'Oh Nature, give us cracks; in these bones, a sign!

Shang Dynasty began c. 1700 BC

I wonder what a yarrow invocation would be like?

I think it should contain references to the full moon, the ancestor's gaves from where the yarrow is harvested and that yarrow is round and spiritual, "those divine things!" last phrase taken from the Great Treatise.

Excellent subject, Sun! I think invocations are very important in Yi divination. They are rarely mentioned by the "experts," but no shaman would attempt an encounter with the Other Side without introducing herself/himself. Invocations make crystal clear what our intentions are in divining. Does anyone else use them?

The full moon? I've always wondered why LiSe renamed her website to share emphasis between the Moon and the Sun. Not that I understand any of this planetary symbolism in any case. Can somebody explain what this "sun" and "moon" stuff is all about?

Lindsay

Because I think Sun and Moon created the hexagrams of the Yijing.
From winter to summer 6 moons
From summer to winter 6 moons

The ancient sundial of the Zhou was a Gui, a tablet which was at one end round, at the other end straight. At the round end a biao, a gnomon, which cast a shadow, longer in winter, shorter in summer. Midwinter is moon 10 (hex.2), the shadow goes across all lines. Midsummer is moon 4 (hex.1), hardly any shadow, and not dividing any line.

LiSe

I tried to upload the animation, but it was too big, so you will have to look here:
http://www.anton-heyboer.org/ and for the story click on the animation.

LiSe

Dear Lindsay and Lise:

the sun and the moon are also understood to be the two entities that have taken the Universal Divine One Energy and divided the two into yin and yang. The Buddhists say that throughout the universe this energy condition is extemely rare. Now when you look at a picture of a Buddha you will always see the sun and moon in the picture and understand its significance.

The shang invocation was written of by this new professor who wrote the articles on shang and Zhou history that many of us are excited about.

Sun

another invocation:

"May the water from the Heavenly Fountain cleanse our being. May the water from the Heavenly Fountain quench our spiritual thirst. May the water from the Heavenly fountain cure our wounds. May the water from the Heavenly Fountain bless us all."
Hua-ching Ni, in speaking of the I Ching's image for itself, The Well (Hexagram 48)

Thanks for the clarification, Sun. Somebody on this website is going to ask you this question sooner or later, so it might as well be me: who is this "new professor" of whom you speak? We have some serious Chinese history and sinological buffs around here - Hilary, LiSe, and Bradford, to name a few - and all of us would like to know what you've read.

Lindsay

Chung-Kwong Yuen of the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. :


The Zhou tribe totem was the bear which does relate to the Yellow Emperor, and in fact the tribal surname Ji's idiogram is "female" next to a bear footprint. Their founder Hou Ji was supposedly born by another Gao Xin wife, Jiang Yuan, whose name indicates descent from the Jiang tribe that claimed to be descendents of Emperor Yan and was later closely allied with the Zhous, and its chief Jiang Tai Gong was the Zhou army supreme commander, who was then granted the dukedom of Qi, hence the Qi pedigree from Emperor Yan, both ally and competitor to Yellow Emperor.

The name Zhou seems related to their agricultural practice: the ideogram was originally a rectangle divided into four parts, each with a dot in the middle probably indicating seed or fertilizer, and the meaning of the word is "boundary", probably footpaths dividing fields into farming plots. The use of fertilizers to maintain productivity and retard soil exhaustion, and the use of boundaries to reduce top soil loss from water flow, were probably important agricultural inventions, which the Zhous may or may not have made.

The name Hou Ji actually means Lord Grain; it is not clear whether the Ji is connected with the Ji used for the tribe surname(different ideogram). Ancient Tibetan books referred to them as "dragons", so apparently they inherited the dragon totem from the Emperor Yan tribes and took it westwards.

The Zhous have a rather weird story about succession: the uncles of King Wen, the founder of Zhou state, were supposed to be so impressed with their nephew that they voluntarily renounced their claims to succeed their father so that their younger brother, King Wen's father, could later pass the chiefdom to him. In actual history, after their father's submission to Shang as vassal, the younger brother was allowed to marry a Shang princess, thus attaining a higher status - indeed part of Shang king's objective was to ensure that a close relative would rule the vassal state. Confucian scholars, however, eagerly seized on the story as a moral tale of virtue and modesty. This younger brother was initially well trusted by the Shang King, his cousin by marriage, and given authority to conquer western barbarians lands, but soon his success started to threaten the Shangs, and he was executed using some convenient pretext. Despite this, his son Prince Wen initially served the Shangs loyally and was allowed to marry the Shang King's sister (who did not produce an heir however - Prince Wu was born of the Youxin princess), but was himself imprisoned and probably died in custody, though the official story was that he was released after his ministers organized a successful bribe.*

When his son King Wu set off the invade the Shang capital, he brought in a chariot the shrine tablet representing the spirit of his father, presumably to receive the blessing of King Wen in his effort to avenge all the wrongs inflicted on the Zhous by the Shangs. Zhou propaganda downplayed this issue however, preferring to see the war as heaven mandated assertion of right to rule rather than tribal vendetta. ***

***The accepted idea that the Duke of Zhou (King Wen's son) wrote the line statements of the Yi can also be questioned because the Duke spent most of his life at the Shang court and could have written down the line statements and hexagrams as part of his learning and training at the Shang court.

****You see here that the author says that a shrine tablet was carried into the battle of Mu rather than the dessicated corpse of King Wen as speculated by S. Marshall in the Mandate of Heaven.

***represents my own comments

Professor of computer science... probably not quite so reliable on early Zhou history as SJM!
(Mind you, Steve is pretty good with computers, to judge by his site, so you never know, maybe it works both ways...)

Just come across an interesting one:
Centre for Zhouyi and ancient Chinese philosophy, Shandong university
Enjoy!

Thank you Hilary!

While SJM seems quite detail-oriented and his craft is quite awesome, he does note that Chinese I Ching scholars have been content to stay among themselves. With their methodologies (and theories I imagine).

I think the professor's article may be a tad dated because in the last 5 years or so, Xia sites have been discovered (he says there is no evidence for them) and also the Erhlitou is now thought of as the Xia and they have been studied for years)

I also find the SJM is a bit too reliant on what the Zhou themselves and their Confucian shills have written as history. As they say, the victors write history! I think everyone has been encourages to be reverential about the Zhou without question.

I don't think the differences we see between these two writers can be resolved so easily without knowing more of the sources and scholarship of each. Even then many ideas will continue to be debatable, something about which reasonable people might differ..

I have been making a list of some the Zhou history that, excuse me, might be 'revisionist":

Were they really the longest dynasty? Probably in name only. After the collapse of the Eastern (?) Zhou they essentially dissolved into competing factions. at the end of the Warring States period the victors, summoned the Zhou king and dismissed him without any ceremony at all. This gives me doubts and it could be the Zhou were a dynasty in name only for a long time but I don't know how it could be dated precisely.

We also have the Confucian school considering the Zhou the 'lost ideal' the measure for all dynastys to follow. The idealization, I think, could be challenged in some respects. And King Wen? well, he was never a king as most know.

Some of these ideas (and more) need debunking. For example, did Tan, the Duke of Zhou really write all the line statements? He spent a great deal of his life at the Shang court. Maybe the Shang had something to do with some of those line statements. I mean, is the Zhouyi 'it'?-didn't the Shang count at all or the Xia? I mean the Zhou take credit for a lot (sorry Master Ni)
This is only a rough idea but if I compare my American history that I learned in school to what I know now, well then, what cr--that stuff in school was! I mean George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree and what about King Wen and his life could be similar myth?

Sorry, I don't have access to my complete Zhou and Warring States articles so I am just really throwing out the ideas.

Sun

Yes, thank you, Hilary! There is enough stuff to read on this site to last a month or two! Who could resist a 31-page article on "The Yi Jing and Chinese ontological hermeneutics"? But my favorite is Prof. Jin Chun-feng's little 20-page confection called "Fearfulness & apprehensiveness & self-cultivation and expanding virtues by observing images: On the completed time of 'The Great Image' and its ideological characteristics"! It doesn't get better than that, does it? Only a little disappointed there was nothing about the Yi and post-modernism, but why haggle about rubies when someone gives you a chest full of diamonds?

Lindsay

Re invocations
I think an invocation is a must, simply because it puts ones ego in its proper place ie as a pupil
seeking help or guidance from someone/something greater than ones self[ego].

Modesty and humility are in my opinion the only keys to open this great mystery without them the door remains firmly closed.
Django.

I was gonna say something, but then I realized its coming from my right brain.

Invocation, yeah that's it. If a small child was handed Stradivarius, it would still be a Stradivarius. But to the child, it would be only a toy.

Why centering and the invocation is considered to be so important:

Of the T'ai Hsuan Ching, an ancient Chinese work of mysterious origins, Michael Nylan writes: "...The sacred efficacy of the divination tool is easily impaired if the user's mind lacks moral integrity (ch'eng), since moral integrity is the single quality that unites the individual with the cosmic order. In consequence, The Mystery, like other famous Chinese classics, makes no promises about the accuracy of its predictions unless the divination is carried out when the inquirer is in the correct spiritual state. After all, divination represents a true communication between Man and the divine impulses operating in Heaven and Earth, which the coins or yarrow stalks only facilitate."