Clarity,
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I find this very hard to believe, as the phrase Yuan heng li zhen does not appear on oracle bones. The characters appear in other contexts, but on oracle bones it surely is not a 'mantra' or 'ritual'. Not even the components 'yuanheng' or 'lizhen' are found on oracle bones, in other words the oracle bones are not very helpful in deciphering the true meaning of this phrase.frank said:Acording to the oraclebones Yuan Heng Li Zhen is some kind of mantra or ritual taking place by making a sacrifice towards the ancestors and doing something with the outcome of that ritual..... With Yuan you call the ancestors... In Heng you are determend to handle the ritual correctly by calling them... (Another Chinese character used in this is Xiang, which looks very much as Heng, but means a slightly different thing... Heng is the ritual, Xiang is the fun in handling the ritual...), In Li, you receive the message from the ancestors, which can only give you profit... and by Zhen the gods / ancestors are expecting that you handle acordingly to the message they gave you... ´don´t stand there... do it´...
Ah, well, then you answered my question. No problem with making things up, as long as it is mentioned.frank said:I thought the material came from a french chinese dictionary you gave to a mutual friend of ours. I am not shure if ALL the four characters came from the oraclebones, and it could be that it is from a slight later date, but acording to the entrances into that dictionary I made this up.
Oh, I am satisfied already. But when someone presents something as a 'fact' I always like to see it backed up by sources - be it dictionaries, other books, assumptions or just plain imagination. Where does someone get his ideas from? That is what I want to know before I give his ideas credit. The phrase 'yuan heng li zhen' is not found on oracle bones, so when someone says "according to the oraclebones Yuan Heng Li Zhen is some kind of mantra" I am curious about his sources. Knowing that is more satisfying than just saying "you are wrong!".It´s always experimenting in the Yi as people write books with a 100 percent certainty, and someone then digs something up and in the next new book the opposite is suggested... I know you want back up and to me that french dictionary is one of them. I also am fond of working with the Yi ´as long as things work´... I know you are not satifsfied with an answer like that :-D...
andChinese studies has a long way to go before it catches up methodologically with the standards of modern historical analysis in other areas.
I believe Chinese (language) studies are quite mature, but the material we can work with is quite scarce. Should we find a Rosetta's Stone with oracle bone inscriptions on it, then the study of archaic Chinese would surely be boosted, just as happened with hieroglyphs in the late 19th century. Without something like that we can only guess at the original meaning of many characters. From most of the glyphs that are given in the 甲骨文字典 we do not know their modern equivalent or their meaning, and if we do not find a key to their meaning it will all stay highly speculative. I don't think this has anything to do with Chinese studies not being 'grown up', it is just the lack of material which could help us out.Time for Chinese studies to grow up, I think.
That's a good point of him. I am not very fond of Chang's books, a lot of material in it is highly speculative, but he did make proper use of techniques he learned in the West.Kwang-chih Chang, the great archeologist of the Shang, once said every archeologist should be thoroughly familiar with at least two unrelated areas of investigation. He insisted that his students not only master Chinese archeology but also the archeology of another area in the world like Europe or the Americas or the Near East. He believed one always benefits from having an outside frame of reference, a serious effort to address different problems, different issues, different cultures.
But isn't language also a barrier in this? How many Chinese can read English, for instance? And how much of Western research is translated into Chinese? In other words, isn't it harder for Chinese to get access to Western research?In my opinion, this is what a lot of Chinese specialists have lacked - familiarity with relevant advances made in other areas of similar inquiry.
I don't agree with you that we still rely on these old translations, I mean, look at the work of Shaugnessy and Rutt, to name but two. Their research, whether you agree with them or not, gives a totally different view and interpretation of the Yi. You don't have to use Legge, Wilhelm etc. if you don't want to, there are alternatives.There are more sources for the Yijing than most people suppose. Some of them have not been closely studied in the West for many years. It is astonishing and embarrassing that we still rely (in English) on translations made over 100 years ago by James Legge.
I could not agree more! It is a wonderful guide in almost all (but not all) aspects of Chinese culture, it points you to the major resources for every area, it is an indispensable work for every researcher. However, the problem with such a work is that it becomes quickly outdated. Nevtertheless the second edition is a must-have.On the matter of sources, there is one book that towers above the rest, a book every serious student of ancient China should own and study: Endymion Wilkinson's "Chinese History: A Manual", first published in 1998 by the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, and already available in a second edition.
I think that in this area even claims by true specialist should be treated skeptical at first. Never rely on one source ('one source is no source', is one of my favourite sayings), try to find backup from other sources or specialists as well.Wilkinson suggests that new claims by non-specialists about re-interpreting the oracle bones should be "treated with the utmost skepticism."
Ah, but whether there is agreement on the meaning of oracle bone glyphs or not, there are nonetheless striking similarities between oracle bone inscriptions and the text of the Zhouyi. Characters like 'yuan', 'heng', 'li' and 'zhen' figure prominently in OBI and the Yi, as do 'ji' 吉 and 'xiong' 凶. That is remarkable, and I can understand why certain people insist that the Yi's origin comes from the OBI. I think there is more than that, though. As I see it there is too much concentration on OBI, and less use is being made of jinwen 金文, bronze inscriptions. That is odd, because bronze inscriptions are closer to the language of the Yi.Now, folks, these are the oracle bones so often referred to in order to support various theories about the origins of the Yi.
Please do. I always appreciate a critical point of view.But here I am, rambling on about dead history. I don't honestly think any of this matters, and I'll tell you why sometime if I feel like it.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).