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History of Original Yi Texts

shao

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Hello.

Does anyone know of a resource that specifies the various original texts of the Yi that have been studied and altered over the centuries (millennia)? I know that different texts have been discovered at different times, standardized, corrected, etc. over the years. Characters are different in certain versions, the hexagram sequence varies, etc.

I would like to get a more complete understanding of the history of these original texts - including even minor character alterations (corrections) by various scholars.

Thanks for reading. All responses are greatly appreciated!

Shao
 

shao

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Another related question:

Harmen mentions, "The received version is only a compromise of different schools, it should never be seen as the Yijing"

Is this to say that the received text does not exist as a complete original manuscript or merely that other manuscripts have been found in addition to the received text? And if the received text is a combination of texts gathered from multiple archaeological discoveries, what are they?
 

bradford

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The "received text" was completed in 1715 by Li Guangdi, its chief editor, under the mandate/direction of the emperor Kang Xi. It is called the Zhouyi Zhezhoung, or Correct Arrangement of the Zhouyi. It's still available, two volumes nicely bound for under 50 bucks. It had the benefit of being able draw from all of the resources available in all the libraries of the time, many thousands of books on the Yi, and presumably the editor was under imperial instructions to do the best possible job. Of course it had no access to the handful of texts and fragments that have been excavated since.
To my mind, the most important thing to remember is that the recent discoveries are all one of a kind texts, and they all differ between themselves and from the received texts. Because both good logic and good science advise against making sweeping generalizations from single examples, as in cherry picking what we want to read from among the various available texts, my own approach was to use the received text as the primary source because it was compiled from multiple lineages and versions, and then to use the more recently discovered versions to help understand the meaning of the words of the received text. We can't do anything with any certainty until we find a Zhouyi first edition along with a copy of Zhou Gong's Unabridged Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese.
 

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