tze-ki hon HUMAN AGENCY AND CHANGE: A READING OF WANG BI’S YIJING COMMENTARY It is commonly accepted that Wang Bi (226–249 C.E.) made signifi- cant contributions to the study of the Yijing (Book of Changes). Before his premature death at the age of twenty-three, he wrote a key commentary to the Yijing, the Zhouyi zhu (Commentary on the Changes from the Zhou Dynasty). 1 A testimony to his genius was his philosophico-ethical reading of the sixty-four hexagrams that not only challenged the Han dynasty interpretations of Yijing commentary, but also later became the model of the yili (meaning and principle) school of Yijing exegesis. 2 Besides interpreting the hexagrams, he also wrote a series of essays offering his insights into how the Yijing should be read. Known to us as the Zhouyi lüeli (Brief Remarks on the Changes from the Zhou Dynasty), his essays helped to transform the Yijing from a manual of divination into a book of wisdom, teaching its readers how to respond to their surroundings creatively and proac- tively. Although he died before writing a commentary on other parts of the Yijing—i.e., the Xici (Appended Phrases), Xugua (Sequence of Hexagrams), Shuogua (Explanation of Hexagrams), and Zagua (Miscellaneous Notes on Hexagrams)—his follower, Han Kangbo (d. ca. 385), did provide a summary of his views on those very parts of the Classic. 3 His contributions notwithstanding, Wang Bi is an enigma to many Yijing scholars. The source of ambiguity lies in his identity as a Neo- Daoist. Equally at home with both Confucianism and Daoism, his true allegiance was uncertain. For some scholars, he was a brilliant Confucian exegete who brought out the true meaning of the Yijing by way of the Daoist philosophical polarity of Being (you) and Non- being (wu). For others, he was a Daoist who corrupted the Yijing (the head of the canonized Five Confucian Classics) by making it look like the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. From the early Qing to the present day, appraisals of Wang Bi have been ambivalent. On the one hand, he is given credit for “sweeping away” the Han Dynasty practices of inter- TZE-KI HON, Department of History, State University of New York at Geneseo. Specialties: Chinese history and historiography, the Yijing Commentary. E-mail: hon@geneseo.edu Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30:2 (June 2003) 223–242 © 2003 Journal of Chinese Philosophy