Wáng Shì 王湜
Native of Tóngzhōu 同州 (in modern Shǎnxī, Dàlì xiàn area). Birth and death dates not securely recorded. Active in the early Southern Sòng; the principal dating evidence is Shàoxīng 6 = 1136, which appears as the terminus of his Tàiyǐ zhǒuhòu bèijiǎn (see below). Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì 郡齋讀書志 records him as a miǎnjiě jìnshì 免解進士 (a jìnshì candidate exempted from the preliminary examination); Zhāng Shìnán’s 張世南 Yóuhuàn jìwén 遊宦記聞 calls him a běikè 北客 (northern refugee/guest) of Tóngzhōu — i.e. a Northerner who came south during the Jìngkāng / Shàoxīng upheaval of 1126–1127. No CBDB record can be confidently matched.
Wáng Shì worked outside the orthodox Confucian transmission of Shào Yōng’s Huángjí jīngshì school. Two writings are recorded under his name:
(1) Tàiyǐ zhǒuhòu bèijiǎn 太乙肘後備檢, in 3 juàn — a Tàiyǐ shù 太乙數 (Tàiyǐ numerology) treatise containing the two-method yīnyáng èrdùn with 144 charts running from Emperor Yáo down to Shàoxīng 6 (1136). Recorded by Zhāng Shìnán; no longer transmitted.
(2) Yìxué 易學 in 1 juàn (KR3g0011), a Daoist-and-alchemical-rooted study of the Yì drawing on Chén Tuán 陳摶, Mù Xiū 穆修, Lǐ Zhīcái 李之才, and Liú Mù 劉牧, with a closing Huángjí jīngshì jiéyào 皇極經世節要 section. The book is in the Tōngzhìtáng jīngjiě 通志堂經解 and in the Sìkù.
His scholarly value to later readers lies in two pieces of candid bibliographic testimony in the Yìxué: (i) that the xiāntiān diagrams cannot be traced before Chén Tuán (“before Xīyí, no one knows where it comes from”), and (ii) that the received Huángjí jīngshì shū is not entirely Shào Yōng’s authentic writing (“Kāngjié’s posthumous writings have errors, both from household drafts and from outside hearsay”). Both remarks are endorsed by the Sìkù editors of his tíyào as evidentially decisive against the standard later-Confucian attributions, and Wáng Shì is praised as “clear-and-without-deception, having the inheritance of the steadfast simplicity of the old Confucians” (皎然不欺. 有先儒淳實之遺矣).