Series on the History of Chinese Philosophy, Pt. 5
Understanding the Cosmic Dance through the Yijing
Harmony in Heaven and Humankind
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Hello and welcome to Part 5 in this continuing series on the history of Chinese philosophy! In case you’re just joining us, you can check out the previous posts here:
In this installment we’re going to turn our attention to the metaphysical and cosmological sources of the Chinese tradition — particularly as found in a text known as the Yijing, or “Book of Changes.”
This is a book that remains shrouded in mystery. It’s sometimes called the Zhou Yi, which offers a clue about the dynasty with which it’s traditionally associated. However, many ancient authors believed the divination practices out of which the text grew stretched back even further, all the way to the Shang dynasty. If we accept this traditional account, the origins of the text might even be placed earlier than 1045 BCE. Instead of trying to pinpoint the text’s historical origins, I’ll focus on the philosophical import the Yijing held for thinkers of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods and how it might be useful to students of philosophy today.
But first, let me say a bit about how it’s become a litmus test for the reception of Chinese thought around the world.
The Yijing was one of the first Chinese texts encountered by Europeans in the late medieval and early modern periods. As such, it was introduced at a time when orientalist attitudes were still largely on the rise.
(To quote the comparativist Bryan Van Norden, orientalism is “the view that everything from Egypt to Japan is essentially the same, and is the polar opposite of the West. Westerners are rational, scientific, and philosophical; “Orientals” are motivated only by passions, superstitions, and folk sayings.”)
The metaphysical underpinnings of the text fed into such racist attitudes and, in some cases, confirmed for those Europeans their own feelings of superiority. It led to statements like this one from Immanuel Kant:
Chinese thinkers strive in dark rooms with eyes closed to experience and contemplate their nihility. Thence the pantheism (of the Tibetans and other Oriental peoples) and the subsequent Spinozism engendered from the sublimation of pantheism. [Kant, On History p. 335–36]
What’s ironic about this statement is that Kant himself was influenced pretty substantially by Chinese ideas, albeit indirectly, through the figurist sympathies of German enlightenment thinkers like Gottfried Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Georg Bilfinger.
Figurism was a Jesuit view that Chinese civilization had descended from Shem, one of the sons of the biblical Noah (of ark building fame). The figurists believed that Chinese legends about Fuxi were just confused accounts of Noah’s ancestor Enoch and one figurist, named Joachim Bouvet, wrote letters to Leibniz convincing him that the Yijing contained the esoteric teachings of early Christianity.
As one might imagine, the Church leaders didn’t appreciate suggestions that Chinese texts could rival the spiritual authority of Catholic scripture. The figurists were ultimately dismissed as fringe occultists and Chinese philosophy became increasingly associated with irrational mysticism in the eyes of Europeans.
This was just one example among many where the Yijing had been used to support the agenda of some outside group. The U.S. post-war counterculture of the 1950s and 60s made a similar [mis]appropriation — drawing on the book’s divination origins as a kind of new-age-Asian-spirituality alternative to Tarot. Some of the beat poets of that time believed the Yijing’s 64 hexagrams were diagrams of insights induced by taking LSD. It was even featured in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962, and now an Amazon Prime series) and Dick admitted to allowing the answers he derived while consulting the text to DETERMINE THE PLOT of the novel.
Such associations with the hippie movement probably fueled many of the prejudices against Chinese thought that continue today. In the same article linked above, Bryan Van Norden recounts a statement made by late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2017, responding to a colleagues’ reference to Confucius:
[it seems] the Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie*… the world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational pop-philosophy; it demands them in the law.
*NOTE* Fortune cookies are an entirely AMERICAN invention!*
In spite of such racist dismissals, there have been many philosophers who devoted their careers to studying Chinese intellectual history, and what they’ve found there is as rich and diverse as any philosophy found in the global west. Moreover, there are plenty of Chinese thinkers we’d consider rationalistic by contemporary standards, just as there are many European thinkers we’d consider mystics.
Something unique about the Yijing is how it blends together a practical, systematic, and reflective philosophy of life with speculations about the ultimate structure of reality. The result is a humanistic approach to harmonizing all spheres of action within constant cosmic change. However, the text is DECIDEDLY vague (as all divination tools must be) and that vagueness lends itself to a vast array of interpretations and appropriations. A recent collection of scholarly essays — The Making of the Global Yijing in the Modern World — focuses on how this has played out in various places and times, in case you’d like to make a deeper dive.
Now let’s take a closer look at what might be some of the philosophical sources of such misunderstanding.
Organic universe — Neither a machine nor a drama
Early Chinese philosophy’s tendency to view the universe as an organism, rather than as a machine (like European traditions) or a play (like the traditions of India) is something at which some philosophers may initially balk.
As we already discussed back in Part 3, the Zhou people saw their daily lives as DEEPLY connected to the natural rhythms of their land, which was not just a place of genesis, but also an extension of their very existence. As such, the Zhou Chinese held an organic view of the universe, one that did not hang on a conception of Being as originative. The closest thing to a western notion of “Being” to be found in Chinese thought, a concept known as yǒu [有], might be better translated as “to have” and in many ways was seen as subordinate to non-being, or “to not have” [wú 無]: “All things in the world are born from yǒu, and yǒu from wú” (Daodejing, Ch. 40). But, as the 20th-century Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan has explained, the relationship of wú and yǒu “has nothing to do with time and actuality. For in time and actuality, there is no Being; there are only beings.” [p. 96]
In other words, in an organic, pluralistic universe the Chinese notion of being was LOGICAL rather than cosmological, as it was meant to show that existence itself is a broader notion than an individual existence, and non-existence is even broader still. For them, it would be perfectly acceptable to espouse an ex nihilo type of generation and, contra Parmenides, logically impossible to have something without first having nothing.
Where the Greeks witnessed quick and violent changes in their maritime culture, the Chinese witnessed change on a much slower, agricultural scale; this is perhaps why Greek philosophical motifs are characterized by delimitation and the stability of form in the face of apparent change, while the central motifs of Chinese philosophy are continuity, interdependence, and cyclical dynamism.
Several notions grew out of this agrarian world-view that would later become mainstays of Chinese philosophy. The first of these was the idea of the sage-ruler. Since it was the landowners who had the time to study under the well-field feudal system, it’s not surprising that the virtues of wisdom and statecraft were believed to be tied together. The ideal person of this era was believed to possess both “sageliness within” and “kingliness without” and it became the task of philosophy to foster such a character. This view of the sage-ruler fit together with a couple of other older concepts, such as the idea of dào [道], which represented a ethico-natural path that had to be followed by any would-be sage-ruler, and the notion of tiān mìng [天命], which is often poorly translated as “The Mandate of Heaven,” and was a principle of ruling legitimacy invoked by the early Zhou leaders to justify the overthrow of their Shang predecessors.
Together, these ideas produced a view of ruling dynasties as “kingdoms of destiny.” However, this should not be equated with the western notion of the divine right of kings. Despite its common translation, tiān mìng was not a birthright, but instead a moral currency built up through wise leadership, which, for the Chinese, meant acting in accordance with a natural order, or tiān dào [天道]. The Shang, according to the Zhou proponents of tiān mìng, had worked against nature and had thus lost their right to rule — which was perhaps supported by a series of natural or political calamities around the time of the usurpation.
To the early Chinese, the parallel would have been obvious: just as the duality of sageliness and kingliness could be held in perfect harmony within the sage-ruler, the duality of human society and the natural world could be held in together in harmony within the ideal kingdom.
Dynamic Polarity in Nature and its Continuity with Humankind
This ties in with yet another important idea that sometimes baffles non-Asian readers, namely, the dynamic polarity of nature and its representation in the concept of yīnyáng [陰陽]. Yīnyáng was an outgrowth of Shang divination practices and became formalized in the Yìjīng. These concepts, which originally referred to sunshine and shadow, came to represent feminine and masculine respectively and, together, are the primary principle of dynamic polarity in Chinese ontology. Rather than some sharp static duality, they are stand-ins for every binary relationship and connote a dynamic, interpenetrating unity of opposites rather than a discrete, static duality. Most westerners are familiar with the symbol, also known as the tàijítú, which represents the Chinese conception of dynamic polarity, but few understand it fully. As Robin Wang has written,
The yinyang is the very building block of the Chinese intellectual tradition and the generator of a dynamic thinking process… Interaction between components increases the combination with the number of components, thus allowing for many new and subtle things to emerge. [p. 221]
You can click on the video below to view a mini-presentation I created on the history and development of the Yinyang symbol.
The foregoing points undergird what might be seen as one of the greatest strengths in Chinese philosophy — it’s emphasis on non-linear modes of thought. Instead of placing the linearality of formal logic at the center of philosophical inquiry, classical Chinese thinkers tended to employ convergent, divergent, and lateral modes of analysis. Such metaphorical ways of knowing were tied to allusion, comparison, and suggestion rather than syllogism. They employed inductive and abductive reasoning more readily than deductive proof. This is not to say that classical Chinese philosophy was devoid of linear logic, but rather to note a difference of emphasis. The result was that Chinese philosophy never took an epistemological turn in the way European thinkers from Descartes to Kant steered the Enlightenment. As Du Wei-ming has explained it:
The continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of qi as a way of conceptualizing the basic structure and function of the cosmos…signifies a conscious refusal to abandon a mode of thought that synthesizes spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole…. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to a people restricted by a Cartesian dichotomy. [p. 69]
Since the word yin just means the shady side of a hill, and yang the sunny side, the ancient Chinese already understood that as time passes one turns into the other. A long tradition developed among Confucian and Daoist philosophers that involved explaining the cosmic dance of this dynamic polarity. Although they often disagreed about how best to arrive at such explanations, what they all agreed on was that these rhythms were built into the fabric of the universe and that it was possible for human beings to harmonize with them.
Another thematic difference between the early Greek and Chinese thinkers was that the Chinese did not tend to think of binaries as necessarily dualistic or hierarchical. Robin Wang sums it up nicely with regard to yinyang:
The Chinese value the jiao (interaction, intercourse) and place it as the necessary condition and the very foundation of any existence. This is the rhythm of human life, earth’s changes and heaven’s power. [p. 221]
So, it would be yinyang, NOT yin AND yang. They are mutually entailing. And that mutual entailment makes a whole. So, there aren’t two concepts under consideration, but three: yin, yang, and yinyang. As the Song dynasty neo-Confucian philosopher, Zhou Dunyi, put it:
Non-polar (wuji) and yet Supreme Polarity (taiji)!
The Supreme Polarity in activity generates yang;
yet at the limit of activity it is still.
In stillness it generates yin;
yet at the limit of stillness it is also active.
Activity and stillness alternate;
each is the basis of the other.
If you want to get a sense of the movement and holism that’s implied in the modern yinyang symbol, you might consider the children’s illusion called the thaumatrope. The classic example is a card with a drawing of a bird on one side and a cage on the other that’s spun rapidly until the images merge into a third image of the bird inside the cage. You can see a similar approach applied to the yinyang symbol in the video below.
The Book of Changes
Now we’re finally ready to consider the Yijing text itself. The traditional story of its provenance is that Fuxi, the legendary lord of heaven who ruled at the beginnings of the Xia Dynasty, discovered the Bagua, or eight trigrams pictured below, on the shell of a tortoise. He used those to make observations about the movements of the world. Many centuries later, King Wen and the Duke of Zhou expanded on the Fuxi arrangement to discover the 64 hexagrams and their meanings. This origin story also helps to explain the layered structure of the text.
As a layered text, the Yijing has many later commentaries interspersed throughout the older hexagram explanations. Many commentaries and glosses have likewise been appended to the text. By the time the text had reached the scholars of the medieval Song Dynasty it was already nearly incomprehensible to the casual reader. Specialists were required to help the laity make interpretations. As the 12th century poet, Qiu Cheng, once put it:
Clear thought lodges in the Yi, But in some lines no-one can find it. If you don’t understand a line, You interpret it in vain; May as well paint a picture of the wind.
In fact, I had one university professor who refused to talk about the Yijing in class. He said the text had “too much power” and recounted a story about how his uncle-in-law, who was a Taiwanese expert on the text, had used it to determine the exact day he would die. When the day came, the uncle died just as predicted. I don’t know how truthful that story is, but it definitely reveals the kind of reverence the Yijing still commands.
It could be said that even the very title of this book defies easy interpretation. As an adjective, yì could mean “easy” or “simple,” while as a verb it implies “to change.” The word jīng means “classic” or “text,” and is derived from the character’s original meaning (“regularity” or “persistence”), implying that it describes an Ultimate Way that will NOT change over time. So, we’re left with a literal translation of “Persistent Change or Changing Persistence.” The philosophical question is: should this be thought of as persistence THROUGH change or persistence as a result OF change? I’ll let you draw your own conclusion by leaving you with a line from one of the appended commentaries: “As begetter of all begetting, it is called change.”
Using the Yijing
Let’s talk about how the text was used as a divination tool. In ancient times, milfoil stalks would be cast to produce a number corresponding to either a solid yang line or a broken yin line. Repeating this five times produced a six-line hexagram. Nowadays coins may be used… but the results are the same.
The symbolism of the lines is as follows:
Upper line = energy state of heaven
Middle line = energy state of human
Lower line = energy state of earth
•Two sets of trigrams are divined to create a hexagram
•Match the result with one of the 64 hexagrams in the Yijing
One would use the explanations on the Yijing to discern meaning of the hexagram and any additional meaning for “changing lines” (energies on the verge of changing). A skilled interpreter would, of course, be needed to apply these generic explanations to specific questions.
There’s another text with a name that’s similar to the Yijing. It’s the Yijin jing, or Classic of Changing Sinews. This book is a manual for exercises similar in nature to the modern practice of Qigong. Qigong could be said to be a practical application of the Yijing principles aimed at bodily health. Practitioners view the body as a microcosm of the larger universe and practice the collection of qi, or vital breath, through slow, even movements that promote flexibility and strength.
Such harmony between cosmic movement and human action is one of the central ideas introduced by the Yijing. In one of the appended commentaries, known as the Wen Yan, the opening passage links the four attributes of the first hexagram — the creative Qian of pure yang — to the four cardinal virtues of the Confucian junzi, or superior person. (It should be noted that most Confucians tended to view such an exalted moral position as exclusively available to men, but I’m choosing to strip the ideas of their unnecessary chauvinism.)
Since Qian is made of six yang lines, it represents pure, active creativity, which probably feels something like ascending upon the backs of six dragons (imagine Harry Potter riding Buckbeak in The Prisoner of Azkaban… only times six!)
There are 4 possible outcomes when “casting” (whether coins or yarrow stalks) to get a line — 6, 7, 8, or 9. Even numbers yield broken lines (yin), odds yield solid lines (yang). 9 is a yang that’s about to change back to yin. and 6 is yin about to change back to yang.
So… if your bottom line yang is about to become a yin, then don’t get too carried away. Remember who you are and what you stand for, otherwise one might be “swept up” in all the hoopla. [That’s my very basic philosophical interpretation of the divination aspect of this.]
But, really, that sort of “divination” use of the Yijing isn’t nearly as interesting as its psychological, ontological, and normative import. Consider how Qigong masters regard the continuity of the “three treasures” [San Bao] of earth, humanity, and heaven/sky [地, 人, and 天, or di, ren, and tian] and how that continuity can be reflected in the San Bao of human character: essence, vital energy, and spirit.
I think there’s a philosophy of action contained in that idea… slowing down and giving full consideration to one’s life, in what modern psychologists would call mindfulness.
In the Wen Yan commentary we see something like this on both sides of that sage-ruler ideal mentioned above. The leadership of a ruler manifests as active usefulness and the wisdom of a sage manifests as a passive exemplar. This distinction will become a matter of some importance in comparing Confucian and Daoist philosophies later on. We’ll start that journey in Part 6, when we turn our attention the sayings of Confucius.
See you there!
