Yù zuàn Zhōuyì shù yì 御纂周易述義
Imperial Compilation: Recital of the Meaning of the Zhōuyì by 傅恒 (奉敕撰)
About the work
The second major Qīng imperial Yìjīng compilation, in ten juàn, prepared under imperial command of the Qiánlóng emperor and completed in Qiánlóng 20 summer, fourth month = 1755. The work was nominally directed by the Grand Secretary Fù Héng 傅恒 (with Lái Bǎo 來保, Sūn Jiāgàn 孫嘉淦 as co-directors and Wāng Yóudūn 汪由敦, Nà Yántài 納延泰, Liú Lún 劉綸 as deputy directors); the technical compilation was carried out by the Hànlín lecturers Wú Dǐng 吳鼎 and Liáng Xīyú 梁錫璵. The work was composed as a companion volume to Kāngxī’s Yù zuàn Zhōuyì zhé zhōng of 1715 (KR1a0117), one or two hexagrams per day under imperial review (一如詩義之例, “exactly on the model of the Shī yì”). It uses Cháo Yǐdào’s 晁以道 base text rather than Wáng Bì’s, and follows Zhū Xī’s Běnyì in arrangement to align with the ten Wings’ original sequence.
The Qiánlóng emperor’s preface explicitly positions the work as continuation rather than replacement of Kāngxī’s Zhé zhōng: “Yì qí tǐ ér zōng qí yì” 異其體而宗其義 — “varying its form but revering its meaning.” Where Kāngxī’s Zhé zhōng is the comprehensive scholarly synthesis, Qiánlóng’s Shù yì is the more accessible imperial-recital, intended to make the Yì’s import available to a broader Qīng official-class readership.
Tiyao
Imperial Preface (Qiánlóng, summer fourth month of Qiánlóng 20 = 1755, translated): The Shī meaning [the parallel imperial Shī jīng compilation] having been concluded, I now turn to the Zhōuyì. Taking up what I had previously brought out in elucidation, I commanded the Hànlín officials to arrange-and-order its discussions, one or two hexagrams a day, exactly on the model of the Shī yì. We follow the Běnyì of Master Zhū, using Mr Cháo’s [Yǐdào’s] base text in order to answer to the old arrangement of the Ten Wings. When the compilation was complete I again composed for it this preface.
The Shī, Shū, and Chūnqiū were all what Confucius edited and fixed; and yet for the Yì he alone composed the Ten Wings to bring out its hidden treasures. The hexagram-and-line, Tuàn-and-Xiàng, the way of mutual-exchange and varying-exchange — without the sage, none can elucidate this. Hence he attached the verbal commentary to instruct the myriad ages, and above to receive the threads of the three sages Fú Xī, King Wén, and the Duke of Zhōu — this is still the meaning of “transmitting and not creating.”
For one who studies the Yì, if one does not deeply savor the words of the sage, one has no means of probing the original-and-real of dividing-the-lines and establishing-the-trigrams, nor the actual-application of embodying observation and savoring divination. Later Confucians who one-sidedly hold one doctrine and take it as their words are not those who know the Yì.
My august grandfather’s [Kāngxī’s] imperially-compiled Zhōuyì zhé zhōng — broad-and-great, refined-and-minute, the meaning is nothing-not-complete; it brings together-and-encompasses all the discussions of the Hàn and Táng onward and takes their pure-and-fine. Those who speak of the Yì cannot escape its scope. The present compilation varies its form but reveres its meaning — perhaps not failing the import of “transmitting from the ancestor’s account.”
[Long list of compilation officials follows.] Sìkù tíyào (translated, condensed): The Yù zuàn Zhōuyì shù yì in ten juàn was compiled by [Fù] Héng and others on imperial command of our Gāozōng Chúnhuáng [Qiánlóng]. The book reveres the Běnyì, follows the Ten Wings’ arrangement, and presents the canonical meaning concisely. As a companion to the Zhé zhōng it is more accessible; in doctrinal substance it does not depart from the latter.
Abstract
Composition is fixed by the imperial preface to summer of Qiánlóng 20 = 1755. The work was prepared under daily imperial review, one or two hexagrams per day, in the same workshop format as the parallel imperial Shī yì. The bracket here adopts the single year. The technical compilers were Wú Dǐng 吳鼎 (Hànlín Reader-in-Waiting Academician) and Liáng Xīyú 梁錫璵 (Hànlín Reader-in-Waiting Academician concurrently Diary-and-Action Recorder); the institutional director was Fù Héng.
The work serves a different function from Lǐ Guāngdì’s Zhé zhōng: where the Zhé zhōng is the comprehensive imperial-examination authority, the Shù yì is the more compact and readable imperial-recital. Methodologically it stays squarely within the Zhū Xī Běnyì tradition and does not engage with substantive innovation; the Qiánlóng emperor’s framing — “transmitting and not creating” — explicitly positions it as a recital of the Kāngxī-period synthesis rather than a fresh contribution.
The compilation also marks a high point of Qiánlóng-period imperial compilation patronage: the long list of named directors, deputy directors, manager officials, compilers, custodians, transcribers, and student copyists at the head of the work documents the elaborate Qīng imperial compilation bureaucracy at its mid-eighteenth-century mature form. As an institutional document it deserves study alongside the parallel Shī yì and the much larger Sìkù quánshū project that would follow under the same emperor twenty years later.
Translations and research
For Fù Héng’s broader Qiánlóng-period role see ECCP under “Fu-heng.” For the imperial jīngxué compilation tradition under Qiánlóng see Pamela Crossley, A Translucent Mirror; R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ien-lung Era (Harvard, 1987). No major Western-language monograph on the Zhōuyì shù yì specifically located.
Other points of interest
The pairing with Kāngxī’s Zhé zhōng (1715) and the trio it forms with the still-earlier Shùnzhì Yìjīng tōngzhù (1657, KR1a0115) and Kāngxī’s Rì jiǎng Yìjīng jiěyì (1684, KR1a0116) makes the early-and-mid Qīng court’s Yì-compilation tradition unusually well-documented across four reigns. The pattern — each emperor producing a successor Yì compilation that explicitly cites and supplements (without superseding) its predecessor — is a small but important piece of evidence for the continuity of imperial Confucian self-cultivation through the high-Qīng century.