Dú Yì shù 讀易述
Recordings on Reading the Changes by 潘士藻
About the work
A late-Míng Yìjīng commentary in seventeen juàn by Pān Shìzǎo 潘士藻 (1537–1600) of Wùyuán 婺源, composed in his last years and published posthumously by his son Pān Shīlǔ 潘師魯 with a preface by Jiāo Hóng 焦竑. The first ten juàn cover the upper and lower scriptures (sixty-four hexagrams); the remaining seven cover the Xìcí, Shuōguà, Xùguà, and Záguà. Each section first lays out Pān’s own reading and then appends earlier commentators’ material — drawn principally from Fáng Shěnquán’s 房審權 Zhōuyì yìhǎi 周易義海 (now mostly lost; Pān most plausibly used Lǐ Héng’s 李衡 fifteen-juàn condensation) and Lǐ Dǐngzuò’s 李鼎祚 Zhōuyì jíjiě 周易集解 (KR1a0009). The general orientation is yìlǐ — meaning rather than number — and the editors note that Pān includes selectively from the Jíjiě, omitting the explicitly xiàngshù-oriented material of Yú Fān 虞翻, Gàn Bǎo 干寶, and others.
Tiyao
Sìkù tíyào (translated): Respectfully submitted: the Dú Yì shù in seventeen juàn was composed by Pān Shìzǎo of the Míng. Shìzǎo, zì Qùhuá, hào Xuěsōng, was a man of Wùyuán. He was a jìnshì of the guǐwèi year of Wànlì (1583), and his offices reached as far as Vice-Director of the Ceremonial Court. The book has ten juàn for the upper and lower scriptures, and seven juàn for the Xìcí through Záguà. Each entry first brings out his own meaning, and then gathers and combines the doctrines of various Confucians at the back.
At the front is a preface by Jiāo Hóng, which says: “What is principal in principle, none was so well equipped as Fáng Shěnquán; what is principal in number, none was so well equipped as Lǐ Dǐngzuò. Shìzǎo gathered and selected from them” — so the old doctrines on which he draws are only those of the Zhōuyì yìhǎi and the Zhōuyì jíjiě. Yet the general import is mostly principal in meaning-and-principle; hence what he takes from the Yìhǎi is the more numerous. Of the Jíjiě’s contents — Yú Fān, Gàn Bǎo, and the various houses tinged with symbol-and-number — he as a rule sets aside without recording, in fact taking Fáng’s book as principal and Lǐ’s book as supplement.
On examination: the Yìhǎi in 100 juàn was long lost; what now exists is Lǐ Héng’s Cuō yào 撮要 in fifteen juàn, not the original recension. Jiāo’s preface and the like — could it be that in the Wànlì period the old recension still existed? Yet the Sòng zhì 宋志 already does not catalog it, and Chén Zhènsūn’s 陳振孫 Shū lù jiě tí 書錄解題 also says he saw only four juàn; the 100-juàn version was not seen [there]. How could Shìzǎo see what they could not? Jiāo’s words are probably embellishment.
Respectfully collated, the twelfth month of the forty-fifth year of Qiánlóng (1780). 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 Pān’s late career: he completed his examination success in 1583 and died in 1600; his son and friends tell us he refused to release the manuscript during his lifetime and died with the work still being revised. The bracket here (1590–1600) covers the late Wànlì decade in which the work took shape. Posthumous publication followed shortly after his death.
The work is a balanced late-Míng jíshì (collected commentary) that maintains a yìlǐ center but draws on the principal medieval bibliographic syntheses (Yìhǎi, Jíjiě) — precisely the two compilations the Sìkù editors had themselves identified as the principal vehicles for transmitting otherwise-lost Hàn-Tang Yì-glosses. It thus stands at a significant point in the late-Míng / Qīng transmission history of these earlier syntheses: by quoting from them, Pān provides an additional textual witness to their state in the late sixteenth century.
The Sìkù editors’ notice contains a small but telling kǎozhèng moment: their cross-check of Jiāo Hóng’s claim that Pān used the original 100-juàn Yìhǎi against the Sòng-period bibliographic record (which already shows the work as lost or radically reduced) demonstrates that the late-Míng claim was inflated. This is a representative instance of the Sìkù editors’ polite but firm correction of inflated late-Míng prefatory rhetoric.
Translations and research
No substantial monograph in Western languages located. For Pān’s broader Wùyuán Confucian milieu and his relations with Jiāo Hóng’s late-Wànlì literary circle, see Edward T. Ch’ien, Chiao Hung and the Restructuring of Neo-Confucianism in the Late Ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
Other points of interest
The work’s structural choice — primary author’s voice followed by anthology of earlier commentary — is a common late-Míng jíshì arrangement (cf. KR1a0095 Lín Xīyuán) but in Pān’s case is unusually transparent because of the limited number of sources. The selective treatment of Lǐ Dǐngzuò’s Jíjiě (omitting Yú Fān and Gàn Bǎo) is itself evidence of Pān’s late-Míng yìlǐ preferences against the xiàngshù current that contemporaries like Lái Zhīdé (KR1a0100) and Xióng Guò (KR1a0098) were elevating.