Ér yì nèi yí yǐ 兒易內儀以
Childlike Changes: Inner Standard, the “By” by 倪元璐
About the work
A late-Míng Yìjīng commentary in six juàn by Ní Yuánlù 倪元璐 (1593–1644), Míng martyr and Hànlín academician, composed in the dying days of the Chóngzhēn reign. The work forms a pair with Ní’s Ér yì wài yí 兒易外儀 in fifteen juàn (separately cataloged in the Sìkù under the same author): the Nèi yí yǐ is the canonical-exegetical inner volume, the Wài yí is the broader discursive elaboration. The Nèi yí yǐ expounds each canonical passage only as far as the Dà xiàng 大象 statement (omitting the small xiàng and the line statements), in keeping with the Dà xiàng zhuàn’s formula yǐzhī wéi yán yòng yě 以之為言用也 (“the yǐ speaks of application”) — hence the unusual final character yǐ 以 in the title, which signals the work’s application-focus. The Wài yí extends with six rubrics — yuán shǐ 原始, zhèng yán 正言, néng shì 能事, jìn lì 盡利, qū chéng 曲成, shēn mìng 申命 — each subdivided by smaller rubrics, all drawn from Xìcí phrases, with diagrams.
The title Ér yì 兒易 (Childlike Yì) is glossed by Ní’s own preface in the sense of hái shǐ 孩始 — the Yì read in its primal, pre-elaborated form. Jiǎng Wénjiē 蔣雯階 had proposed that ér 兒 stood for Ní’s surname (借姓 — using the Hàn shū rúlín zhuàn graphic interchange between ér 兒 and ní 倪), but the Sìkù editors reject this as forced; they note that the Wànlì-period Sū Jùn 蘇濬 of Zǐxī 紫溪 had already used the title Ér yì — could he too have been embedding his surname?
Tiyao
Sìkù tíyào (translated): Respectfully submitted: the Ér yì nèi yí yǐ in six juàn and Ér yì wài yí in fifteen juàn were composed by Ní Yuánlù of the Míng. Yuánlù, zì Yùrǔ, was a man of Shàngyú. He was a jìnshì of the rénxū year of Tiānqǐ (1622), and held office through Minister of Revenue, concurrently Minister of Personnel, and Hànlín Academician. In Chóngzhēn jiǎshēn (1644) he died for his country in the dynastic catastrophe. Our August Emperor Shìzǔ Zhānghuáng [Shùnzhì] bestowed the posthumous title Wénzhèng 文正.
The Nèi yí dedicatedly uses the Dà xiàng to gloss the canon. For each hexagram the hexagram and line statements are laid out down to the Dà xiàng and stop there. Because all sixty-four hexagrams’ Dà xiàng contain the character yǐ 以, and the yǐ speaks of application — hence the work’s name. The Wài yí further has six rubrics: Yuán shǐ, Zhèng yán, Néng shì, Jìn lì, Qū chéng, Shēn mìng; and again separately small rubrics to record under each — all drawing on the meanings of characters in the Xìcí as section-names. Each section has diagrams.
Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo says: “Ní Yuánlù’s Ér yì nèi yí in six juàn and Wài yí in fifteen juàn.” Below “Nèi yí” there is no character “yǐ”; yet this compilation, in the contemporary printed edition, in fact has the character “yǐ” — so the Jīngyì kǎo is in error of omission.
The naming “Ér yì”: Jiǎng Wénjiē says, “The Lord composed Ér yì; ér is a surname.” On examination, the Shuōwén has ní 倪 and ér 兒 as two separate characters, and the Hàn shū Ér Kuān zhuàn has ér equivalent to ní — so the ancient characters were originally interchangeable. Yet examination of Yuánlù’s self-preface in fact has the meaning of hái shǐ 孩始 (childlike beginning), and the prose is very clear; Wénjiē unavoidably falls into forced attribution. In the Wànlì period, Sū Jùn 蘇濬 of Zǐxī 紫溪 had already had an Ér yì — could he too have been embedding his surname?
Yuánlù composed this book in days when the Míng fortune was in extreme peril; therefore his exposition mostly worries-about-the-times and feels-for-the-world, borrowing the Yì in order to set forth his meaning — it is not necessarily what the canonical meaning encompasses. Yet the Yì arose in mid-antiquity, and those who made the Yì had care-and-suffering; the work does not exhaust the speech, and the speech does not exhaust the meaning, but in extension and class-touching its principle in essence is nothing-not-included. The Chūnqiū fánlù 春秋繁露 too does not entirely match by the Chūnqiū, and yet Confucians today still revere and use it because its great meaning brings out the Chūnqiū. Yuánlù’s book may be read in this way. With Huáng Dàozhōu’s Sān Yì dòng jī 三易洞璣 and the rest of his nine works, it is together one of those that establish instruction by leaning on principle. Their persons are sufficient to be jointly transmitted; their words are also sufficient to be jointly transmitted. To require sentence-and-section glossing as the test of their fitting-or-not — that is petty.
Respectfully collated, the seventh 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 is bracketed by the late Chóngzhēn period. The Sìkù notice’s reading — “composed in days when the Míng fortune was in extreme peril” — places the work plausibly in the late 1630s through Ní’s 1644 suicide. The bracket here (1635–1644) reflects this. The work is undated internally.
The work’s significance is twofold. As exegesis, the restriction of canonical glossing to the Dà xiàng and the orientation toward application (yòng 用) constitute a deliberately narrowed and ethically focused reading — a Lǐxué answer to the proliferating xiàngshù commentaries of the late Wànlì. As historical witness, the work belongs (with Huáng Dàozhōu’s KR1a0110) to the small group of late-Míng Yì commentaries written under the imminent threat of dynastic collapse, by men who would shortly die for the dynasty. The Sìkù editors’ explicit grouping of Ní with Huáng Dàozhōu — “their persons are sufficient to be jointly transmitted; their words are also sufficient to be jointly transmitted” — and their broader claim that such works should not be subjected to “sentence-and-section glossing as the test of their fitting-or-not” is one of the more memorable normative statements in the Sìkù tíyào.
The textual point — that Zhū Yízūn’s Jīngyì kǎo misrenders the title without the final yǐ 以 — is corrected by the Sìkù editors against the actual printed edition.
The Wài yí (15 juàn) is a separate but related work; the present entry covers only the Nèi yí yǐ.
Translations and research
For Ní’s broader Míng-Qīng transition career and his calligraphy, see the Dictionary of Ming Biography under “Ni Yuan-lu” and Bai Qianshen, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003), which treats Ní as one of the principal late-Míng calligraphers. No major monograph on the Ér yì specifically located in Western languages.
Other points of interest
The unusual last-character title (the canonical particle yǐ 以 attached to a substantive title) is one of the more strikingly non-standard Yì-commentary titles in the late Míng, and Ní’s gloss of it through the Dà xiàng zhuàn is methodologically pointed. The Sìkù editors’ parallel between Ní’s work and the Chūnqiū fánlù — both works that “do not entirely match” the canonical meaning but transmit a worthy adjacent reading — is an interesting Qīng critical move that deserves further study.