paired square-diagram — that here it is the diagrams that were made on the basis of the Yì, not the Yì on the basis of the diagrams: this point of source-and-stream is brilliantly lucid, unlike the other houses’ insistence on mystifying their own readings by claiming them as productions of antique sages. He alone may be said to have grasped the truth.
The twenty-seven charts he expounds are likewise transformations of older charts, applying the odd-and-even numerologies. The further one pushes them, the more there is, and each man makes his own reading; their principles all commune. By analogy, from antiquity to the present no two games of yì (Go) have been the same — equally, there is no harm in preserving them as one school’s record.
Respectfully collated, the fourth 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
Date of composition is fixed by Qián’s own preface to zhìzhèng bǐngxū 至正丙戌, summer, fourth month, jiǎzǐ day = 1346 (the month-day combination is internally consistent with the late-Yuán calendar). The work was thus composed near the close of the Yuán, in the same intellectual generation as the major late-Yuán Yì-summae (Dǒng Zhēnqīng’s KR1a0086 of 1334; Hú Yīguì’s school works) but at a deliberately polemical distance from them.
Qián’s intellectual independence — visible in his deliberate decoupling of the Hétú-Luòshū pair and his diagnosis of latent hesitation in Zhū Xī’s Běnyì — earns him a long, qualifiedly approving notice from the Sìkù editors. They concur with him on his clearest historiographical point — that the chart-corpus is a Sòng creation overlaid on the Yì, not an ancient inheritance — but criticize him for stopping halfway: on the Sìkù editors’ reading, the Luòshū of forty-five dots is itself a Northern-Zhōu / Sòng forgery via Lú Biàn and the spurious Guān Lǎng yìzhuàn, which Qián fails to see. The Sìkù notice on this point is unusually sharp evangelism for kǎozhèng 考證 method.
The book’s chart inventory (seven + twenty = twenty-seven) is preserved intact in the Sìkù recension; Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 Jīngyì kǎo listing of one juàn is corrected by the Sìkù editors as a copying error.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature in Western languages located. The work is sometimes treated in Chinese surveys of late-Yuán Yìxué (Zhū Bóhūi 朱伯崑, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ) as a representative dissenting voice within the broader Sòng-Yuán chart-and-numerology synthesis.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù notice’s extended critique of the HétúLuòshū tradition (cribbed in part from Hú Wèi 胡渭’s later Yìtú míng biàn 易圖明辨) is one of the more substantial kǎozhèng statements embedded in the Sìkù tíyào on SòngYuán Yìxué. Reading Qián’s preface against the editors’ notice illustrates with unusual clarity how a Yuán-period author’s tentative skepticism could be amplified into a full Qīng kǎozhèng position.