《易经》成书于战国晚期说--运用时代词汇互证法的考察

The Yijing Was Likely to Have Been Completed in the Warring States Period:An Exploration with Mutual Ascertainment by Contemporary Vocabularies

《易经》是不同时代的编纂者“积薪式的记录”,后代的编纂者可以沿用前代的词汇、句式,但前人绝无可能使用后代才有的词汇、句式。因此,如果《易经》中包含了某个时代才有的词汇、句式,则证明其成书一定不会早于这个时代。基于这一逻辑,本文运用时代词汇互证法推断《周易》的成书年代,即从甲骨文、金文、简牍材料及《诗经》《左传》《国语》等先秦文献中寻找与《周易》相同或有内在联系的词汇、句式,从而判定《易经》所用词汇、句式的时代性。其中,“夫妻”一词的产生年代可以大体确定为战国晚期。随着丈夫、妻子组成的小家庭成为基本的生产单位,“夫妻”一词也逐渐变为日常用语和法律术语。“夫妻反目”,正是《易经》成书于战国晚期的显著标志。

The basic text of the Book of Changes resulted from cumulative records by composers of different periods.Later generation composers might continue to use their predecessors’vocabularies and sentence patterns,but not vice versa.Therefore,if the Yijing contains some vocabularies and sentence patterns of a specific period,the date of its composition could certainly be earlier than this period.On the basis of this logic,this paper applies the mutual ascertainment of contemporary vocabularies to speculate the date of composition of the Yijing,i.e.,seeking the same or internally related terms and phrases in the Zhou Changes from the pre-Qin(before 221 BCE)documents such as the inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze objects,bamboo-slip manuscripts,as well as the Book of Poetry,Zuo zhuan(Zuo’s Commentary on the Springs and Autumns Annals),and Guo yu(Sayings of the States)so as to infer the contemporaneity of the Yijing.Among these terms,fu-qi(husband and wife)can be generally determined to have come into being in the late Warring States period(475-221 BCE).Along with the case that the small family with husband and wife became a basic production unit,the term fu-qi(husband and wife)gradually turned out to be a daily expression and legal terminology.The phrase of“husband and wife feeling estranged”in the Yijing was just a remarkable testimony that it was completed in the late Warring State period.