Dinsdag, 18 april 2006Yijing related pictures
A site with Yijing related pictures can be found here. Many pictures are available in large format.
And if you are wondering why I am not writing so much in this weblog: for the last half year I have been struggling with hexagram 35, and I hope to post something about it soon.
Maandag, 6 maart 2006WAAAAH! FrustratingZaterdag, 4 maart 2006Better transcription of Chujian Zhouyi
In this article I referred to a transcription of the Chujian Zhouyi. But there is a better transcription available, which comes close to the pdf I made from pages from the 上海博物館藏戰國楚竹. This page on the site of the Center for Zhouyi and Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Shandong University) compares the Chujian Zhouyi with the Mawangdui text and the current text (the latter both in simplified and in traditional characters). The file is compiled by Liu Dajun 劉大鈞, head of the center and co-author of I Ching: Text and Annotated Translation; a transcription of the current text in simplified characters, with some comments about the MWD text.
Because the site is extremely slow I have taken the liberty to make a pdf of the page. It can be downloaded here. Thanks to Niraya for pointing me to this link. Dinsdag, 28 februari 2006A review of Lillian Too's "The New I Ching: discover the secrets of the plum blossom oracle"
.....can be found here at Steve Marshall's site.
Maandag, 27 februari 2006Questioning the questionIn every Yi book that teaches you how to consult the oracle you read the same thing: you must ask a question, and the Yi answers that question. It is necessary to formulate that question as specific as possible - an accurate question gives an accurate answer, etc. I don't know where and when this practice of asking questions originated. All I know is that in all the old Chinese Yi books that I have read there is no mentioning of 'asking a question'. In the old days you consulted the oracle not by asking a question, but by addressing a (potential) situation. You described in short what was going on, what elements were involved, how you got there, and then you consulted the oracle to find out how the spirits thought about all this, and if their judgment would help you to accomplish what you desired. If the spirits condemned the situation and the actions that lead to it you could try to change the course of the developments and/or gain approval by doing sacrifices. But you did not ask specific questions to the oracle; at the most you asked for approval - not by asking a question but by posing a situation you desired: "Would it be that I become king". This reminds us of the charges that we find on the oracle bones: "The next ten day period there will be (no) harm". There is a lot to say for this method. A question that focuses on a specific part of the situation discards a lot of elements because of this focusing. Focusing is what you want, but the risk is that because of this (subjective) focusing you will not see other elements that might be important. A question like "is X the right man for me?" focuses on a person, but it is also possible that circumstances play an important role in the situation. But if you ask about a person you will see the answer of the Yi as saying something about that person. And you will not see everything else, like time and circumstances, means and matter, that are involved. By addressing a situation to the Yi you allow every aspect of the situation to play an equally important role. The Yi will help you to find what you really need to focus on, it will point to the aspects that do deserve your attention. Without a question you will get the most objective answer possible. Zondag, 26 februari 2006Yijing bij de School van de KraanvogelOp uitnodiging van Roel Jansen heb ik enige tijd terug twee avonden verzorgd voor zijn kerngroep. Roel vond dat het tijd werd dat zijn Tai Chi-studenten wat meer te weten kwamen over de Yijing, zijn geschiedenis, gebruik en andere eigenaardigheden. Dit soort hap-snap ad-hoc avonden vind ik het leukste om te doen: er is veel ruimte voor dialoog, en vooral bij de School van de Kraanvogel vind je een kritisch gehoor. De eerste avond verschafte inleidende info. De tweede avond was meer praktisch omdat ik de studenten de opdracht had gegeven zelf de Yijing te gebruiken. Een van de deelnemers van de eerste avond was John Tak. Hij maakte een lezenswaardige impressie hiervan en plaatste deze d.d. 26 januari op zijn weblog:
Dank aan John dat ik dit stuk op mijn weblog mag plaatsen. Jammer genoeg was hij er de tweede avond niet bij, want dan had hij gezien dat zijn antwoord van de Yijing opvallend veel overeenkomsten vertoonde met de antwoorden die een paar andere deelnemers hadden gekregen, en dat had hem wellicht nog wat verhelderende inzichten verschaft. Hierover vertelt David, een andere deelnemer, op het weblog van Roel:
Ook dank aan David voor zijn toestemming voor overname van dit stuk. Zelf vond ik het twee zeer leuke avonden en als ze me weer vroegen zou ik het zo weer doen. De studenten van Roel zijn een kritisch volkje, ze slikken niet alles, willen graag het naadje van de kous weten en vragen dóór. Zo zie ik het graag, het houdt je scherp. Het was inderdaad opvallend, zoals David opmerkte, dat het trigram Donder in veel Yijing-antwoorden terug te vinden was. Statistisch gezien bijna onmogelijk, Yijingistisch gezien niet zo verwonderlijk. De Donder en zijn associaties van spontane actie, niet-nadenken-maar-doen, impulsief (maar niet ongecontroleerd) handelen, dit alles past goed bij Tai Chi als krijgskunst. Was na twee avonden voor iedereen de Yijing en zijn antwoorden zo klaar als een klontje? Neuh. Maar wat het boek voor je kan betekenen, en hoe je het kan gebruiken, dat was voor iedereen wel duidelijk, zo heb ik begrepen. En dat goede inzichten niet altijd direct komen maar soms even op zich laten wachten laat het weblog van John zien, die in zijn entry d.d. 25 februari vermeldt wat het werken met de Yijing hem heeft geleerd:
Inderdaad, John. Ik hoor mijzelf de laatste tijd vaak zeggen "niet moeilijk doen!". Keep it simple. Teveel is minder dan genoeg. Dank aan de School van de Kraanvogel voor twee leerzame avonden. Zondag, 12 februari 2006Programming again
In the last Xiangshu module that I gave at the Oriental College we also discussed the Heluo Lishu method of calculating a birth hexagram. Using your bazi, your eight characters which form the basis of your Chinese horoscope, you calculate two hexagrams: one for the first half of your life, and one for the second half. From these hexagrams you can calculate yearly hexagrams, monthly hexagrams and even daily hexagrams (although I have not yet worked out how the method of daily hexagrams could fit in our Western calendar).
Heluo Lishu was introduced to the West by Sherril & Chu in their book The Astrology of I Ching, but they made quite some modifications to the original material. For instance, they say that if a person is born at the end or the beginning of a month you should calculate two sets of bazi - one for the original and one for the adjecent month. This is simply not true, because no person has two sets of bazi. You are born at a specific time,and that time determines your bazi. They also took the winter solstice as start of the year, but for most forms of Chinese astrology the solar calendar is used, and in the solar calendar the year starts on or around 4 February. S&C skipped the calculation of monthly hexagrams, and they completely changed the method for calculating daily hexagrams, making it far more complex than the original method. They probably did this because the original method uses a fixed amount of 30 days in a month, but some solar months have 29 days, some 30, some 31. This indeed makes it hard to put the method for daily hexagrams to use, but what S&C made of it is extremely complex and far from the rules in the original method. S&C give complex calculations to get your bazi, they use lots of tables which make it easy to make a mistake. And one small mistake will give a totally different outcome. You can skip the calculations for the bazi if you use a solar calendar, and this is what I learn my students. But a computer program which does all the calculations for you would be even more welcome. There are already programs which do this, and 15 years ago in the good old days of MS-DOS I wrote one myself, but all these programs are based on the work of Sherril & Chu, with all the faults that come with this book. Time for a new! improved! version. The advantage of a computer program is not only that it can do the calculations for you, but you can also make statistics of your yearly hexagrams (which hexagram do you encounter most in your life, which one do you never have as a yearly hexagram) and other data. So I picked up my programming skills, which by the way I don't have anymore. A lot has changed since the good old days of DOS. I used to program in Powerbasic for DOS, in that time a magnificent programming language which made writing code almost as easy as making a shopping list. But the latest version of Powerbasic for Windows is not suitable for anyone who is a novice in Windows programming. You need to know how Windows works at the core and why it works like it does. It is very hard to grasp the concepts of it. Since I am a hobbyist and not a diehard programmer with instant coffee on my desk I choose to program in Visual Basic 2005, using the Express edition that is freely available. You can say about Microsoft what you want, but they sure know how to promote their products. With VS2005 comes free video tutorials to get you started, there are manuals to explain the basics and the forum to dump your question when you get stuck can easily be accessed within the program. Programming in VS2005 is far more easier than in Powerbasic, because the IDE, the screen in which you type the code, helps you with writing by suggesting the proper code when you type a structure, procedure or whatever. Neat. It will probably create bloatware with lots of redundant code where Powerbasic can deliver complex programs which fit on a diskette, but it least I enjoy using it. But although it is easier than Powerbasic it is still a totally different world to me. I have to work with classes, structures, forms, MDI's, modeless dialogs, public or private variables of type integer, double, string, event handlers, etc. Slowly I am progressing. Today I finished the module which calculates the bazi: This is just a testing dialog, and if you think, pffff, that's nothing, then please keep in mind that the underlying code involves not only the calculation of the position of the sun for any given date & time (to find the start of the Chinese solar months), and that time corrections for UT and true local time are also made, with al the necessary code that comes with it. After that the bazi are calculated using some nifty routines which I partly wrote myself and partly took from Astronomy with your Personal Computer by Peter Duffett-Smith. It is fun to do. It will take some time to finish, but hey, who said I was in a hurry? Dinsdag, 17 januari 2006Articles moved
There were a few English articles on my other website (www.yjcn.nl). To keep it all together I have moved them to this diary.
Zondag, 15 januari 2006A review of Chung Wu's "The Essentials of the Yi Jing"
.....can be found here at Steve Marshall's site.
Zondag, 11 december 2005Don't forget the Germans
It is a pity that the German literature about ancient China is so much neglected or ignored. There are numerous excellent studies about Chinese literature, history and culture written by German professors, but you will hardly find it mentioned in the English books that dominate this field of study. This is sad because often the German research excels in thoroughness; many German writers do not spare any effort to scrutinize the subject of their study. You will find a few examples of this below: German books in the spotlight.
Dominique Hertzer The first book is an excellent study about the Mawangdui Yijing, its history and how it compares to the received text. The second book is a translation of the Mawangdui text, and just as Edward Shaughnessy does Hertzer give the MWD text in combination with the received text. But Hertzer does a better job than Shaughnessy: her translation is very well annotated (and interpreted), and often the modern version of the MWD text that she gives seems closer to the original silk manuscript. For instance, where Shaughnessy gives 溍 as the name for hexagram 51 (35 in the received text), Hertzer gives 𣸄. A slightly different character with a slightly different meaning. She also translates the name of hexagram 14 (22), fan 繁 as 'a common and versatile plant, used for medicine purposes, the "Artemisia stelleriana" ', which differs quite from Shaughnessy's 'luxuriance'. She uses this meaning throughout her translation of hexagram 14. Another remarkable difference is her translation of 34 (11) - 2: 'The drum stick is lost....', where Shaughnessy gives 'wrapped recklessness...'. These differences are worth to take note of, because they give an entirely and less traditional view of the MWD text. If you want to study the MWD text you simply cannot do without Hertzer's books. Dennis R. Schilling This book consists of five parts:
Hermann G. Bohn Bohn's book is the most detailed study of xiangshu and yili philosophy and history available in a Western language. It talks in detail about the contents of the Ten Wings, the guaqi theories of Meng Xi and Jing Fang, the Eight Palaces, Wang Bi's Yijing commentary, Han Kangbo's commentary to the Xici, Kong Yingda's Zhouyi Zhengyi, the Yili school during the Song dynasty, Ouyang Xiu, Li Gou, Zhou Dunyi, Xue Jixuan, Lu Jiuyuan, Ye Shi's criticism, etc. etc. etc., illustrated with pictures and other material which is unknown in the West. This book contains so much new information that it will keep you busy (and puzzled; some systems from xiangshu are hard to comprehend) for months. It is a good company to Bent Nielsen's A Companion to Yijing numerology and cosmology. An extensive bibliography and an index make this book complete. Gerhard Schmitt This book, published in 1970, is small in size but has been very influential in the studies of the original language of the Yijing. Schmitt was one of the first to look at oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions to illuminate a selection of texts from the Yi. His translations differ greatly from the traditional ones, but it is all motivated by references to ancient Chinese literature and the early inscriptions. The book is very hard to find but it is compulsory reading for everyone who is interested in the language of the Yi. Therefore I have made it available as a pdf download. Tsung-Tung Chang There are not many books which discuss the meanings of oracle bone characters in their context. Chang's book is one of the few; all the characters are organized by topics as 'ghost and ancestor cult', 'nature cult', 'the highest god Di' and 'magic actions'. Although it is not a dictionary it is easy to use it like that because of the radical index at the back of the book. The main value of the book is not its definition of the characters alone, but more the mentioning of the context in which a character occurs. By doing this Chang's book also explains the culture of the Shang. Raimund Theodor Kolb It is hard to find good books about the military in Ancient China. The excellent works of Ralph Sawyer come to mind, and I am patiently waiting for his multi-volume book History of Warfare in China. Kolb's book is a welcome addition to what we have so far: it deals with the history of the infantry in ancient China up to the Zhanguo-period (475-221 BC). The material is divided by dynasty; it starts with the Shang-Yin period, the sources we have about this period, its culture, and a short section about the chariot. After that the divisions of the infantry is discussed: zhongren 眾人, chen 臣, shi 史, doghunters etc. are discussed in detail, with many references to oracle bones. For each dynasty there is information about weapons, tactics, recrutement, etc. Extensive footnotes, lots of Chinese characters and a lenghty bibliography make this book a valuable work if you want to know how the military shaped the history of China. The only thing that I miss is an index. Wolfgang Bauer This A4-sized book of 74 pages mainly deals with the Tuibeitu 推背圖, an ancient prophetic text in about 66 chapters, often compared to the work of Nostradamus. Just as with Nostradamus is the Tuibeitu used to foretell the future in todays world. But what many people do not know is that there were different versions of the TBT, and Bauer discusses four of these versions, giving images, the content of the text and the differences in each version. It also contains a complete edition of the TBT in color and BW pictures. The TBT is still an important text in China, and there is a version which links the TBT to some hexagrams of the Yijing. This is just what I have on my shelves. Don't forget the Germans! Their work is often valuable, inspiring and very complete if we compare it with the English equivalents.
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