Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

go on to claim that the Yijing was originally a Korean text. In the Correct Changes, Kim sought to go beyond the accomplishments of China’s early sages by devising a trigram configuration that differed from both the standard Former Heaven sequence attributed to Fuxi and the Later Heaven sequence attributed to King Wen. In this new configuration, Kim symbolically privileged Korea as the center of a new world order for the future—an era of peace, prosperity, and joy. Kim also devised a “Correct Changes Diagram of Metal and Fire,” which served as the conceptual equivalent of the famous Yellow River Chart and the Luo River Writing.⁴⁷

The Yijing in Vietnam

From the end of China’s thousand-year occupation of north Vietnam (a.k.a. Tonkin) in the tenth century CE until well into the French colonial era, most Vietnamese intellectuals engaged in some form of Chinese-style classical scholarship, aspiring to be part of a distinctively Sinitic “domain of manifest civility” 文獻之邦 (Vietnamese: Văn hiến chi ban )—the Vietnamese equivalent of the long-standing Chinese notion of their country as the “domain of ritual and moral duty” (禮義之邦; also 禮儀之邦, “the land of ritual and etiquette”).⁴⁸ To be sure, from at least the thirteenth century onward (and especially from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries), use of the unique chữ nôm or nôm script had the effect of making works identified with other cultural traditions (including, of course, the Yijing; Vietnamese: Dịch kinh) seem somewhat more “Vietnamese.” But on the whole, in Vietnam, as in Korea and Japan, literary Sinitic tended to overshadow indigenously developed scripts.

The Yijing was probably introduced into Vietnam at about the same time that it reached Korea and Japan, but it did not become influential until after the establishment of the Lê dynasty. During that period, Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism became state orthodoxy, and the Changes was studied both as a Confucian classic at the Imperial College and as a divination manual at the Ministry of Rites.⁴⁹ Even then, however, it did not occupy a particularly important place in the Vietnamese examination system, and very few students seem to have specialized in it. Nonetheless,