The Text
Our electronic text is based on 1990 Zhonghua Shuju edition (in the Lixue Congshu series; Beijing, 1990). The numbers in brackets such as this, 【12】 , which appear throughout the electronic text, refer to the page numbers in this edition.
Numbers in brackets such as this, 〔1〕 , are footnotes; click on the number to read the footnote. In the footnote section, clicking on the page numbers will return you to that page in the main text.
Content
All text beginning at the left margin is by Zhou Dunyi, except where indicated otherwise. All indented text is commentary by Zhu Xi.
We have omitted Zhou’s famous Taiji Tu because including all of the special symbols was deemed too time-consuming. We may remedy this lack in the future. (Added in 2005: here is the Taijitu.) Note that we have included the extremely influential Taiji Tu Shuo. We have also omitted the few poems and inscriptions by Zhou that are included in the text, as well as numerous prefaces written in the Song through Qing dynasties that are collected in appendices. These decisions have been made in an attempt to get the most out of currently available student resources; if such resources become less scarce (or more readily compensated!) in the future, we hope to remedy these omissions.
(Added in 2023) The Tongshu, along with Zhu Xi’s two postfaces, is keyed to Joseph A. Adler’s translation (Reconstructing the Confucian Dao: Zhu Xi’s Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2014). Since word order differs in English and Classical Chinese, we have followed a fixed methodology to make the keying more consistent. We took the last English word or phrase before the start of each new page, found the Chinese characters that corresponded to that English word or phrase, and inserted the page breaks after those Chinese characters. The relevant page numbers are in brackets such as this, [27].