Despite the great and often glaring differences separating the Yijing from such religious classics as the Bible, the Talmud, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Lotus Sutra, it deserves to be considered one of the great works of spiritually inspired world literature. Why? In the first place, the life cycle of the Changes has been surprisingly similar to that of the above-mentioned spiritually inspired books. In each case, for example, written commentaries have amplified, clarified, explained, and modified the meanings of the core text, ironing out inconsistencies and opening up new interpretive possibilities—including, of course, correlative and numerical ones.1 In the process the commentaries have helped to establish these texts as foundational. Moreover, like other classic works, the Changes has enjoyed remarkable longevity—and it is still going strong. It has traveled widely and left enduring versions of itself in many parts of the world. At the same time, however, the reasons for its long life and global appeal have far more to do with its challenging content and multifarious applications than with any sort of religious attraction; the book certainly offers no prospect of other-worldly salvation, for instance.
The sustained appeal of the Yijing rests primarily in three related areas, all of which apply to many other classic works as well: (1) the intellectual challenges it poses, (2) the psychological insights it encourages, and (3) the creative inspiration it affords, not least by virtue of its powerful and pervasive symbolism. Having said a good deal about the first two points in previous chapters, let me conclude with a few brief remarks about the last point. These concluding remarks summarize and in some cases expand on a substantial amount of work that I have done previously on the cultural significance of the Changes.2
The symbolism of the Yijing appeared everywhere in premodern China, from written inscriptions and craft productions to art and architecture, and it continues to be manifest in certain realms of Chinese culture to this day. Remnants of its symbolism can also be found throughout most of the rest of contemporary East Asia, including Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Tibet. Moreover at least some Changes-related symbols—notably the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, popularly known as the “yin-yang symbol” (figure 6.1)—have become decorative elements throughout much of the Western world, appearing, for example, on innumerable commercial products, from surfboards to jewelry.
The word magic of the Yijing has also been pervasive. During the entire imperial era in China and in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for the past several centuries as well, a great many people, places, writings, art-works, and buildings have borne names based on hexa-grams or on characters selected from the basic text or the Ten Wings of the Changes. Allusions to it could be found everywhere. At the highest level of Chinese society, reign names often reflected concepts such as the Supreme Ultimate or employed one or two of the four characters that constitute the judgment of the Qian hexagram (number 1): “Fundamentality,” “Prevalence,” “Fitness,” and “Constancy” (also translated “Great,” “Penetrating,” “Proper,” and “Right” or “Immoveable”). In the Forbidden City numerous expressions drawn from the Changes appear either as inscriptions inside the palace buildings or as the names of the buildings themselves. At the lower levels of Chinese society, the Yijing’s magical language was also ubiquitous. Quite apart from its use in fortune-telling, it could be found in a great many personal names, New Year’s couplets and other auspicious inscriptions, and even popular proverbs—for instance, “Good fortune arises when misfortune peaks,” derived directly from the hexagrams Tai (“Peace,” number 11) and Pi (“Obstruction,” number 12).
FIGURE 6.1
The Supreme Ultimate Symbol
The eight trigrams—particularly Qian and Kun—were powerful visual symbols in all sectors of traditional Chinese society (and East Asia more generally), evident, for example, in the decorations of the Forbidden City, the Temples of Heaven and Earth, city god temples, Buddhist and Daoist religious establishments, and the households of both elites and commoners. They also adorned flags and other paraphernalia, not only in China but also in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Tibet. In most cases the trigrams served not only as decorations but also as talismans (see figure 6.2). In addition they gave their name to various martial arts practices, notably the Eight Trigram Hands. Although associated primarily with orthodox culture, they might also be appropriated by rebellious groups, such as the notorious Eight Trigrams Society of the late Qing period.
Philosophically speaking, the Changes exerted more influence in China than any other Confucian classic. It was the foundation of Chinese metaphysics and the locus classicus for most philosophical discussions of time and space. Its emphasis on correlative thinking and intuitive understanding left an enduring imprint on China for at least two thousand years. In premodern times no Chinese thinker of any stripe could afford to ignore the Yijing entirely. Moreover as early as the Han dynasty we see the emergence of highly influential derivative works, such as Jiao Yanshou’s (ca. 70–10 BCE) Forest of Changes, Yang Xiong’s (53 BCE–18 CE) Classic of Great Mystery, and several important apocryphal writings, including Opening up the Regularities of Qian. This process of creative inspiration persisted for many centuries and continues to this day.
FIGURE 6.2
Trigrams on a Ritual Bell in the Shanghai City God Temple
Virtually all the major fortune-telling traditions of China (and of other countries in East Asia as well), including astrology, numerology, meteorological divination, geomancy, physiognomy, and fate calculation,
trace their origins to the Yijing and employ its diverse symbolism. A fengshui compass, whether from China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam, provides a perfect working model of the many cosmological variables that entered into Yijing and other divinatory calculations (see figure 6.3).3
FIGURE 6.3
Detail of a Qing Dynasty Fengshui Compass
This imperially authorized compass, in the author’s private collection, measures 50.8 cm in diameter. It has a total of forty-nine rings, all of which contain cosmological information that had to be considered—at least theoretically—in fengshui calculations. The cosmic variables in these rings include all those discussed in this book and a great many more.
Some Chinese maps also indicate such variables. Figure 6.4 shows the left section of a map titled “Fixed Positions of Heaven and Earth,” which illustrates the cosmic power exerted by the eight trigrams and the twenty-eight lunar lodges.
FIGURE 6.4
Qing Dynasty Map of the Fixed Positions of Heaven and Earth This illustration, excerpted from a Qing dynasty almanac (1721), represents slightly more than half of a complete map showing the entire universe. Heaven, we are told, is round, encompassing the Earth “like an umbrella.” The Earth is square, “like a chessboard.” In the excerpt shown, five of the eight trigrams are depicted outside the celestial circle, along with most of the twenty-eight lunar lodges. The square territory influenced by these cosmological “force fields” includes virtually all of China proper, as well as Southeast Asia, Tibet, Central Asia, and lands far to the west described generically as the realm of the “Hundred Barbarians.” From the British Library Board, the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library (#15257 a 24).
The symbols of the Changes were widely used in the description and evaluation of East Asian culture, from music, flower arranging, and cooking to literature, art, and architecture. Virtually any subject that had an aesthetic or metaphysical dimension came to be closely linked with the Yijing. Consider, for example, the opinions of Liu Xie (ca. 465–ca. 521 CE), a profoundly influential literary critic throughout the imperial era, who tells us in his Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons that “the images of the Yijing first brought to light the spiritual presences that previously had been concealed,” thus illuminating “human patterns.” Throughout this work Liu repeatedly and reverentially cites the Changes—not only as the foundation of Chinese aesthetics, but also as a concrete model for various literary forms and genres.4
The Yijing informed Chinese artistic and literary criticism in other ways as well. The hexagram Bi (number 22), for example, came to denote beauty, grace, and simplicity of form, while Yu (number 16) suggested energy, enthusiasm, and emotion. Kuai (number 43) stood for resolute, critical judgment; Li (number 30), for logical clarity. Qian (number 1) generally referred to creativity and spirituality, while Kun (number 2) indicated passive intelligence. Hexagrams also became a tool of literary analysis. For example Zhang Xinzhi’s late-Qing interpretation of the great eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber uses hexagram relationships to analyze the personalities of certain important characters.
The Yijing provided a cosmologically grounded justification for the social and political hierarchies of imperial China from the Han period through the Qing. As one of many indications, the extraordinarily influential Neo-Confucian compilation known as the Jinsi lu (Reflections on Things at Hand) employs about fifty different hexagrams to illustrate various social and political roles and relationships. Hexagrams also played a part in the administration of law, as we have already seen in the case of the Kangxi emperor’s contemplation of the Shihe hexagram (chapter 3). Other law-related hexagrams include Kan (“Sinkhole,” number 29), Zhongfu (“Inner Trust,” number 61), Xie (“Release,” number 40), Song (“Contention,” number 6), Lü (“The Wanderer,” number 56), and Feng (“Abundance,” number 55).
One of the most pervasive uses of Yijing symbolism in premodern China was in the related realms of science and medicine. As we have seen, until the dawn of the twentieth century, most Chinese intellectuals believed that the Changes had the capacity to explain virtually everything in nature.5 The official eighteenth-century assessment of the classic by the editors of the Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries was that “the way of the Changes is broad and great. It encompasses everything, [providing the foundation for] astronomy, geography, music, military methods, the study of rhymes, numerical calculations, and alchemy.”6 Even individuals such as Fang Yizhi and Jiang Yong, who possessed a substantial knowledge of Western science and had a deep interest in the role of numbers in explaining natural relationships and processes, believed that the eternal principles of astronomy, calendrics, mathematics, music, and medicine could all be found in the Yellow River Chart, the Luo River Writing, hexagrams, trigrams, and their individual lines.
The index to almost any volume of Joseph Need-ham’s monumental Science and Civilisation in China (more than two dozen at the time of this writing) under the subject heading “I Ching” will reveal that there were very few realms in the natural world for which the Changes did not provide some sort of meaningful explanation. The color and flow of blood, the anatomy of crustaceans, the physical constitution of people from different areas of China, the movements of the eye and jaw, acupuncture and pulse points, chemical and alchemical reactions, the nature of earth-quakes, musical tonality, and even male and female sexual responses could all be explained by reference to trigrams, hexagrams, or both.7 Similarly Li Yang’s Book of Changes and Traditional Chinese Medicine, an English-language distillation of his award-winning studies in Chinese, provides numerous examples of the way the eight trigrams and the number systems of the Yellow River Chart and the Luo River Writing, as well as yin-yang/five agents correlations, figure into Chinese traditions of healing, which remain vital to this day.8
This is not to say that empirical investigations were unimportant to premodern Chinese scientists and technicians. Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China abundantly documents the ways that physicians experimented with herbal and other medicines, mathematicians solved complicated algebraic problems, astronomers carefully observed the heavens, geographers closely examined the earth, and all kinds of scientifically minded individuals investigated the realms of what would now be called physics, engineering, biology, and zoology.
But if Chinese intellectuals “were fully satisfied with an explanation they could find from the system of the Book of Changes, they would not go further to look for mathematical formulations and experimental verifications in their scientific studies.”9 The either/or question that might be posed by a scientist or physician relying primarily on deductive reasoning did not generally concern a Chinese theoretician, who naturally thought in terms of systematic correspondence. Thus in premodern China a way could usually be found “to reconcile opposing views and to build bridges—fragile as they may appear to the outside observer—permitting thinkers and practitioners to employ liberally all the concepts available, as long as they were not regarded as destructive to society.”10
The twentieth century in China brought an appreciation for Western science and mathematics that went well beyond the enthusiasm that at least a few Chinese scholars had for the ideas introduced by the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As in the past, scientifically minded individuals tried to use the Yijing to explain the natural world, but their efforts were now predicated on modern Western understandings of these realms of knowledge. The same was true of newly introduced theories of the humanities and the social sciences. Thus we see the eventual rise to prominence of Chinese scholars such as Shen Heyong, whose pioneering studies have sought to show affinities between notions of “mind” as expressed in the hexagrams and Ten Wings of the Changes and in Jungian psychology.11
From the 1920s onward, Chinese scholars have relentlessly explored connections between the Yijing and newly introduced ideas from the West, from linear algebra and quantum mechanics to the fields of molecular biology and computer coding. Thus we have contemporary individuals such as Yang Li arguing in the same basic vein as Fang Yizhi and Jiang Yong in the Qing period that the numbers of the Yellow River Chart and the Luo River Writing are the “deriving coefficient” of everything in the cosmos.12 Similarly Feng Youlan contends that the Yijing contains an incipient “algebra of the universe”; Xie Qiucheng maintains that the hexagrams of the classic were originally designed as a high-efficiency information-transfer system analogous to contemporary computer coding based on optimal units of two (the number of basic trigrams in each hexagram) and three (the number of lines in each trigram); and Tang Mingbang, drawing on the writings of Xie and other contemporary Chinese scholars, asserts that the forms of atomic structure in nuclear physics, the genetic code in molecular biology, and the eight-tier matrix in linear algebra all seem to be related to the logic of the Changes.13 Although this sort of thinking remains essentially correlative, it has been nonetheless satisfying for Chinese scholars who have long been accustomed to the view that modern science had somehow passed China by.
What, then, does the future hold for the Yijing, both domestically and internationally? No one can answer this question with certainty, of course, but it will probably continue to serve as a source of inspiration for creative thinkers, East and West, as it has for many hundreds of years. It will also continue to be studied by Chinese scholars as a foundational cultural document, with possible practical applications in the modern world. And it will no doubt continue to be translated by foreigners eager to understand and transmit its arcane wisdom for scholarly purposes or commercial gain. Perhaps most important, it will continue to offer us new opportunities for the comparative study of the lives of great religious books—how they came to be born, how they evolved, and how they traveled across space and time. By engaging in such comparisons we will not only learn more about other cultures; we will also assuredly learn more about ourselves.