Chén Yìngrùn 陳應潤, zì Zéyún 澤雲, was a late-Yuán Yìjīng scholar from Tiāntái 天台 (Táizhōu 台州, Zhèjiāng 浙江) and a descendant of Chén Bāngyàn 陳邦彥 (posthumous name Xiànsùgōng 獻肅公). His career and the source for this prosopography come from Huáng Jìn’s 黃溍 (黃溍) preface to the Zhōuyì yáo biàn yì yùn 周易爻變易縕 (KR1a0088) of zhìzhèng bǐngxū 至正丙戌 (1346): in the Yánvyòu 延祐 period (1314–1320) Chén entered government from his initial posting as a Confucian instructor in Huángyán 黃巖, becoming a prefectural clerk; some years later he was reposted to Míng [Zhōu] 明 [州] as a clerk; in zhìzhèng yǐyǒu 至正乙酉 (1345) he was assigned to a guest-secretary position at Tóngjiāng 桐江, where he composed the Yáo biàn yì yùn. Huáng Jìn (1277–1357), who had served as deputy magistrate of Nínghǎi 寧海 in the Yánvyòu period and had known Chén in office there, supplies a detailed character sketch (admired Chén’s plain-spoken integrity, decisive judgment, and filial frugality) and dates his preface to 1346.
Chén’s reading of the Yì is unusually independent for the late Yuán: he rejects the entire Chén Tuán 陳摶 chart-tradition (including Shào Yōng’s 邵雍 prior-heaven hexagram positions and Zhōu Dūnyí’s 周敦頤 wújítàijí doctrine) as a contamination by LǎoZhuāng and the Cāntóng qì 參同契 alchemy onto the canonical Yì. His method takes the Shuōguà 說卦’s Dì chū hū Zhèn 帝出乎震 passage as the only canonical authority for hexagram positions, treats the Tiāndì dìngwèi 天地定位 passage (read by Shào Yōng as the prior-heaven order) as merely a description of the eight trigrams’ mutual interaction (xiāng cuò 相錯), and applies the Chūnqiū zuǒzhuàn’s “X hexagram changes to Y hexagram” formula to derive readings for individual lines (the yáo biàn 爻變 method of his title). The Sìkù editors regard him as the first Yuán-period scholar to break decisively with the Chén Tuán school.
CBDB has no securely identifiable entry for this Chén Yìngrùn (the entry 108330, fl. 1279, is for a different person of the same name).