CHUYŎK CHŎNGMUN.

CHUYŎK CHŎNGMUN 周易正文 [Main text of the Classic of Changes].

Manuscript on paper. 95 folding pre-printed leaves. One kwŏn in one volume. Small folio (353 x 215 mm.), orig. wrappers (lower cover a little wormed), handwritten title & table of contents in black ink on upper cover, later stitching. [Korea]: [between 1775 & 1848].

This fine Korean manuscript is a rare sola scriptura version of the Classic of Changes, with the canonical “Ten Wings” (Ch. shiyi 十翼) commentary.

An unusual, and in its time revolutionary, edition of the Confucian Classics was commissioned by King Chŏngjo (1752–1800) of the Chŏson dynasty in 1775. As his edict to the officials observed, “many have commented upon the Three Classics and the Four Books, under the names ‘transmissions,’ ‘elucidations,’ ‘notes,’ ‘explanations,’ ‘studies,’ or ‘commentaries’.” These commentaries, which seemingly commanded importance above those of the classical texts themselves, were “cacophonous despite their plentitude,” and were often confused, if not mutually contradictory. Taking as models the “Stone classics” (Ch. shijing 石經) of antiquity, King Chŏngjo ordered instead an edition of the Three Classics (Changes, Documents, and Poetry) and the Four Books to be printed without any commentary whatsoever, and in so doing produced an edition that differed — functionally and visually — from the typical scholarly edition, in which original texts of the classics are buried under layers upon layers of philological and exegetical commentaries. This succinctness — King Chŏngjo hoped — would better allow the Classics themselves to reveal their meanings (Chŏngjo, “Gyŏngsŏ chŏngmun yŏn’gi” 經書正文緣起, in Hongjae chŏnsŏ 弘齋全書).

The resulting sola scriptura edition of the Confucian Classics, printed in 1775 with the imjincha 壬辰字 metal type, circulated under the title chŏngmun 正文, meaning the “main” or proper text, as opposed to one laden with later scholarship. This unusual editorial endeavor on the part of the Chŏson court likely formed the basis of the present manuscript copy of the Classic of Changes, which, written in a beautiful cursive hand, likewise contains very little paratextual material. (The exception being, of course, the “Ten Wings” commentaries, attributed to Confucius himself, which have long been considered part of the Changes itself).

The manuscript opens with Prefaces by the Neo-Confucian philosophers Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033-1107) and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), then moves swiftly into a conventional presentation of the Changes: the 64 hexagrams with integrated tuan 彖, xiang 象, and wenyan 文言 commentaries (ff. 4–71), followed by xici 繫辭 (ff. 72–80), shuogua 說卦 (ff. 87–90), xugua 序卦 (ff. 90–94), and zagua 雜卦 (ff. 94–95).

The handwritten text follows a woodblock-printed frame of ten lines per half-leaf, double lines around the edges, with white mouth and two facing patterned fishtails. The section title is written, in the original hand, in the top section of the p’ansim 版心.A second, likely Japanese hand, has added the work title and a brief table of contents on the front cover. A third, coarser hand, adds on a sheet pasted down on the front endpaper a grid containing the list of 64 hexagrams and their respective page numbers. The handwritten leaf numbers in the top margins of the verso of each leaf are in the same hand. Another sheet tipped-in on the recto of the first leaf contains another grid showing the derivation of the 64 hexagrams from the eight trigrams, in black ink. The names of the hexagrams on the diagonal of this grid are, however, in red ink, and so are the light punctuations in the first Preface (the only punctuated part of the manuscript). Finally, another handwritten note, pasted down on the back endpaper, describes this manuscript as a gift from Torī Yūjirō 鳥居雄次郎 and is dated to the spring of Showa 5 (1930).

Two red ownership seals on f. 4r read 書楼珍蔵 and 潘南朴氏鎬寿美京斎之印, the latter being the personal seal of Pak Ho-su 朴鎬寿 (1798-1848), an official of the late Chŏson dynasty.

The chŏngmun version of the Changes is very rare outside of Korea. We find only one copy of the 1775 printed edition in WorldCat, at the Library of Congress (WorldCat 1240826989).

Nice copy. Minor worming.