Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

evil fortune.” He even went so far as to include in his Zhouyi benyi two numerological charts of highly questionable provenance: the Hetu 河圖 ([Yellow] River Chart) and the Luoshu 洛書 (Luo [River] Writing) (see figure 1).¹² On the other hand, Zhu believed steadfastly that the ultimate purpose of the Changes was to contribute to self-cultivation and that without sincerity and the rectification of character it would be of no use in divination.

The Travels of the Changes in the Sinosphere

Although the specific circumstances under which the Yijing found its way to various East Asian countries naturally differed, the enormous prestige of the document and the basic language of transmission remained the same. As indicated, from the early centuries of the common era into the late nineteenth century, literary Sinitic was the lingua franca of virtually all literate elites in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, employed in a fashion roughly analogous to the scholarly use of Latin for several centuries in the West. The prestige of Chinese characters was so great in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that most philosophical and religious texts, whether Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, or Shintoist, were written in literary Sinitic despite the fact that alternative, indigenously developed scripts such as Vietnamese chữ nôm ࡨ�喃 or 字喃, Korean hangŭl 한글, and Japanese kana 仮名 had been available in these societies for hundreds of years.¹³ As a result, interpretive approaches to the Chinese classics, including the Changes, were profoundly influenced by Chinese forms of exegesis. At the same time, however, once texts written in classical Chinese arrived in new places, their interaction with indigenous ideas and institutions produced significant linguistic variations—hence my use of the term literary Sinitic.