Zhōuyì zhuànyì dàquán 周易傳義大全
The Great Compendium of Commentary and Meaning on the Zhōu Changes by 胡廣
About the work
The Yì-volume of the early-Míng Yǒnglè-period imperial Wǔjīng dàquán 五經大全, in twenty-four juàn, compiled in 1414–1415 by Hú Guǎng 胡廣 (1370–1418) together with the Hànlín lecturers Yáng Róng 楊榮, Jīn Yōuzī 金幼孜, and a further team of some thirty-nine Hànlín editors (including Yè Shízhōng 葉時中) under imperial commission. The work was printed and distributed throughout the empire by the Ministry of Rites in 1415 and served as the standard examination text for Yìjīng candidates for the next two hundred years.
The structure follows Chéng Yí’s Yìchuán 易傳 in its base order — the so-called jīn yì 今易 of Wáng Bì 王弼, with the Wings interleaved with the canonical scripture — but supplements it with Zhū Xī’s Běnyì 本義 in gǔ yì 古易 (Lǚ Zǔqiān 呂祖謙 recension) order where the latter departs. Below each canonical passage the work prints, in order: (1) Chéng’s Yìchuán and Zhū Xī’s Běnyì under “Master Chéng says” / “Master Zhū says”; (2) extracts from the Chéngshì jīngshuō 程氏經說 and the Zhūzǐ yǔlù 朱子語類; (3) further later commentators drawn from a small fixed pool of Yuán-period syntheses. As Zhū Yízūn 朱彝尊 observed in his Jīngyì kǎo 經義考 (followed by the Sìkù editors), the editors silently combined four pre-existing Yuán syntheses — Dǒng Kǎi’s 董楷 Zhōuyì zhuànyì fùlù 周易傳義附錄, Dǒng Zhēnqīng’s 董真卿 Zhōuyì huìtōng (KR1a0086), Hú Yīguì’s 胡一桂 Zhōuyì běnyì fùlù zuǎnshū 周易本義附錄纂疏, and Hú Bǐngwén’s 胡炳文 Zhōuyì běnyì tōngshì (KR1a0078) — stripped the original commentators’ names, and admitted very little from outside that range.
Tiyao
Respectfully submitted: the Zhōuyì dàquán in twenty-four juàn was composed by Hú Guǎng and others on imperial command in the Míng. Examination of the Míng Chéngzǔ shílù shows that on the jiǎyín day of the eleventh month of Yǒnglè 12 (1414), the visiting Hànlín academician Hú Guǎng, together with the lecturers Yáng Róng and Jīn Yōuzī, were commanded to compile the Wǔjīng dàquán and the Sìshū dàquán. In the ninth month of Yǒnglè 13 (1415) the work was reported complete; the emperor personally composed the prefaces and placed them at the head of each volume, ordering the Ministry of Rites to print and distribute copies throughout the empire, and granted Hú Guǎng and the others bolts of silk according to rank, with a banquet at the Ministry of Rites. Among those who participated in the compilation, beyond Guǎng, Róng, and Yōuzī, were also the Hànlín editor Yè Shízhōng 葉時中 and thirty-eight others. This work is the head of the Five Classics.
Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo says that Guǎng and the rest took up earlier Confucians’ completed compilations and miscellaneously transcribed from them, removing the names of their authors. For the Yì, they took the works of the two Mr Dǒngs of Tiāntái 天台 and Póyáng 鄱陽, and the two Mr Hús of Shuānghú 雙湖 and Yúnfēng 雲峯, with little outside this set having ever come under their eyes. The Mr Dǒng of Tiāntái is Dǒng Kǎi’s Zhōuyì zhuànyì fùlù; the Mr Dǒng of Póyáng is Dǒng Zhēnqīng’s Zhōuyì huìtōng; the Mr Hú of Shuānghú is Hú Yīguì’s Zhōuyì běnyì fùlù zuǎnshū; the Mr Hú of Yúnfēng is Hú Bǐngwén’s Zhōuyì běnyì tōngshì. We have now collated the old texts and find the correspondences exact in every case. Yízūn’s discussion cannot be called captious censure. Nonetheless, Dǒng Kǎi, Hú Yīguì, and Hú Bǐngwén firmly held to Master Zhū, and their expositions are quite scrupulous; Dǒng Zhēnqīng took Chéng and Zhū as his main concern but broadly drew on the various houses to wing them, and his exposition is quite well rounded out. To draw material from the books of these four houses, prune duplications, and bring it together into a single volume — although it is unavoidably a holding-on to the empty and embracing of the broken — its main aim may still be said not to have lost its uprightness. Moreover, on this work the empire selected its officials for more than two hundred years; the orderly statutes of one age reside here. To preserve the book in the canon is to see in what the classical learning of the Confucians of the Míng consisted: the reason it did not initially rove or stray was this; the reason it later was unable to escape narrowness and confinement was also this.
Zhèng Xiǎo’s 鄭曉 Jīn yán 今言 says: “When Hóngwǔ opened the examinations, all five classics took the old commentaries and subcommentaries together with the works of the Sòng Confucians as principal — for the Yì the works of Chéng and Zhū, for the Shū Cài, for the Shī Zhū, for the Chūnqiū Zuǒ, Gōngyáng, Gǔliáng, Chéng, Hú, and Zhāng, for the Lǐjì Chén. Later, the old commentaries and subcommentaries were entirely set aside; one does not know from what point. Some say it began with the promulgation of the Wǔjīng dàquán, when, taking the strongest of the various houses’ discussions and incorporating them, that became the standard. Yet the old commentaries and subcommentaries are after all not to be dispensed with.” So at the height of the Míng, the discerning had already worried about its abuses. To consider this volume — it is, if not the source of a thousand years of gain and loss, at least a forest of them.
Respectfully collated, the sixth 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 is fixed by court records. The compilation was commissioned in the eleventh month of Yǒnglè 12 (1414), reported complete in the ninth month of Yǒnglè 13 (1415), and printed and promulgated in the same year — a turnaround of less than a year for the entire Wǔjīng dàquán / Sìshū dàquán / Xìnglǐ dàquán triad. The bracket of 1414–1415 reflects this. The remarkable speed is itself the principal evidence behind the Sìkù’s and Zhū Yízūn’s charge that the compilers worked principally by transcribing and stitching together pre-existing Yuán syntheses rather than by original research.
The compositional method is set out in the Fánlì 凡例 (textual conventions) at the head of the work, which I have read in the source: the editors take Chéng’s Yìchuán as their base text, supplement it with Zhū Xī’s Běnyì (with the Běnyì used to fill the Xìcí-and-after sections where Chéng has no commentary), insert paired glosses from the Chéngshì jīngshuō and the Zhūzǐ yǔlù as a fùlù layer, and append further later commentators (with names) under “X shì yuē 某氏曰”. The two Sòng commentaries’ textual orderings — Chéng follows Wáng Bì’s jīn yì arrangement, Zhū Xī follows the gǔ yì recension Lǚ Zǔqiān had recovered — are reconciled by adopting Chéng’s order as primary and noting Zhū’s order at the foot.
The work’s influence is much greater than its originality. As the imperially-promulgated examination text, the Dàquán fixed the reading of the Yì for two centuries of Míng candidates and, mediated through Korean and Japanese print culture, served as the principal early-modern East Asian Yì textbook. The Sìkù notice’s frank diagnosis — that the Dàquán both prevented Míng Yì-learning from straying widely and prevented it from going deep — is one of the editors’ more astute critical judgments and remains the standard view.
The frontmatter persons-list here records only Hú Guǎng (the catalog meta entry), although Yáng Róng, Jīn Yōuzī, Yè Shízhōng, and the thirty-eight further compilers all also worked on the project; in keeping with project convention, additional editors not named in the catalog appear in the prose only.
Translations and research
Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), treats the Wǔjīng dàquán corpus extensively as the standard examination canon for the Míng. For the Yì in particular, Hon Tze-ki’s English-language work on Sòng-Yuán Yìxué sets the Dàquán synthesis in its broader context. No major monograph specifically on the Zhōuyì zhuànyì dàquán located in Western languages. In Chinese: Zhū Bóhūi 朱伯崑, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ vol. 3 (Sòng-Yuán-Míng), and the introduction to the modern punctuated edition of the Wǔjīng dàquán in the Sìkù quánshū huìyào 四庫全書薈要 reprint.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù notice uniquely combines a textual diagnosis (the four Yuán-source list) with a political-historical assessment (the Dàquán’s curricular role) and a meta-bibliographic warning (Zhèng Xiǎo’s testimony that already in the high Míng the displacement of the gǔzhù 古註 / shū 疏 commentaries by the Dàquán was being recognized as a loss). It is one of the editors’ most fully developed jīngxué notices.