Staff Publications

The Yiwei are component of the corpus of literature called chenwei, or weishu, which originated in Han Dynasty China (206 B.C.–220 A.D.) and have generally been referred to as the “Apocryphal” or “apocrypha and prognostication writings” in Western sinological works. This dissertation suggests that the chenwei be rendered as the “auxiliary texts of the Confucian classics.” The Yiwei therefore are the “Auxiliary Texts of the Book of Changes,” a set of writings meant to complement the Yijing. This dissertation accounts on the transmission of the Yiwei and outlines their major contents. Its focus of analysis, however, is on a particular concern of the writings: the attempt to correlate the Yijing with the calendar. The endeavor to establish symbolic correlation between the Yijing and the calendar is mainly accomplished by the creation of certainmodels of correlative scheme that delineate the supposed correspondences between the components of the Yijing and the units of the calendar. Much of these correlative schemes embodied in the Yiwei have been recognized as closely related with the teachings of two prominent Yijing masters active during the mid-Former Han, Meng Xi and Jing Fang. Hence, it is generally believed that the Yiwei were mainly composed by the followers of the two masters and were sources exemplifying this particular school of Yijing learning. This study, however, attempts to identify within the passages of Yiwei certain ideas or concepts which possibly originated before the time of Meng Xi and Jing Fang. It argues that these ideas represented the thought of early Han Yijing scholars and were a reflection of their effort of responding to the major intellectual currents of their time. This dissertation, therefore, proposes that one should not be bounded by the tradition of seeing the Yiwei as primarily derived from the teachings of Meng Xi and Jing Fang, but should see it instead as a repository of the concepts or ideas evolved within Yijing studies through the span of time ranging from the post-Yizhuan (Appendices of the Book of Changes) to the mid-Former Han.