Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

According to the theory of the Yijing, the sixty-four hexagrams represented all of the fundamental situations one might encounter at any given moment in one’s life. It followed, then, that by selecting a particular hexagram or hexagrams at a given moment, and by correctly interpreting the symbolic elements involved (especially, but not exclusively, the judgments, line statements, and trigrams), a person could devise a strategy for dealing with issues arising in the present and the future.

The problem with the basic text of the Changes, however, is that almost nothing about it is unambiguously clear. Written commentaries were thus necessary to make practical, moral, and/or metaphysical sense out of it. The most important of these, at least in the early history of the work, were known collectively as the “Ten Wings” (Shiyi 十翼). They became attached to the basic text of the Yijing when the work received imperial sanction in 136 BCE as a major “Confucian” classic. Together, the Ten Wings amplified the basic text of the Yijing and invested it with additional symbolism and multiple layers of meaning. Over time, from the Han dynasty onward, thousands of commentaries were composed in China (and, as I will show, elsewhere in East Asia), reflecting a wide range of political, social, philosophical, and religious outlooks.¹¹

The two major schools of Yijing interpretation were known respectively as the School of Images and Numbers (Xiangshu 象數) and the School of Meanings and Principles (Yili 義理). The former, epitomized by the writings of Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011–1077), relied on trigram symbolism, calendrical correlations, and/or numerology to reveal patterns of cosmic change, while the latter, epitomized by the writings of Cheng Yi, emphasized the moral messages of the Changes. The great contribution of Zhu Xi in the realm of Yi exegesis—reflected in his highly regarded Zhouyi benyi 周易本義 (Basic meaning of the Zhou Changes) and his Yixue qimeng 易學啓蒙 (Introduction to the study of the Changes)—was to bring together these two interpretive approaches. On the one hand, Zhu maintained that Yijing was originally a book of divination and that “what is described in it is simply images and numbers by which to foretell one’s good or