Dú Yì yú yán 讀易餘言
Surplus Words on Reading the Changes by 崔銑
About the work
A mid-Míng Yìjīng commentary in five juàn by Cuī Xiàn 崔銑 (1478–1541) of Anyáng 安陽, completed in Jiājìng gēngzǐ 嘉靖庚子 = 1540 (the date of his self-preface). Cuī takes Chéng Yí’s 程頤 Yìchuán as his principal frame, supplements it with selections from Wáng Bì 王弼 and Wú Chéng 吳澄, and openly diverges from Zhū Xī’s Běnyì on a number of points. The general orientation is yìlǐ — meaning rather than number — and the work is overtly polemical against the Chén Tuán 陳摶 chart-tradition: Cuī declares that Chén Tuán’s transmitted túxiàng 圖象 are all extensions of practitioners’ technical art (shù shù 術數) and have nothing to do with the Yì, and that the various Sòng commentators’ hexagram-variation (guà biàn 卦變) doctrine is similarly mere fragmentary imitation. The work is structurally uneven — some sections give only hexagram-names without the canonical text, others reproduce the canonical text in full — reflecting that it was written piecemeal over an extended period.
Tiyao
Original preface (Cuī Xiàn, dated Jiājìng gēngzǐ winter, eleventh month, gēngzǐ day = 1540): I [Xiàn] in childhood lived in Shǎn 陜, and heard Mr Sū Mào of Shǔ lecturing on the Yì; my heart took pleasure in it. My late father also held this classic dear, gathering the long-clear instructions and writing them all out by hand. When I came of age and held office at the capital, I joined friends in unrolling and rehearsing it; serving in the Hànlín, I had access to the secret library. Now fifty years on, my own years past sixty-three, in sorrow and joy, in flat or in steep terrain, in conduct or in fortune, there has not been one day on which I did not embody the Yì. The earlier Confucians’ explications are sufficiently detailed and sufficiently abundant. The lovers of strangeness seek meaning in the symbols, drift into the bizarre — fēifú 飛伏, nèijiǎ 內甲, wǔxíng 五行, hùtǐ 互體 — using such petty arts to choke our sage canon. The Sovereign Xī 皇羲 drew the trigrams; King Wén and the Duke of Zhōu attached the verbal commentary; the Master made the Wings — these are one and the same. To say “the way of the Yì is more detailed at each stage” — that may be acceptable; but to say “there is the Yì of Xī, the Yì of Wén, the Yì of Confucius” — that is to fragment it.
The Yì contains four ways of the sage; today, those who esteem the symbols have lost their measure, and those who esteem the divinations have lost their method. To follow the master’s appraising in order to bring out the import of the three sages, to use it to determine the variations and to set the conduct upright: the man who initiated this was Wáng Bì, and the one who completed it was Master Chéng. This is what is suited to our time and the essence of the Yì. I have therefore set forth my limited views in a chapter, in order to clear the doubts of the two houses [Chén Tuán and Shào Yōng].
Sìkù tíyào: Respectfully submitted: the Dú Yì yú yán in five juàn was composed by Cuī Xiàn of the Míng. Xiàn, zì Zhòngfú 仲鳬, also Zǐzhōng 子鍾, was a man of Anyáng. He was a jìnshì of the yǐchǒu year of Hóngzhì (1505), and his offices reached as far as Vice-Minister of Rites at Nánjīng; his posthumous title was Wénjìng 文敬 (catalog convention here records Wénmǐn 文敏 — discrepancy noted). His career is set out in the Míng shǐ rúlín zhuàn. The book takes Master Chéng’s zhuàn as its principal concern, but jointly draws on the doctrines of Wáng Bì and Wú Chéng 吳澄, and there are quite a few places where it diverges from Master Zhū’s Běnyì. The general import sets aside symbol and number and brings forth principle; hence Xiàn says the chart-symbols transmitted from Chén Tuán are all extensions of art-and-number, and have nothing to do with the Yì; and that the various Confucians’ hexagram-variation doctrines are likewise fragmentary and not to be adopted.
His Upper-Scripture Hexagram Outline, Lower-Scripture Hexagram Outline, and Discussion of the Great Xiàng each give only the hexagram-name without the canonical text; the Xìcí Compilation and Shuōguà Glosses, by contrast, fully reproduce the zhuàn text. The work was not composed all at one time, hence the layout occasionally differs; moreover, the canon has hexagram-names while the Xìcí and Shuōguà have no chapter-names, so by the nature of the case the two could not avoid being different. Only in his deletion of the eight chapters on broad symbol-correspondences in the Shuōguà, and in his use of Cài Qīng’s 蔡清 (蔡清) doctrine to add and subtract — and further in his blanket deletion of the three Wings Jíguà 集卦, Záguà 雜卦, and Wényán — does he fail to escape the suspicion of altering the canon. In the main, however, his solidity and proximity to reason do not fail to make him a transmitter of the LuòMǐn 洛閩 [ChéngZhū] line.
Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 Jīngyì kǎo lists Xiàn’s Dú Yì yú yán in five juàn and additionally his Yì dà xiàng shuō 易大象說 in one juàn. On examination, the third juàn of this book is precisely the Dà xiàng shuō. Yízūn, on the basis of its having circulated separately, mistakenly split it into two — he had simply not checked. We now indicate this here so as not to repeat the entry separately.
Respectfully collated, the tenth 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
Date of composition is fixed by Cuī’s own preface to Jiājìng gēngzǐ 嘉靖庚子 = 1540 — the year before his death — when he was sixty-three. The work distills decades of Yì engagement begun in his childhood Shǎn studies under a Sū-clan teacher and continued through his Hànlín career. The dating bracket is therefore narrow.
The work occupies a clearly defined position within mid-Míng Yìxué: against both the resurgent xiàngshù tradition (the Chén Tuán → Shào Yōng → late-Sòng / Yuán túxiàng school) and the technical-divinatory traditions (fēifú 飛伏, hùtǐ 互體, wǔxíng 五行 numerology), Cuī asserts a return to the Wáng Bì → Chéng Yí yìlǐ line, supplemented by Wú Chéng’s late-Yuán principle-oriented exegesis and selectively engaged with Cài Qīng (KR1a0092) on the Shuōguà. He also explicitly denies the late-Sòng / Yuán construct of “three Yì’s” — Xī’s Yì, Wén’s Yì, Confucius’s Yì — as a fragmentation of what should be read as a single canon.
The textual unevenness — some sections gloss only hexagram-names while others reproduce the canon in full — is conceded by the Sìkù editors and is correctly explained by them as reflecting the work’s long compositional history. The deletion of three Wings (Jíguà / Záguà / Wényán) and of the broad-symbol chapters of the Shuōguà is the Sìkù editors’ principal complaint; they note it as a “suspicion of altering the canon” but stop short of decisive condemnation. Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo error of double-listing — counting the Dà xiàng shuō as a separate one-juàn work in addition to its place as juàn 3 of the Yú yán — is corrected here.
Translations and research
No substantial monograph in Western languages located. Cuī’s place in the late-mid-Míng yìlǐ recovery is treated in Chinese-language histories of Míng Yìxué (Zhū Bóhūi, Yìxué zhéxué shǐ vol. 4); for his broader Lǐxué profile see studies of the Anyáng circle of the Jiājìng era.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù editors’ double error-correction in this notice — settling the Jīngyì kǎo double-listing, and labeling the work’s structural unevenness as a witness to its compositional history rather than as evidence of carelessness — is a small but characteristic example of the Sìkù editorial preference for incremental disambiguation over wholesale rewriting.