Wèi Yuánsōng 衛元嵩
Northern-Zhōu cosmographer, calendrical-astronomer, and former Buddhist monk. Native of Chéngdū 成都 in Shǔjùn 蜀郡 (Sìchuān). Active under the Northern Zhōu Wǔdì 武帝 (reigned 561–578); birth and death years not securely recorded; flourished c. 560–575.
The Sìkù 提要 of KR3g0003 Yuánbāo jīngzhuàn assembles his complex biography from multiple sources:
(1) Cosmographer: Yáng Jí’s 楊楫 preface to the Yuánbāo describes Wèi Yuánsōng as “a man of Chéngdū in Shǔ; clear in yīnyáng and calendrical-astronomical computation; presented strategy [memorial] to the Later-Zhōu [Northern Zhōu]; received the noble rank of Chíjié Shǔjùngōng (Holding-the-Tally Lord-of-the-Shǔ-Commandery)“. The Northern History (Běishǐ) records him in the Yìshù zhuàn (Arts-and-Techniques Biography), confirming his standing as a recognized expert in occult-and-cosmographic technique.
(2) Buddhist apostate: Wèi Yuánsōng was originally a Shǔjùn Buddhist monk (shāmén 沙門). The Suíshū Shìshì lèi records that he memorialized to denounce the Buddhist sēngtú (monks) as “excessive and indiscriminate”; the Northern Zhōu Wǔdì subsequently issued the famous mièfó edict of Jiàndé 3 (574 CE), abolishing Buddhism throughout the Northern Zhōu (one of the SānWǔ yīZōng 三武一宗 great Buddhist persecutions of pre-modern China). Wèi Yuánsōng’s role as the proximate instigator of this persecution made him a hated figure in subsequent Buddhist memory: the Táng-period Buddhist apologist Dàoxuān 道宣 in the Guǎng hóngmíng jí 廣弘明集 records Wèi Yuánsōng’s career with extensive denunciations.
(3) Prophetic-political agent: Wēn Dàyǎ’s 溫大雅 Chuàngyè qǐjūzhù 創業起居注 (Diary of the Founding of the Tang Dynasty) records that Wèi Yuánsōng composed yáochèn 謠讖 (prophetic ballads) that Péi Jì 裴寂 and others used to justify the LǐYuán 李淵 uprising against the Suí. The 提要 dismisses these as “aberrant-and-deceitful” (yāowàng 妖妄), but the involvement places Wèi Yuánsōng at the political center of the Suí-Tang transition.
His sole transmitted work is the Yuánbāo jīng 元包經 (KR3g0003 Yuánbāo jīngzhuàn) — a 5-juan cosmological-numerological treatise modeled on the Tàixuán jīng (KR3g0001) but using the Guīcáng 歸藏 (Returning-Storehouse) hexagram-sequence (starting with Kūn rather than the Yìjīng’s Qián), then proceeding through Qián-Duì-Gèn-Lí-Kǎn-Xùn-Zhèn (the seven other trigrams) in seven transformations to yield the 64-hexagram complete set. The Sìkù 提要 judges the work harshly: “its narrative-style is roundabout and the writing tends to crooked-difficulty; furthermore [it] enjoys using borrowed-characters, difficult to read at sudden encounter; investigating its commentary-and-pronunciation glosses, [we find] separately no profound meaning — by means of difficulty-and-deepness, the text is shallow-and-easy: nothing more than imitating the Tàixuán ‘s frowning [a vain emulation]“. Despite this critical verdict, the work is preserved on grounds of long transmission.