Dú Yì dà zhǐ 讀易大旨
The Great Import of Reading the Changes by 孫奇逢
About the work
A late-life Yìjīng commentary in five juàn by Sūn Qíféng 孫奇逢 (1584–1675) — Míng loyalist and one of the “Three Great Confucians of the Early Qīng” — composed at Mount Sūmén 蘇門 in Hénán after his post-1644 retreat. Sūn says explicitly that he began studying the Yì only at Sūmén, in old age, when his powers had declined; the work is therefore a synthesis of long-meditated readings rather than a continuous canonical commentary, and bears the title “Dà zhǐ” — Great Import — to signal that it does not work line by line. His pupil Gěng Jí 耿極 collated the manuscript; appended at the end is the Jiān shān táng wèn dá 兼山堂問答 (questions and answers from his Sūmén lectures) and Sūn’s Yì-correspondence with his teacher Lǐ Bēng 李崶 (zì Sānwú dàorén 三無道人) of Xióngxiàn 雄縣, gathered into a separate juàn.
Methodologically Sūn neither openly attacks the chart-tradition nor incorporates it (“not a single character touches on chart-and-writing”); he develops his readings from the Xiàng zhuàn through to the whole hexagram, and from the single hexagram out through the sixty-four. Each gloss first lays out his own reading and then appends earlier commentators’ material. The Sìkù editors’ judgment is approving: his learning in practical application makes his readings about “law and admonition” (法戒) — distinct from those who turn the Yì into mere “star-charts, yì-game manuals, xiàng-tables, computation-canons.”
Tiyao
Sìkù tíyào (translated, condensed): The Dú Yì dà zhǐ in five juàn was composed by Sūn Qíféng of our [Qīng] dynasty. Qíféng, zì Qǐtài, hào Zhōngyuán, also Xiàfēng, was a man of Róngchéng. In the previous Míng, he was a jǔrén of the gēngzǐ year of Wànlì (1600). At the start of our dynasty he moved to Mount Sūmén in Hénán, gathered pupils and lectured to the end of his life. This book is what he composed in Hénán; he himself says he began to study the Yì on arriving at Sūmén — old in years, his talent exhausted, he merely on the basis of what he had occasionally seen, distilled the body and essentials in order to display them to his students and disciples. It is fundamentally not a phrase-by-phrase, character-by-character gloss; hence “Dà zhǐ” — Great Import. His pupil Gěng Jí collated it. Appended at the end is the Jiān shān táng wèn dá and the Yì-correspondence with Lǐ Bēng (zì Sānwú dàorén) of Xióngxiàn — Sūn’s teacher in Yì-learning — separated as one juàn.
Qíféng’s Yì-exposition does not openly attack chart-and-writing, and yet there is not a single character on chart-and-writing’s general meaning. He brings out meaning-and-principle close to human affairs: by the Xiàng zhuàn he penetrates the import of the single hexagram, and by the single hexagram he penetrates the meaning of the sixty-four hexagrams. In each gloss he first lays out his own discussion and then appends earlier commentators’ words. His life-long learning was rooted in practical application; hence what he says is all about law-and-admonition — by no means what those who hook at the odd-and-even and color black-and-white, who turn the sage’s pedagogical canon into a star-chart, yì-game manual, xiàng-table, or computation-canon, can match.
Respectfully collated, the third month of the forty-third year of Qiánlóng (1778). 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 Sūn’s post-1644 Sūmén years and his death in 1675. The bracket here adopts these dates. The work is undated internally; the Sìkù notice does not narrow it.
The work is one of the principal early-Qīng Confucian Yì commentaries written from a Míng-loyalist scholarly retreat. Methodologically it stands in the same anti-chart, yìlǐ-emphasizing tradition as Zhāng Cìzhòng’s KR1a0114 of the same generation; doctrinally Sūn is more centrally LùWáng 陸王 mind-learning oriented than Zhāng but takes the same Confucian-pedagogical view of the canon. The Sìkù editors’ approving rhetoric — singling out the work as exemplary in keeping the Yì a “pedagogical canon” rather than a technical-numerological apparatus — is one of their characteristic late-Qiánlóng evaluations.
The appended Jiān shān táng wèn dá is a substantive piece of pedagogical-ethical Yì-discussion in yǔlù form, and the correspondence with Lǐ Bēng preserves a small piece of MíngQīng Yì-transmission documentation outside the major schools. Together they make the work also a documentary witness to early-Qīng northern Lǐxué Yì-learning.
Translations and research
For Sūn Qíféng’s broader place in early-Qīng northern Lǐxué see Lynn Struve, The Ming-Qing Conflict, 1619–1683: A Historiography and Source Guide (Ann Arbor, 1998), and Ng On-cho, Cheng-Zhu Confucianism in the Early Qing (SUNY, 2001). No major Western-language monograph specifically on the Dú Yì dà zhǐ located. In Chinese: Yú Yīngshí 余英時, Sòng Míng Lǐxué yǔ zhèngzhì wénhuà, treats Sūn’s broader thought.
Other points of interest
The work’s compositional setting — a Confucian school in mountain retreat in early-Qīng Hénán, with formal pedagogical correspondence both to teacher and to pupils preserved as part of the work — makes it one of the clearest documentary cases of the early-Qīng Confucian Yì-discussion-circle as a textual genre. The pairing with KR1a0114 (Zhāng Cìzhòng’s Wàn cí kùn xué jì, also Míng-loyalist mountain-retreat Yì) marks the early-Qīng moment when Confucian Yì-writing under refusal of dynastic service became a recognizable mode.