Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

The Yijing in Japan

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, during the Tokugawa period, the Yijing (Japanese: Ekikyo) was wildly popular among scholars, much more so than in Chosŏn Korea or Lê dynasty and early Nguyễn dynasty Vietnam. Prior to the seventeenth century, the document exerted some influence in Japanese Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto circles, but beginning in the early seventeenth century interest in the document exploded. According to Benjamin Wai-ming Ng (吳偉明), to whom I owe a deep personal and scholarly debt,¹⁴ there were at least 1,085 major books on the Yijing written in the Tokugawa period by 416 authors—a figure that was far greater, proportionally speaking, than the number of such books produced during the entire Qing dynasty by Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol scholars.¹⁵

For the most part, early Tokugawa scholars of the Yijing routinely included commentaries from both Zhu Xi’s Zhouyi benyi and Cheng Yi’s Yichuan Yizhuan 伊川易傳 (Commentary on the Changes by Cheng Yi) in their writings without explicitly recognizing the interpretive differences that separated them. But a number of Japanese scholars, including the influential legal authority Sakakibara Kōshū 榊原篁洲 (1656–1706), gravitated clearly toward Zhu Xi, as one can see in his Ekigaku keimō genkai taisei 易學啟蒙諺解大成 (Great synthesis of a popular interpretation of [Zhu Xi’s] Introduction to the Study of the Changes) (1684). (See figure 1.) Scholars like Sakakibara may also have been influenced by the renowned but ill-fated Ming Neo-Confucian official Zhang Juzheng 張居正 (1525–1582), who had an interest in both law and classical scholarship and who wrote a highly regarded book on the Changes titled Yijing zhijie 易經直解 (A straightforward interpretation of the Classic of Changes) (1660). (See figure 2.)