Zhōuyì wàn cí kùn xué jì 周易玩辭困學記
Records of Savoring the Words and Studying-in-Straits the Zhōu Changes by 張次仲
About the work
A late-Míng / early-Qīng Yìjīng commentary in fifteen juàn by Zhāng Cìzhòng 張次仲 (1589–1676) of Hǎiníng 海寧, a Míng loyalist who refused Qīng office. Composed over more than twenty years and revised six or seven times, the work explicitly refuses both xiàngshù numerology and chènwěi 讖緯 apocrypha, taking the Wáng Bì 王弼 base text for Qián (with a parallel printing of Zhèng Xuán’s 鄭玄 base text marked at the head of each section for comparison). At the front is a Dú Yì dà yì 讀易大意 collecting earlier commentators’ broader views together with several dozen entries of Zhāng’s own opinions. Methodologically the work is sharply polemical: it rejects the Sòng guà biàn doctrine (“the doublings from eight to sixteen to thirty-two to sixty-four, and the deriving of any one hexagram from any other, are all things Confucius did not say”), denies the existence of charts beyond the Hétú and Luòshū themselves (post-Sòng diagrams being “later attributions to the Master”), and declines the line-by-line allegorical reading that would let “this line be a jūnzǐ and that line a xiǎorén” — instead reading each hexagram as a single ethical configuration. The Sìkù editors approve the cleanup but warn that abandoning all formal yìli apparatus risks “opening the door to conjecture.”
Tiyao
Sìkù tíyào (translated, condensed): The Zhōuyì wàn cí kùn xué jì in fifteen juàn was composed by Zhāng Cìzhòng of our [Qīng] dynasty. Cìzhòng, zì Yuánhù, was a man of Hǎiníng. The book has a self-preface saying his nature is dull and unable, and he dares not extravagantly discuss symbol-and-number, and that he plainly does not believe the chènwěi doctrine; he merely sought, in the language and characters, what is exactly fitting and beneficial to body and mind, and noted them down as he went, accumulating into a volume over the years. After more than twenty years, with six or seven redraftings, it was completed. His position-taking is most solid and substantial.
For the Qián hexagram he uses the Wáng Bì base for ease of glossing, but still places the Zhèng Kāngchéng base at the head of each section for comparison. At the front is collected the discussions of various Confucians and several dozen of his own discussions as a Dú Yì dà yì. What he disputes — for example: that “the doubling-method of the eight trigrams from sixteen, thirty-two, on to sixty-four, and the saying that some hexagram came from such-and-such hexagram, are all what the Master did not say”; that “outside the Hétú and Luòshū there are no other charts — later men attributed sayings to the Master, fragmentary and meandering”; that “the six lines of one hexagram are like zhǔbóyàlǚ 主伯亞旅 [the social positions of host, elder, junior, retainer]; there is no principle whereby this is a jūnzǐ and that is a xiǎorén, in mutually-back-to-back-and-mixed disorder” — sweeping away the entanglements and dedicatedly making meaning-and-principle his standpoint. Although this thoroughgoing setting-aside of all the various houses’ formal yìlì unavoidably opens the door to subjective verdicts, his thoroughgoing setting-aside of all the various charts in fact has the strength of cutting away the bramble. Moreover, his great import is close to human affairs, of comparative use to learners; compared with those who fill page after page with diagrams that resemble computation-canons or yì-game manuals, while in turn shelving the Yì-principle without discussion, he far surpasses.
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
Composition cannot be precisely dated. Zhāng’s self-preface implies a long period of revision; the bracket here (1640–1670) covers the late-Míng and early-Qīng span when the work took shape, with the manuscript probably in essentially final form by the mid-Kāngxī period. Zhāng died in 1676.
The work is one of the principal late-Míng / early-Qīng anti-chart and anti-numerology Yì commentaries, and a clear precursor — alongside Dǒng Shǒuyù’s KR1a0112 — to Hú Wèi’s Yìtú míng biàn (1706). Doctrinally Zhāng pushes further than most: he refuses not only the chart-tradition but also the line-by-line allegorical yìli method that earlier yìli writers had taken for granted, instead reading each hexagram as a single, integrated ethical configuration. The Sìkù editors’ careful balancing of the work’s strengths (sweeping out chart-tradition cobwebs) and risks (subjectivism in the absence of formal exegetical apparatus) is one of their more nuanced Yì-class assessments.
The classificational note: the Sìkù editors classify the work under the Qīng (Guócháo), recognizing Zhāng’s continued life into the Kāngxī era; the catalog meta places him under Míng. Zhāng was a Míng loyalist who refused Qīng office.
Translations and research
No substantial monograph in Western languages located. Treated in Chinese surveys of early-Qīng Yìxué (Liào Píng 廖平’s Yìxué-tradition listings; Zhū Bóhūi’s Yìxué zhéxué shǐ vol. 4 epilogue).
Other points of interest
Zhāng’s parallel printing of the Zhèng Xuán base text for Qián alongside the Wáng Bì base — the canonical Hàn-tradition recension preserved as a small head-matter — is a graceful late-Míng acknowledgment of the philological problem of the Yì’s textual recensions, and one of the more elegant editorial gestures in the corpus.