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FTEN dismissed as an ambiguous appendix to an enigmatic a divination text, the "Commentary on the Attached Verbalizations" ("Hsi tz'u chuan" W) of the Book of Change (Yi ching MY-) has been for some two thousand years one of the most important statements in the Chinese tradition on knowing how the cosmos works and how humans might relate to that working. Especially from the Sung through the Ch'ing period, the "Great Commentary" ("Ta chuan" t4), as it was also called,' provided the locus classicus for vocabulary and concepts in nearly every major abstract discussion of the physical world and man's place in it. As readers we might reasonably expect that the purpose of a commentary is to explain the text which it addresses, but we would miss part of the intent of the "Commentary on the Attached Verbalizations" if we were to attempt to read it only as an explication of words and phrases in the Change and as an explanation of the hows and whys of its technique for prognostication. When we accept the "Commentary" as a set of assertions which are aimed at persuading us to a certain view of how and why we might best operate in the I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Larry Schulz, Chris Murck, and Peter Bol for their contributions to my understanding of the "Commentary," and to A. C. Graham for his helpful criticisms of an earlier draft. BOOK OF CHANGE 69 THE COMMENTARY AND ITS LABELS The "Commentary on the Attached Verbalizations" constitutes two of the so-called Ten Wings (shihyi +x) of the Change. (The Ten Wings are the "T'uan chuan" AiW, "Hsiang chuan" *V, and "Hsi tz'u chuan," each in two parts (p'ien A), the "Wen yen" 3, "Shuo kua" :-h*, "Hsu kua" J, and the "Tsa kua" Wh.) At the beginning of the twentieth century the text of the "Commentary" was available in two main recensions. One stems from K'ung Ying-ta UKRM (574-648), whose Cheng-yi IEA version as printed in the Sung was followed in the imperially sponsored printing of the Thirteen Classics in 1739 (i.e., the Palace, or Wu-ying-tien AAR edition); in Juan Yuan's IR5 (1764-1849) reproduction in 1816 of a Sung edition with his own critical apparatus appended to mark textual variants; and in the compilation of the Harvard-Yenching Institute Index of the Change.2 The Cheng-yi version includes the "Commentary on the Attached Verbalizations" with the annotation of Han K'ang * (Han K'ang-po; third century); for the text of the classic, K'ung Ying-ta included the annotation of Wang Pi 3AE0 (226-49). The text of the Change used by Wang Pi is traced back by way of the commentator Cheng Hsuan #3 (127-200) to the ku-wen version taught by Fei Chih ji (fl. middle of 1st century B.C.). Fei's teachings had not been established, as had the chin-wen interpretation, with an official position at court in Western Han.3 It seems reasonable to assume that the Cheng-yi version of the "Commentary" has the same genealogy as the text of the Change it accompanies, except that Wang Pi did not prepare annotation on the "Commentary" itself. The first part (p'ien) of the Cheng-yi v...

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