Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

a great many short essays. Some texts are organized topically, and a few employ an explicitly comparative approach, analyzing the Changes together with other Chinese classics, such as the Classic of Poetry (詩經) or the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋).⁵⁷ And some are more or less random observations, such as Ngô Thế Vinh’s 吳世榮 (1803–1856) Trúc đường Dịch kinh tùy bút 竹堂周易隨筆 (Jottings on the Zhou Changes from the Bamboo Hall) (1847).

There are very few extant printed books on the Changes in Vietnam. One reason is that printing in premodern Vietnam was not as well developed as it was in Qing dynasty China, Tokugawa Japan, or Chosŏn Korea. Moreover, great numbers of printed Vietnamese books were either lost during centuries of warfare, destroyed during the Ming dynasty’s book-burning campaign in the early fifteenth century, stolen from imperial archives after the fall of a regime, or eradicated by politically inspired “anti-superstition” campaigns in more recent times.⁵⁸ Most Vietnamese manuscripts on the Changes are undated and/or anonymous, and some have been attributed to more than one author. As a result, it is not always known who the original author(s) of a given manuscript might have been. A good example of this problem is the widely circulated Vietnamese work on the Yijing titled Dịch phu tùng thuyết 易膚叢說 (Collected discussions on the surface of the Changes).⁵⁹

There are at least three different manuscripts with this exact title as well as several with similar titles: the Dịch phu tùng thuyết đính 易膚叢說訂 (A revision of the Collected Discussions on the Surface of the Changes); the Dịch phu tùng quái đính 易膚叢卦訂 (A revision of the hexagram [texts] of the Collected Discussions on the Surface of the Changes); the Dịch phu tùng kí 易膚叢記 (Collected records on the surface of the Changes); the Bình Giang Phạm thị gia thục Dịch kinh lãi trắc 平江范氏家塾易經蠡測 (Shallow understandings of the Classic of Changes from the family school of Mr. Phạm of Bình Giang), reportedly edited by Phạm Đình Hổ 范廷琥; and the Lãi trắc vấn đáp 蠡測問答 (Questions and answers based on shallow understandings [of the Changes]). Other titles for the latter