A Brief Exposition of the Zhouyi

The Zhouyi Lueli is a methodological outline distilled by Wang Bi from his commentary on the Zhouyi. Though brief, it carries immense weight in the history of Yi studies and philosophy. Rather than discussing the divinatory judgments of individual hexagrams and lines, it focuses on how to understand such structural conventions as hexagram images, line positions, cheng (supporting), cheng (riding), ying (correspondence), and bi (adjacency), and proposes the interpretive approach of "forgetting the image once the meaning is grasped," steering the Zhouyi away from a divination manual and toward the study of philosophical meaning. This edition belongs to the "Essence of Classic Chinese Culture: Original Texts" series, preserves the original appearance of the work, and focuses on conserving and transmitting traditional thought and culture. For readers, the value of this book lies in providing a key to entering the Zhouyi: understand Wang Bi's way of reading first, then return to the hexagram and line statements, and one will be less likely to misread the text at face value. It is suited to slow, repeated reading, and also to reading alongside the main text of the Zhouyi, to appreciate how the ancients established the rules of classical interpretation. The language is concise and abstract and requires some patience, but each reading brings new insights.