Here in the West we are not familiar with the work ofÂ
烏恩溥 Wu En-pu, but in China's world of
Yixue
he is a well known name. His speciality is the discovery of
astronomical phenomena in the Yijing, like for instance hexagram 22,
which Wu sees as a comet. In the only book I have of him,
周易 - 古代中國的世界圖式 ('Zhouyi - Ancient China's design of the world'), he gives a lot of his findings. I find much of his arguments far-fetched. With Wu it looks like 'I
want to find it, therefore I
shall find it'. But it is good to be acquainted with his ideas, even though you do not agree with them.Â
Let us take the mare from hexagram 2 as an example of Wu's way of thinking. Because the word for mare,
pinma 牝馬
is made up of two characters, 'female' and 'horse', and this is
important for what will follow, I will speak of it as 'the female
horse', however odd this may sound. Wu says about
pinma 牝馬 (p. 52 of the forementioned book):
牝馬當指天駟,即房星.
'Female horse' is a reference to
Tianma, 'The Heavenly Coach-And-Four';
Tianma is the constellation Fang
房.
This
sentence already needs some clarification, otherwise it is hard to
understand what comes next. Fang is a Chinese constellation, it is
situated in our Western constellation Scorpio, and it is the name giver
of the fourthÂ
xiu 宿, the fourth lunar mansion. It is part of the constellationÂ
qinglong 青龍 or
canglong 蒼龍, the Azure Dragon.
《爾雅》:"天駟,房也", 郭璞 (276-324) 注: "龍為天馬,故房四星,謂之天駟."The Erya says: "
Tianma 天駟 is Fang
房";
Guo Pu
(276-324)Â adds: "The dragon is the Heavenly horse;Â because the
constellation Fang has four stars it is called 'the Heavenly
Coach-And-Four'."
房星共四星,屬東方蒼龍七宿的第四宿,為龍腹。
The
constellation Fang consist of four stars and is the fourth lunar
mansion in the Eastern constellation Azure Dragon, which covers seven
lunar mansions; Fang represents the stomach of the dragon.
天駟或房星何以稱為 "牝馬" ? 《石氏星經》: "房南二星間為陽環,其南曰太陽道;北二星間為陰環,其北為太陰道." 原來房四星是太陽道和太陰道的分界線,天駟而稱 "牝馬", 正是分陰、分陽的標記。Why
is the Heavenly Coach-And-Four, the constellation Fang, 'the female
horse'? The Shi Shi Xing Jing ('The Book of Stars from
Mr. Shi', written by Shi Shen
石申, around 300
B.C. HM) says: "The space which is formed by the two Southern stars of
Fang is the yang circle, this South is called 'the Way of Great Yang';
the space which is formed by the two Northern stars of Fang is the yin
circle, this North is called 'the Way of Great Yin' ". Originally the
stars of the constellation Fang are considered as the boundary
between the Way of Great Yang and the Way of Great Yin; the  'Heavenly
Coach-And-Four' is therefore called 'the female horse', because it is
the demarcation between the yin and yang sides.
Wu means this: the word for mare is
pinma 牝馬.
Pin 牝 is 'female', that is what it means. But
ma 馬 is 'horse', and a horse is
yang 陽, male. In the Shuogua
說卦 we read, "
乾為馬": "
Qian (yang) represents 'horse' ". With
pinma 牝馬
we have female and male, and because of that it can serve as another
name for the Heavenly Coach-and-Four, a constellation which in the old
days was seen as the division between yin and yang.