Tàixuán běnzhǐ 太玄本旨
The Original Meaning of the Tàixuán by 葉子奇 (Yè Zǐqí, fl. 1378, 明, zhuàn 撰)
About the work
Yè Zǐqí’s 9-juan revisionist commentary on Yáng Xióng’s KR3g0001 Tàixuán jīng, composed in the first decades of the Ming. The work is one of the very few sustained late-imperial commentaries on the Tàixuán and the principal Ming-period exposition. The Sìkù-recension is reproduced from a 江蘇巡撫採進本 (manuscript-presentation copy submitted by the Jiāngsū provincial inspectorate).
Yè Zǐqí’s editorial stance is openly polemical: he rejects the calendrical / lǜlǚ (pitch-pipe) and seventy-two-phenological framing that the Tàixuán’s Hàn-era apparatus and the standard Sòng commentaries had imposed on the work. The text opens with a series of old diagrams (presumably inherited from the Sīmǎ Guāng tradition) tabulating the 72 phenological pentads (qīshíèr hòu 七十二候); Cháo Yuèzhī’s 晁說之 Yìxuán xīngjì pǔ 易玄星紀譜 had similarly used asterism-and-phenology coordinates as the structural key. Yè Zǐqí argues that this whole apparatus is a forced harmonization — fùhuì lǜlì jiéhòu 附會律曆節候 (sticking the Tàixuán onto the pitch-pipes/calendar/pentads) — and lists eight specific cases in which the supposed correspondences fail. From these failures he concludes that the Tàixuán cannot be made to substitute for or fully replicate the Yì. He then concedes that the Tàixuán is nevertheless an original achievement that “in the Two Hàn cannot be matched” (兩漢不可多得), and so produces his own yìlǐ (meaning-and-principle) commentary, correcting what he takes to be transmissional errors in the older Sòng commentary by Lù [Yuánfǔ] 陸 (a reference to the Wú-period Lù Jì 陸績 commentary as received through Sòng intermediaries; the Sìkù editors note this).
The Sìkù editors are sharply critical of the substantive position. They counter that Yáng Xióng’s own Hànshū biography (Yáng Xióng zhuàn) explicitly identifies the Tàixuán as a numerical-cosmological apparatus calibrated to the Tàichū 太初 calendar — the 99-fold great cycle, the alignment with day-and-night yin-yang counts, even the Zhuānxū lì 顓頊曆 reference — and that Hàn-era commentators expounded this in detail. The editors thus regard Yè Zǐqí’s rejection of the lǜlì framework as eccentric (shū lì 殊戾, “remarkably perverse”). Their concession is that the Tàixuán text itself is exceptionally dense and obscure (艱澀) and that Yè Zǐqí is at least able to read straight through it and unpack it for ordinary readers — “of some local merit” (一節之可取). On these grounds, and because almost no other late-imperial commentator had taken up the work in centuries, the Sìkù preserves the Běnzhǐ as “one school among many” (存以備一家可也).
For the parent text and its commentarial tradition, see KR3g0001 Tàixuán jīng.
Tiyao
The source directory /home/Shared/krp/KR3g/[[KR3g0002]]/ is not present in the local KRP mirror; the 提要 below is taken from the Kyoto University Zinbun digital Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào at http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/db-machine/ShikoTeiyo/0222901.html. Note that the Zinbun edition prints the title as 太元本旨, substituting 元 for 玄 under the Kāngxī taboo on the character 玄 (玄燁).
Compiled by Yè Zǐqí of the Míng. Zǐqí — style-name Shìjié 世杰, sobriquet Jìngzhāi 靜齋, native of Lóngquán 龍泉. In the early Míng, he was recommended to office and served as Chief Secretary (zhǔbù) of Bālíng 巴陵.
Yáng Xióng modeled the Xuán on the Yì. The old diagrams placed at the head of [Yè Zǐqí’s] book lay out the seventy-two phenological pentads. Cháo Yuèzhī’s Yìxuán xīngjì pǔ likewise takes asterism-and-pentad as its structural pivot. Yè Zǐqí alone holds that the Tàixuán is forced onto the pitch-pipes / calendar / pentads and that the correspondence is strained — not without arbitrary opinion. He enumerates eight cases that he was unable to make work, to demonstrate that [the Xuán] cannot exhaust the meaning of the Yì; yet he also praises [Yáng Xióng] for “being able on his own to constitute a school of learning, which in the Two Hàn cannot easily be matched”. On this basis he separately produces an exposition, in order to correct the transcriptional corruptions of the old Sòng [Yuánfǔ] Lù [Jì] commentary. In effect he is also one of those Yì commentators who abandons xiàngshù (image-and-number) to speak only of yìlǐ (meaning-and-principle).
Considering the general purport of the Tàixuán: although it does not entirely engage with the fēifú hùyìng 飛伏互應 (flying-hidden mutual-correspondence) technique, and so differs from the Jiāo [Yánshòu] / Jīng [Fáng] school, the Hànshū biography of Yáng Xióng nevertheless says: “The ‘head’ of the Xuán has four lines (zhòng 重) — these are not trigrams but numbers. Its operation derives from the 天元 [天元 in the sense of cosmic origin], deducing the calendrical-and-pitch-pipe records of the diurnal cycle and the yin-yang numerical degrees: the 99 great cycles, beginning and ending with Heaven, correspond to the Tàichū calendar; the Zhuānxū calendar is also implicated.” Hàn-era Confucians elaborated this with the greatest clarity. Yè Zǐqí’s insistence that [the Xuán] does not align with the pitch-pipes and calendar is therefore exceptionally perverse.
Still, the language of the Xuán is dense and obscure. Yè Zǐqí is able to follow the text and to unfold its meaning, so that the reader can easily understand — and in this there is at least one merit worth retaining. For several hundred years, commentators on this book have been few and far between. To preserve [the present work] as one school among the many is acceptable.
Abstract
Composition window: c. 1368–1390. Yè Zǐqí (fl. 1378 per Wilkinson) was active across the Yuán–Míng transition and held office as 巴陵主簿 in the early Hóngwǔ 洪武 reign of the Míng (founded 1368). His most famous work, the Cǎomùzǐ 草木子 (Master Vegetation), bears a preface dated 1378 — an important early-Míng biji and the principal anchoring date for his career. He is conventionally placed in the first two decades of the Míng (his death is conventionally given as c. 1390, though not securely recorded). The Tàixuán běnzhǐ was probably composed in the same period, perhaps in Yè Zǐqí’s retirement / unofficial life after his Bālíng tenure; the work itself contains no fixed dated colophon, and the Sìkù editors offer no date.
The work is significant within the long but thin commentarial tradition of the Tàixuán (after Sòng Zhōng 宋衷, Lù Jì 陸績, Fàn Wàng 范望, Wáng Yá 王涯, Sīmǎ Guāng 司馬光) as the principal Míng-period sustained commentary. Its substantive intervention — to detach the Tàixuán from Hàn-era calendrical-and-pitch-pipe correspondences and to read it as a pure yìlǐ text — is consonant with the broader SòngMíng lǐxué tendency to subordinate xiàngshù to philosophical-moral interpretation, and helps mark the place of the Tàixuán in late-imperial Chinese cosmological discourse. The Sìkù editors’ reservations (registered above) are themselves diagnostic of the high-Qīng kǎojù preference for restoring Hàn-era technical commentary.
The book’s classification under zǐbù shùshù lèi (子部·術數類) reflects the Sìkù editors’ parent classification of the Tàixuán jīng itself in the same division — see the discussion in KR3g0001.
The 9-juan structure follows the SòngYuán arrangement of the Tàixuán in 9 juàn (matching Sīmǎ Guāng’s Tàixuán jízhù organization), rather than the 10-juan Hàn / Western-Jìn arrangement followed in KR3g0001.
Translations and research
- Nylan, Michael. The Canon of Supreme Mystery, by Yang Hsiung, Albany: SUNY Press, 1993 — the standard English translation of the Tài-xuán jīng itself; notes Yè Zǐqí among the commentarial tradition.
- For Yè Zǐqí’s life and his Cǎo-mù-zǐ, see the Zhōnghuá Shū-jú 1959 edition (preface dated 1378), used by Wilkinson; and the Míng-rén zhuàn-jì zī-liào suǒ-yǐn p. 728 entry (per CBDB notes for person 131947).
No dedicated monographic study of the Tài-xuán běn-zhǐ located in Western languages.
Other points of interest
The Zinbun text prints the title throughout as 太元本旨 (substituting 元 for 玄). The catalog meta and Sìkù-recension book title retains the original 太玄本旨 form. This is a high-Qīng character-taboo artifact (Kāngxī 玄燁) preserved in the Zinbun digital transcription; the WYG text itself uses 太玄.