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

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20Thus, in virtually all of his commentaries on individual hexagrams, Wang takes pains tospell out the nature of every line and its relationship with other lines and/or trigrams. Forhim, each hexagram, whether auspicious or inauspicious, simple or complicated,symbolizes the possibility of change. “First, a hexagram denotes a specific situation (ortime, shi ), such as war, peace, harmony, discord, conflict and reconciliation. Second,the six lines of a hexagram represent the room to maneuver (application, or yong )within that particular situation, showing both the hidden dangers and the availableoptions.” At this precise juncture, between what is “fated” and what can be done, WangBi emphasizes “the fluidity of human affairs and the importance of making the rightdecision.”The only major interpretive principles that Wang shared with commentators from theLate Han period were: (A) the view that certain hexagram lines can resonate productivelywith one another and (B) the notion that the lines can represent—either directly or byanalogy—different kinds of people in different positions and social situations. Undermost circumstances, however, Wang chose to emphasize the temporal and developmentalsignificance of the individual lines within the framework of a single hexagram. In hiswords: “Moments of time entail either obstruction or facility, thus the application [of agiven hexagram] is either a matter of action or of withdrawal.” Once the critical(“incipient”) moment of time has been determined, “one should either act or remainpassive, responding to the type of application involved.” One contemplates the name ofthe hexagram in order to see whether the general situation portends good fortune or bad,and one cites what is said about the incipient moment in order to see whether one shouldact or remain passive. From these things, “it is apparent how change operates within thebody of one hexagram.” So, for instance, in glossing the Gen hexagram (“Restraint,”number 52; below), to which I have referred previously on several occasions and willrefer to again, Wang points out that the third yang line portends danger, indicating theneed for great caution and care, because of its position at the “backbone” of the hexagram(i.e. its location between a pair of yin lines on either side).By the end of the Six Dynasties period (220-589 CE), Wang Bi’s commentary on theChanges, amplified by the remarks of Han Kangbo (; c. 332-385?), had gainedascendancy among scholars of the Yijing. This ascendancy continued into the Sui (589-618) and Tang (618-907) dynasties, especially after Wang’s edition of the text becamethe centerpiece of Kong Yingda’s (; 574-648) Correct Meaning of the ZhouChanges (Zhouyi zhengyi ), which remained the official version of the Yijingthroughout the Tang and into the Song (907-1279) and Yuan (1279-1368) dynasties.Gen
21Han-style New Text scholarship and Images and Numbers interpretations did notdisappear entirely, however. In fact, in some circles there was a resurgence of Han-stylecorrelative thinking. During the Tang period, for example, the five agents were firstmatched systematically with the eight trigrams. In the most common configuration, theQian and Dui trigrams shared the agent metal; Sun and Zhen shared wood, and Gen andKun shared earth. Kan was linked solely with water and Li was associated only with fire.In another, less common, model, Qian and Kun shared both wood and water, Gen andDui shared fire, Kan and Li shared earth, and Zhen and Sun shared metal. In either case,the basic goal was to assure that in any given situation the conjunction of symbolicelements—whether trigrams, agents, or numbers—would be harmonious and thereforeauspicious. But to critics of this sort of cosmological thinking, like the Tang scholar L¸Cai (600-664) and his successors, efforts to correlate incommensurate numbersrepresented nothing more than a “forced fit” (qiangpei )It was during the Tang dynasty that Buddhist and Daoist ideas, which had already begunto influence Yijing scholarship in the Six Dynasties period, gained ever greater visibility.Proponents of Daoist “alchemy,” for instance, in their quest for longevity and eventualimmortality, increasingly saw the Changes as a convenient device by which to align thebody and mind with the cosmos. Likewise, Tang Buddhists, building on Six Dynastyprecedents, engaged the Yijing to an unprecedented extent. This was particularly trueparticularly the variety of Buddhism known as Flowery Splendor (Huayan ). Fromthis point onward, as we shall see, Buddhist terminology, imagery and symbolismincreasingly found its way into Changes exegesis.A Brief Account of Interpretations of the Changes in Late Imperial and Post-Imperial Times (960 CE-Present)The intellectual and institutional challenge posed by Buddhism in the Tang dynastyresulted in the rise of “Neo-Confucianism” during the Song dynasty. This new brand ofmetaphysically oriented Confucianism drew heavily on the Yijing as a domestic source ofinspiration, a counterweight to the “alien” ideas of Buddhism. Neo-Confucianism tooktwo major forms in the Song period and thereafter. One was the so-called School ofPrinciple, which focused on the idea that in order to cultivate the “principle” of one’sinnate goodness, it was necessary to study the Confucian Classics assiduously, thusrefining one’s qi from without, so to speak. The other was the so-called School of theMind, which emphasized the value of seeking the principle of the innately good selfwithin, primarily through meditation. Both schools placed a heavy emphasis on the powerof the mind, however. Thus, for all his insistence on the importance of book-learning, oneof the leading exponents of the School of Principle, Cheng Yi (; 1033-1107), couldwrite that “With the most highly developed sincerity, [the mind] can penetrate metal andstone, and overcome water and fire, so what dangers and difficulties can possibly keep itfrom prevailing?”One of the many noteworthy features of early Song scholarship on the Yijing is theprofusion of charts and diagrams that suddenly appeared at that time, many of which
Page 2 and 3: 2repository of what has happened.
Page 4 and 5: 4GenJudgment: If one cleaves the ba
Page 6 and 7: 6divinations recorded in the Change
Page 8 and 9: 8immortality; Confucians, for their
Page 10 and 11: 10these commentaries are quite hete
Page 12 and 13: 12instance, the Great Commentary st
Page 14 and 15: 14GenJudgment: Restraint [or Stilli
Page 16 and 17: 16The so-called New Text (jinwen )
Page 18 and 19: 18these, Opening Up the Regularitie
Page 22 and 23: 22came to be attributed to a Daoist
Page 24 and 25: 24of things, predict the future, an
Page 26 and 27: 26gangsheng ). Xu examines in parti
Page 28 and 29: 28Let us now look at an example of
Page 30 and 31: 30contemporary Chinese scholars, as
Page 32: 32offers us additional interpretati

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