Zhu Xi

Zhu Xi is a recurring authority in the translator’s discussion of the I Ching, consulted on the formation and interpretation of its figures and cited for explanations of particular passages. His commentary offers practical ways to read the symbolic text, while the translator distinguishes those explanations from the older material and challenges some of Zhu Xi’s inherited or philosophical assumptions.

Interpretive Method and the Translator’s Principle

The translator’s account of reading the I Ching turns on a distinction between translating words and conveying thought. In his first translation, made in 1854, he tried to match the original’s concision and produced English with too little syntactical connection; he recognized a similar failure in the Latin version by P. Regis and his collaborators. He subsequently argued that Chinese written characters symbolize ideas rather than represent words, so that a translator cannot achieve an intelligible version simply by transferring each character literally. Instead, the symbols must bring the translator’s mind into contact with the author’s, after which the ideas can be rendered as clearly and exactly as possible in another language.

This interpretive freedom is limited, not arbitrary. The translator says that he sometimes adds words to express what the original writer’s mind supplied without stating, and that he generally marks those additions with parentheses. His aim remains to convey the original meaning as exactly and concisely as he can. That method shapes the context in which Zhu Xi appears: his comments are evidence for the history of interpretation, but they do not automatically settle what the earlier text meant.

The same distinction governs the translator’s account of the book’s architecture. He describes the text as sixty-four short, symbolically expressed essays, each based on a six-line figure, and distinguishes those essays from the appendixes. In his reconstruction, King Wen interprets each hexagram as a whole, while the Duke of Zhou treats its individual lines; the line interpretations should accord with the combined significance of the figure. Later commentators such as Zhu Xi help explain the system, but the translator’s analysis repeatedly asks whether a given explanation belongs to the early text, to its later interpretive tradition, or to the commentator’s own account.

Figures, Origins, and the Great Extreme

Zhu Xi’s account of the Great Extreme becomes a point of explicit disagreement. The translator reports that in his Lessons on the I Ching for the Young, Zhu Xi represents it as a circle, following the philosopher Zhou, who lived from 1017 to 1073. Zhu Xi cautions readers not to assume that this circular representation came from Fuxi. The translator considers the diagram unsuccessful: if the circle unrolls, it gives one long line; dividing that line yields two whole lines, and another division is needed before the whole and divided lines of the figures appear. The picture, in his view, fails to explain the sequence it is meant to represent.

By contrast, the translator finds the multiplication of figures straightforward when it begins with the whole and divided lines. Adding each of the two lines to each trigram produces sixteen four-line figures; repeating the process produces thirty-two five-line figures and then sixty-four hexagrams. He describes the line-count as an arithmetic progression with common difference one and the number of figures as a geometric progression with common ratio two. He also notes a shorter procedure: combine a strong and a weak line to make the eight trigrams, then add each trigram to itself and to the others to form the sixty-four hexagrams.

Who first multiplied the trigrams into the sixty-four figures remains uncertain in the translator’s account. He reports that the more common view assigns the work to King Wen, whereas Zhu Xi, when questioned, leaned toward Fuxi having done it. The translator does not claim to disprove Zhu Xi’s view about the figures, but considers the names in their present form to date from King Wen. He also observes that no Chinese writer, in the discussion he surveys, explains why the sequence stops at sixty-four rather than continuing to figures of seven, eight, or more lines; the mass of additional figures would be cumbersome and difficult to interpret.

Reading the Lines and Their Relations

Zhu Xi’s interpretive work belongs to a system in which a line’s meaning depends on its position, the figure’s subject, and its relation to other lines. The translator emphasizes that the first, third, and fifth places are considered correct for whole lines, while the second, fourth, and sixth are considered correct for divided lines. Whole lines are associated with strength and command; divided lines with weakness and obedience. Correspondence also matters: the first and fourth lines, second and fifth, and third and sixth are paired, and their relation is complete when one is whole and the other divided.

The central places receive particular weight. The second and fifth lines are the middle lines of their respective trigrams; when they are of complementary qualities, their correspondence is especially significant. The translator gives the example of a whole line in the fifth place and a divided line in the second: if the fifth represents a sovereign or commander, the second may represent an able minister or skilled officer, and their mutual action can bring a beneficial result. But a line’s significance is not fixed in isolation; it varies with the name and subject of the hexagram. The translator therefore warns that the reader must understand the figure’s theme before applying general rules to its individual lines.

In discussing the hexagram Great Havings, the translator quotes an explanation attributed to Zhu Xi’s interpretive tradition. The weak line occupies the honored, central position, while the strong lines above and below respond to it. The constituent trigrams signify strength and vigor, elegance and brightness; the ruling line also responds to the ruling line in the symbol of Heaven, and acts at the proper times. These relations support the hexagram’s promise of great progress and success. The example shows how structural details—the central place, the responding lines, and the attributes of the trigrams—are used to unfold a short judgment into an account of why it applies.

Symbolic Images and the Limits of Explanation

Zhu Xi is also cited in the discussion of figures whose images seem physically impossible. The hexagram Great Accumulation is formed from the symbols of Heaven and a mountain, described as Heaven in the midst of a mountain. Its associated instruction is that the superior man stores in memory the words and conduct of former people to build virtue. When the translator asks how Heaven could literally be within a mountain, Zhu Xi’s answer is that it cannot happen in reality, but can be conceived for the purpose of symbolism. The example treats an apparent impossibility not as a factual claim about the natural world, but as an imaginative arrangement that makes a moral meaning available.

The translator uses this and related examples to resist a more elaborate philosophical reading of the trigrams. In his view, the evidence does not show that their original forms and meanings were designed as the foundation of a comprehensive philosophical scheme about the constitution of Heaven and Earth. In one appendix, they operate as familiar symbols, rather than as elements of a fully worked-out cosmology. This distinction also informs his discussion of yin and yang: he argues that the terms refer to bright and dark qualities and that a doctrine of primary ethereal matter took more than a thousand years to develop within the Confucian school, reaching fuller form in the Song dynasty. To find that later doctrine already present in the earlier text would, he argues, put the last first.

A similar caution appears in the discussion of spiritual agency. Zhu Xi is asked about a passage that describes Heaven and Earth as growing vigorous or becoming dull and void with the seasons, while also referring to Gui-shen. He answers that language about Heaven and Earth gives the general result, whereas the reference to Gui-shen presents the effective interaction as though personal agents were bringing it about. The translator finds that explanation to dissolve rather than resolve the question. His treatment preserves the distinction between the passage’s wording, Zhu Xi’s account of its implications, and the translator’s own judgment of that account.

Zhu Xi as Commentator and Historical Witness

The translator invokes Zhu Xi not only to explain images but to weigh claims about authorship and textual history. The first three paragraphs of one appendix, he argues, derive from a narrative associated with Zuo Qiuming and record words attributed to a marchioness-dowager of Lu fourteen years before Confucius was born. Zhu Xi’s explanation is that an older account of four adjectives used by King Wen was already in circulation, had been used by Mu Jiang of Lu, and was also employed by Confucius; a chronicler then used the formula “The Master said” to distinguish Confucius’s words from the older sayings. The translator finds the identity of this chronicler impossible to establish and concludes that the passages marked as Confucius’s words do not prove his authorship of the appendixes as a whole.

From this internal evidence, the translator concludes that Confucius did not compose the third and fourth appendixes and that they were assembled after his death. He acknowledges that this departs from the prevailing judgment of Chinese critics and commentators, but argues that their case for Confucian authorship does not hold. His disagreement does not make Zhu Xi irrelevant: rather, Zhu Xi’s attempted reconciliation becomes part of the evidence through which the translator tests orthodox claims about the text.

The same critical pattern applies to practical and political readings. In the discussion of Regulations, the translator notes that Zhu Xi anticipates an explanation based on the symbolism of the figure, while other commentators commonly ground its promise of success in the balanced distribution of whole and divided lines and the presence of whole lines in the central second and fifth places. The important qualification is that regulations must be adjusted to circumstances and must not become excessively strict. In another passage about a ruler’s proclamations and benevolence, the translator compares Zhu Xi’s symbolic elaboration of perspiration with other translators’ renderings, showing how commentators and translators can make different choices even when addressing the same image.

Across these examples, Zhu Xi is neither a mere authority to be repeated nor a figure whose commentary the translator dismisses wholesale. His readings provide a durable interpretive framework for positions, correspondences, symbolic images, and textual traditions. The translator accepts their explanatory usefulness where they illuminate how a hexagram works, while separating them from early textual evidence and challenging them when they project later philosophy backward or smooth over an unresolved historical problem.