Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose style name was Yuanhui and whose sobriquet was Hui'an, was a native of Wuyuan in Huizhou in present day Jiangxi province. Zhu was an important proponent of Lixue (also known as neo-Confucianism) who left behind an enormous corpus of written works, including the Collected Commentaries on the Four Books, which exerted a heavy influence on the generations that followed him.
This volume, which comprises excerpts from the Commentaries on the Book of Changes (Yizhuan), is the only extant example of large calligraphic characters written in Zhu Xi's hand. Each line contains only two characters, written with a fast-moving brush and composed so that they appear to have top-heavy structures. The characters' lines are heavy and dark, with occasional glimpses of "flying white," or places where the brush's bristles separated to reveal empty space. This outstanding piece of ancient large-character calligraphy was donated to the National Palace Museum by Mr. Lin Tsung-yi (1923-2006) in the seventy-second year of the Republic of China (1983).