Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

for Cheng Yi, the third for the opinions of others (jishuo 集說), and the fourth for Li’s own editorial comments (an 案). In all, Li drew from a broad range of scholarly opinion on the Changes: eighteen commentaries from the Han; five from the Six Dynasties period; one from the Sui 隋 (581–618); eleven from the Tang; ninety-eight from the Song; two from the Jin 晉 (265–420); twenty-two from the Yuan 元 (1279–1368); and sixty-one from the Ming.⁵⁴

Most extant works on the Yijing were published in Vietnam during the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, and most, like the aforementioned reference works, reflected an orthodoxy based on Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism. But once again, as in Japan and Korea, despite this official orthodoxy, other currents of thought circulated in Vietnam at the time, encouraging scholars to explore new interpretative ground. Significantly, many Vietnamese scholars found a pre-imperial form of Confucianism alluring, as it seemed to speak more directly to the politics and geography of their country than the visions of Song- and post–Song dynasty thinkers, who were themselves the products of a highly developed bureaucratic state that had been at least a thousand years in the making.⁵⁵

It is sometimes said that Vietnamese scholars were not as preoccupied as their Chinese, Japanese, and Korean counterparts with philological and metaphysical questions.⁵⁶ But based on my own perusal of dozens of Yijing-related printed works and handwritten manuscripts in the Hanoi National Library that were produced in the late Lê period or the early Nguyễn dynasty, it seems clear that Vietnamese intellectuals were genuinely interested in these topics, especially approaches to the Changes associated with the School of Images and Numbers. Most of their works are written in literary Sinitic, but a number employ nôm characters in prose, verse, or a combination of the two. The works themselves range in length from several hundred pages to only a few dozen. Many have sections that utilize a question-and-answer format, while others present their Yijing-related information in the form of