The Yi-ology conceived in the Yi copied on silk unearthed at Mawangdui to CHENG Yi-chuan’s Yi-ology

This paper holds that it is not enough for us to trace the tradition of Yi-chuan’s (a famous neo-Confucianist of the Northern Song Dynasty) Yi-ology only back to WANG Bi's (a famous scholar at metaphysics of the Wei and Jin dynasties) Yi-ology.Yi-chuan’s theory of “realizing the Principle of Heaven in daily conducts”had attained to the profound connotations of Zhouyi in a religious level and could be traced back to the Yi-ology conceived in the Yi copied on silk unearthed at Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan Province. Different from WANG Bi's Yi-ology, when he attached importance to the philosophical connotations conceived in Zhouyi, Yi-chuan did not completely deny image-numberology, but simultaneously took the basic qualities of the images of the hexagrams and lines into consideration as the Yi-ology of Mawangdui did. Comparing Yi-chuan’s Yi-ology and Zhouyi copied on silk, we could further recognize the origin of the Yi-ology formed in the Song Dynasty: not only the philosophical school of the Song Yi was closely related to the Yi-ology on silk, the correlation between the image-numberology in the Song Yi and that on silk ought not to be ignored. In examining the origin of the Song Yi, only if we transcend the partiality between the philosophical school and that of the image-numberology, could we get a true recognition over this issue: the origin of the Song Yi which occupies an important position in the neo-Confucianism of the Song Dynasty maybe closely related to the Yi-ology embraced in the Zhouyi copied on silk of Mawangdui.