Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

first draft in 1804. In a letter to his sons, he wrote that this particular book had been composed with the assistance of Heaven and without Heaven’s help, it could not have been completed.⁴² In the Chuyŏk sajŏn, Tasan provides a detailed discussion of what he considered to be the four essential techniques (易理四法) of Changes interpretation: “images of things” (物象); “extrapolation and transfer” (推移); “line changes” (爻變); and “interlocking trigrams” (互體). The details of these techniques have been discussed many times in various East Asian– and Western-language scholarly works and need not be repeated here.⁴³ The salient point is that they represented modifications to various interpretive theories that had developed in the Han 漢 (206 BCE–220 CE) and Song 宋 (960–1279 CE) dynasties and that were designed to explain the complex relationships existing between individual lines (and their line statements), trigrams, and hexagrams.

Tasan’s meticulous scholarship brought Korean philological approaches to the Yijing to new heights. One indication of his critical attitude can be found in the Yŏkhak sŏŏn, which devotes nearly two hundred pages to evaluating about twenty major Chinese scholars of the Yijing, ranging from Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200 CE) in the Han dynasty to Li Guangdi 李光地 (1642–1718) in the Qing.⁴⁴ In the spirit of balance, Tasan identifies at least some of the admirable qualities of each major scholar (and a great number of others as well), but most of them face substantial criticism. Zheng Xuan, for instance, comes under fire for inspiring “heretical theories” (邪說) with his careless numerological and symbolic speculations. Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249) and Han Kangbo 韓康伯 (fl. ca. 385), for their part, take flak for erring in the opposite direction—not giving sufficient attention to the concrete images of the Changes and leaning much too far in the direction of Daoism. Several Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907) scholars received Tasan’s criticisms for their triviality, dryness, or carelessness, and even the talented Li Dingzuo 李鼎祚 (fl. eighth century), who compiled the Zhouyi jijie 周易集解 (Collected explanations of the Zhou Changes), produced work in which Tasan found “both gold and sand.”