Key Concepts of Fate and Prediction in the Yijing - Chao Center for ...

16The so-called New Text (jinwen ) scholars of the early Han period sought inparticular to identify correspondences between the various features of the natural world(both physical and metaphysical) and the hexagrams, trigrams and individual lines of theChanges. These correspondences often involved numerical correlations, since—as withthe Pythagoreans in ancient Greece—numbers provided cosmologically inclinedindividuals with a systematic explanation of the universe and its movements. Theyprovided a way of “domesticating” nature, of submitting it to the premodern equivalent ofequations. From a practical standpoint, an understanding of numbers enabled humanbeings to determine how best to situate themselves in a harmonious relationship withtheir environment.According to the Great Commentary, when numbers are combined in various ways, they“exhaust all aspects of change;” thus, a mastery of numbers enables one “to know thefuture.” For this reason, a significant amount of this commentary is devoted to variousnumerological discussions. For instance, we are told that the numbers of Heaven are one,three, five, seven and nine (all yang numbers) and the numbers of Earth are two, four, sixeight and ten (all yin numbers). The sum of the five Heavenly numbers is twenty-five andthe sum of the five Earthly numbers is thirty; together they come to fifty-five. The GreatCommentary also describes in detail a method for divining with fifty milfoil stalks thatinvolves dividing the stalks into numerical groups that symbolize yin and yang (two),Heaven, Earth and Man (three) and the seasons (four). It is easy enough to imagine howthese numbers, both alone and in combination, came to be correlated with all kinds ofphenomena, from musical notes and heavenly bodies to divisions of time and space. Suchcorrelations revealed cosmic connections—spiritual resonances that existed between likethings. As such, they explained how the universe operated and, more importantly, how itcould be manipulated.New Text scholarship marked the beginning of what would become known as the Schoolof Images and Numbers (xiangshu ), in contrast to what became known as theSchool of Meanings and Principles (yili ). The former school emphasizedmathematical calculations and correlations of the sort described above; the latter wasmore closely associated with so-called Old Text (guwen ) sources, and its exponentspaid primary attention to what they saw as the “moral” content of the judgments, linestatements and commentaries to the Changes.One of the most influential early interpreters of the Yijing was Jing Fang (; 77-37BCE). Known primarily as a divination specialist, but also identified as an exponent ofNew Text scholarship and an advocate of the Images and Numbers approach to theChanges, he has been credited with inventing and/or popularizing several calendricallybased schemes for linking phases of change with markers of time. These systemsinvolved correlations between yin and yang, the five agents, the eight trigrams and thesixty-four hexagrams on the one hand and units of space and/or time associated with theten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches (operating either individually or incombination), the twenty-four segments of the solar year and the twenty-eight lunarlodges on the other.