Zhōuyì wénquán 周易文詮
Textual Exegesis of the Zhōu Changes by 趙汸
About the work
A late-Yuán Yìjīng commentary in four juàn by Zhào Fǎng 趙汸 (1319–1369) of Xiūníng 休寧, a pupil of Huáng Zé 黃澤. The work’s main thrust is yìlǐ — meaning rather than numerology — but Zhào’s pupil Jīn Jūjìng 金居敬 records (in a now-lost prefatory remark cited by the Sìkù editors) that his master had grasped the inner-and-outer import of the prior-heaven (xiāntiān 先天) hexagram positions and had penetrated the meaning of the posterior-heaven hexagram order, so the Sìkù description of the work as “downplaying number, speaking of principle” should not be read as a wholesale rejection of the xiàngshù tradition. The work was rare in transmission. The Jīngyì kǎo 經義考 lists it in eight juàn; the surviving Sìkù recension is in four — apparently a later combination by an unidentified hand.
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Zhōuyì wénquán in four juàn was composed by Zhào Fǎng of the Yuán. Fǎng, zì Zǐcháng, was a man of Xiūníng. He took as his teacher Huáng Zé 黃澤 and received from him the learning of the Yì symbols and the Chūnqiū. Living in retirement, he composed and wrote, building the East Mountain Studio for the support of his mother. In the second year of Hóngwǔ (1369) he was summoned to compile the Yuán shǐ; not wishing to take office, he asked to return, and not long after, died.
The general import of this book is to downplay number and speak of principle. Yet his pupil Jīn Jūjìng 金居敬 says of it that he had attained the inner-and-outer import of the prior-heaven and had grasped the meaning of the posterior-heaven hexagram order — so he had not in fact set number aside. The Jīngyì kǎo lists eight juàn; this old transcribed copy has only four, but the head and tail are intact, and one suspects this is the form into which a later hand combined the original. The original book had headers in fine characters, section by section, at the top of the page; examining their wording and intent, they do not resemble Zhào’s hand, and may have been the marginal notes of later readers — they had little to add to the canonical meaning, and we have now removed them along with the rest.
The labor of Zhào’s life-long learning was deepest in the Chūnqiū, and the books he composed on that classic are also the most numerous; these have been cataloged separately. His Yì exposition consists only of this work, and its transmission has been quite rare. Its exegesis of meaning and principle is for the most part based on the lineage of Sòng Confucian discussion, and does not reach the depth of self-attainment of his Chūnqiū writings. Nonetheless, as he turns over and presses out the heaven-and-human, fortune-and-misfortune, regret-and-stinting boundaries, his exposition is extremely lucid; he has not a little affinity with the original import of “communicating virtue and classifying feelings” (tōng dé lèi qíng 通德類情). Of the meaning of the Yì it cannot be said that he leaves nothing unilluminated. As a wing-feather to Chéng and Zhū, the work is in any case sufficient to round out one school’s tradition.
Respectfully collated, the eighth month of the forty-second year of Qiánlóng (1777). 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 only loosely. Zhào’s main scholarly career falls in the late 1340s through the late 1360s; the Wénquán is one of his less prominent works and lacks an internal date. The bracket here (1340–1369, between his early maturity and his death) is conservative. The work belongs to the late-Yuán ChéngZhū exegetical synthesis but, as the Sìkù notice candidly admits, is not original at the level of his Chūnqiū writings — for which see the separately cataloged Chūnqiū corpus.
The transmission profile is one of the more tenuous in the late-Yuán Yì-corpus: rarely reproduced, with the Jīngyì kǎo’s eight-juàn citation reduced (probably by editorial combination) to the four-juàn Sìkù recension, with marginal headers stripped by the editors as later accretions. The Sìkù editors’ editorial decision to remove these headers — rather than preserve them as evidence of reception — is candidly noted but not defended at length.
The pupil Jīn Jūjìng’s testimony to Zhào’s xiàntiān / hòutiān learning, preserved through the Sìkù notice, is the principal evidence that Zhào’s surface-level downplaying of number does not reflect ignorance of or hostility to the chart-tradition; rather, it reflects a deliberate exegetical choice. Read together with KR1a0088 (Chén Yìngrùn’s revolt) and KR1a0089 (Liáng Yín’s synthesis), the Wénquán documents a third late-Yuán stance on the chart-tradition: tactical reticence rather than rejection or absorption.
Translations and research
No substantial monograph in Western languages located. Zhào Fǎng’s Chūnqiū corpus has received some attention in studies of late-Yuán Huīzhōu Confucianism (e.g. work by Hilde de Weerdt, Peter Bol on Sòng-Yuán intellectual networks); his Yì writing has not.
Other points of interest
The discrepancy between the catalog meta’s lifedates (1319–1469, evidently a typographical error) and CBDB’s (1319–1369) is noted in the 趙汸 person note, where the corrected dates are followed; the Sìkù notice’s account of his being summoned in Hóngwǔ 2 = 1369 and dying not long after is consistent with the corrected dates.