Sorry but I was getting tired of the other thread. We might as well agree or disagree in a brand new one...

Also, I think Lindsay's comments were very interesting to grant the subject a separate discussion.

lindsay said:

And there are few external sources of the same age and type and provenance to use for comparison. We don't have a lot of 3,000 year-old divination manuals hanging around to look at. So scholars trying to resolve disputed passages have very little evidence to work with when trying to decide which meaning of many possible meanings is intended. Maybe they all were - divination thrives on ambiguity.

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A few posts above I mentioned a discussion forum in Early China 14 (1989) where the "Question question" was discussed by several scholars, Western and Chinese. It is a very enlightening discussion about Shang and W/Zhou language structure and syntax. Even with all the textual evidence collected (some 200,000 fragments of bone and turtle shells, as pointed recently by Scott Davies in a Philosophy conference in Amsterdam where he presented a fifty page paper named "Plessner and the Structural Study of Ancient China"-- I asked him for a copy and he graciously sent me one), and even realizing that although not many divinations manuals have reached us, other than in fragmentary form, the amount of "divination" related material is overwhelming, scholars continue to disagree about how to read those text in a contemporary context.

BTW, in his paper, Scott Davis share the very good idea of approaching the study of ancient China, and its classical literature, more from an anthropologist angle than a philological one.

I think Luis posted this link a while back, but Kidder Smith's little essay on "The Difficulty of the Yijing" is a nice summary of the scholarly problems of working with the Yi. Someone asked, Why don't the professors like to write about the Yi? Well, here's your answer:
# www.tc.umn.edu/~cmedst/gmap/uploaded/The%​20Difficulty%20of%20the%​20Yijing.pdf

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Chuckles! Speaking of papers and essays, there's also an essay by Shaughnessy in EC 20 (1995) named "The Origin of an Yijing Line Statement" where he poses a few interesting theories. In the first page there is a lighthearted comment about the "Why don't the professors..."

Recently, when discussing the problem of context in translating the Yi (or even simply understanding what it is saying), it has become more common to talk about the context of the translator. That is, where is the translator coming from? What ideas and opinions does the translator have that affects his translation? What is the historical and cultural context of the translation?

These questions are resolvable and enlightening, whereas similar questions about the Yi itself are not. At least not yet. But if the Chinese keep digging, who knows?

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Very worthy of consideration, indeed, and a very good question to ask ourselves when discussing translations, IMO. Translators will not ever be able to completely detach themselves from their own contemporary cultural background and their personal understanding of reality. They can approach it with the goal of empathizing with the time they are studying but, again, that involves much more than mere command of the language.

Professor says Yi has no philosophical value

Luis, I don't want to highjack your thread, but one of its themes seems to be the prevailing attitude of our established institutions of higher learning toward the Yi. I found the following webpage a year or so ago, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. I am quite sure Manyul Im, who is a rigorously-trained and impeccably-credentialed professor of Asian philosophy, represents the opinion of a large minority, if not the majority, of his kind in the United States. Take a look:

http://manyulim.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/the-yijing-i-chings-philosophical-value/

At first, I was shocked and dismayed, but then I began to wonder if perhaps the professor was right. Does the Yi have any philosophical content or value? Obviously, I refer to the Zhouyi portion only. It would be hard to argue, even for Manyul Im, that the Dazhuan was devoid of philosophical matter.

What do you think?

Lindsay

At first, I was shocked and dismayed, but then I began to wonder if perhaps the professor was right. Does the Yi have any philosophical content or value?

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Hi folks,

The Great Divide is between those who accept divination and those who reject it as being outside the limitations of the academic as defined by the medieval scholastics and their University curriculum.

Separated from divination, particularly your personal use of the Yi Oracle for your own divination insights, the rest of the I Ching is drained of both its fundamental context and shared meaning. It is the ETERNAL capacity of the Yi Oracle to answer human questions in each individual's own terms that is the geometrical center that gives meaning to each and all of the points along the circumference of Yi studies although of course it is not at all one of those points along the circle.

In terms of the origin of the line statements, specifically, they are generally given as following later after the hexagram order of the King Wen Sequence set up the framework of overall meaning. Since this is an unresolved or a priori avoided question it is difficult to get very far on the academic philosophy track.

Pushing beyond all those difficulties, the question of the origin of the line statements settles toward an issue of the relationship between the text of the line statements and the name or other text of the hexagram overall.

A recent example was the import of the name of hex 32 in several of the line statements of lines in that hexagram. Hilary wrote extensively from a perspective that if the same Chinese word was used, it must have the same meaning and therefore there must be a 'lasting' quality to the line statements. However, in divination symbolism the overall context of the hexagram is the eternal cycles of celestial motions like the planets in their orbit. On Earth, cycles aren't so simply eternal and that symbolic image becomes a rock in a sling that has a stable cycling motion before it is loosed. The line statements, though they repeat the stable routine name of the hexagram take unfortunate judgments that would fit to a symbolism that as moving lines trying to hold on to the routine cycling of the sling after it is loosed and thus moving toward its target will make for failure and trouble.

The words and divination symbolism only make sense then in human divination context rather than naively from the words or their translation. In human situations, the routine cycles of formal marriage are one reality. When something changes, to make one or more of these hexagram lines change and move toward a different hexagram, trying to hang on to the simple routines of stable marriage rather than adapting to the changes is a course toward misfortune.

The human context of the divination use of the Oracle is essential to understanding, but forbidden in formal academic philosophy.

Frank

lindsay said:

Luis, I don't want to highjack your thread, but one of its themes seems to be the prevailing attitude of our established institutions of higher learning toward the Yi. I found the following webpage a year or so ago, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. I am quite sure Manyul Im, who is a rigorously-trained and impeccably-credentialed professor of Asian philosophy, represents the opinion of a large minority, if not the majority, of his kind in the United States. Take a look:

http://manyulim.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/the-yijing-i-chings-philosophical-value/

Click to expand...

Oh, I'm very familiar with Manyul and his blog. Early last year I even ventured some comments about the Junzi and Taijitu in it. I think not only him but some of the contributors and commentators are really interesting and knowledgeable. I can't blame Manyul too much for taking such a position. Who knows what's really in his mind when making an statement like that. IMHO, there's no way to deny the Yijing's inherent philosophy (perhaps hidden and wrapped in a very definite cosmology). However, I believe Manyul shows his hand in something I quoted/posted here last year when we were discussing the Junzi. In that quote he goes as far as, in his own words, "saying that “philosophy” is really a Western concept". In that statement alone you can figure out is state-of-mind and what he's really implying... I mean, is a wholesale discarding of "philosophy," as strictly defined and understood, from Eastern thought. He further explains in the comment linked (#23):

From Manyul Im's blog said:

Let me say something more about it. I don’t think there is tradition-independence of philosophical thought; *philosophy is Western* in an important sense. “The philosophical” is a Western concept in origin. What counts as a philosophical way of thinking is largely constrained by how the concept has been understood and continues to be re-understood in Western thought. I’m pretty sure that there is no non-Western concept that maps accurately onto it. It doesn’t follow from that that such thinking does not occur in the non-West. But it’s important for Philosophy 101 students to understand how the concept of philosophy originates in Greece and develops over time into the present. To that extent, any intro to philosophy has to include, I think, some reasonable subset of Western philosophical works that are pivotal in the history of the concept of philosophy: some sampling of Plato’s dialogues, Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, Kant’s Prolegomena, Hegel’s Phenomenology, maybe Quine’s Two Dogmas or Naturalizing Epistemology, and I’m sure I’m leaving off someone’s favorite here.

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At first, I was shocked and dismayed, but then I began to wonder if perhaps the professor was right. Does the Yi have any philosophical content or value? Obviously, I refer to the Zhouyi portion only. It would be hard to argue, even for Manyul Im, that the Dazhuan was devoid of philosophical matter.

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So..., I wouldn't feel shock or dismay from his conclusions. OTOH, if "philosophy" related constructs were to be attached to the core Zhouyi text, my personal opinion would be that it is some sort of a "philosophical prompting aphorism matrix." (does that makes sense in English? ) If we think about the Yijing as a canonized classic, and all the exegesis piled upon it, we can clearly extract and visualize the matrix that seeded it. That some believe the seed isn't the tree is OK with me. However, no one can deny were the tree came from...

Hi Lindsay,

That is exactly the traditional definition of the "academic" from Plato's Academy "reconstructed" by the medieval Scholastics: Philosophy is created in Plato's dialogues and extends to the borders of Christendom only. Divination wasn't part of their Christian practice and so it is judged totally random superstition and forbidden in academic thought.

At one point, while I had the opportunity to wake up each morning surrounded by centuries of West African art, I met a university student majoring in art history who cheerily told me there was no "art" in West Africa since they did not change their styles in clear time periods like the Europeans. It only became art in academic terms when redrawn by Picasso in the 20th century.

Or more to the point, fuzzy logic that used math ranging from 0% to 100% (rather than specifying each exact pixel uniquely in every application) was declared unacceptable by US academia for violating the official interpretation of Aristotle's principle of the excluded middle (20th century view) so that only Japanese corporations could develop the simple chip technology that eliminated US based cameras, etc from the world market. One chip could control many devices, rather than a 10 min cartoon

It only becomes a serious problem when those academic limitations are seen in the view that the level of civilization is measured by energy consumption and therefore burning fossil fuels in vast quantities is essential for justifying global economic dominion. Fortunately, climate change is starting to challenge that view; however still very few willing to question the limits of the "academic" perspective.

Or again, divination use draws a bright dividing line between this community and the limits of the academics. Trying to find divination expertise from academic scholarship confuses twisting your mind like a pretzel for holding to the straight and narrow.

Or in the alternative, what do any of these sad, limited, obsolete, antique academic confessions of willful ignor-ance have to do with the origins of line statements. Or to focus just a bit: Are divination roots of line statements found in the soil of historical artifacts grabbed from ancient graves OR are they symbolic twists upon the hexagram structures indicating how changing lines affect Oracle divination?

Frank

I think I would agree that the Zhoyi isn't philosophy in the sense that these guys mistake it to be. But as "love of wisdom", the way Pythagoras intended the term, I think it is. I would hold with most of academia that the Zhouyi is not a metaphysics of Yin and Yang, as the Wings later tried to make it to be. It is, however, a root document introducing some fairly complex correlative thought, even if not nearly as intricate as Wing and Han algorithms would have it. Also, there is a whole lot more to philosophy than metaphysics - aesthetics, for example, the art of appreciation, and ethics, the study of appropriate behavioral responses to situations. Every metaphor and extended analogy and piece of advice in the Zhouyi informs ethics, and the sum of them creates a comprehensive philosophy of situational ethics. In this the professors have made a grave oversight, with notable exceptions like Rich Smith at Rice.
But something that everybody wants to overlook is the relationship between philosophy and psychology, in the way our attitudes shape our perceptions, and how we philosophize best when we first understand our (often cowardly) motives for doing so. I think the Zhouyi authors had a great handle on this field of study and in fact I would credit them with writing the first psychology text as well as an ethical philosophy.

Thank you, Frank, Luis, and Bradford. Very thoughtful responses, lots to think about.

Frank suggests that divination - and therefore the Yi - does not fall neatly into the Greek-based tradition of academic philosophy, and I believe he is correct. As he points out, though, we are really only talking about Plato and Aristotle as the foundational, archetypal philosophers of Western academia. Neither would probably have had much regard for the Yi, although they were respectful of oracles like Delphi and so on.

So today we have academic philosophers who are analytical, systematic, hyper-rational, materialist in their assumptions, literal-minded, and reductionist. That is the legacy of western scientific thinking.

Luis also made a lot of good points, but I was struck by his idea that the Yi was a "matrix". Bradford uses the same word in his work. The more I think about it, the more I see what a perfect description of the Yi this word "matrix" offers. Here is the Encarta web definition:

ma·trix [ máytriks ] (plural ma·tri·ces [ máytri sz ] or ma·trix·es)
noun
Definition:

1. arrangement of connected things: an arrangement of parts that shows how they are interconnected

2. substance containing something: a substance in which something is embedded or enclosed

3. situation in which something develops: a situation or set of circumstances that allows or encourages the origin, development, or growth of something
The matrix of video and computers is producing new forms of art.

4. tissue-forming substance: the substance that exists between cells and from which tissue such as cartilage and bone develops

5. soil or rock containing something: the soil or rock in which something such as a fossil, crystal, or mineral is embedded.
See also gangue

6. main part of alloy: the main metal component in an alloy

7. arrangement of mathematical elements: a rectangular array of mathematical elements, e.g. the coefficients of linear equations, whose rows and columns can be combined with those of other arrays to solve problems

8. network of circuit parts: in computing, a network of circuit parts such as transistors and resistors

9. surrounding mass of material: a bed or surround of material that gives protection or absorbs a force

[14th century. Directly or via French matrice< Latin matrix "womb," later "list" < matr- "mother"]

Almost every part of this definition sheds a little light on what the Yi is and how it works. Yup, the Yi is a good "matrix", and that's exactly what makes it so excellent as a divination book.

Have you ever tried to create your own divination book? I don't mean something based on the Yi, I mean something completely new and different. When I first started using the Yi, I became frustrated with the 64 categories I was supposed to shoe-horn everything into. About two seconds of thought are needed to discover big, abstract ideas and generic personal situations of great importance that the Yi does not even mention. Death, for example. And the categories it does use often seem to overlap each other. No, the Yi was complete unsatisfactory, I concluded. So I set about inventing a better divination book, something that really covered all the ground of human life and experience.

But how to do this? My answer was to go to Roget's Thesaurus, especially the original version and older revisions. Roget's intention was to classify everything in human experience, and it's a good system of universal classification in a pinch. So I began with the Roget outline of all human knowledge about the world, and started listing categories (hexagrams) for divination. Unfortunately, there were far too many. Also they were too abstract, it was difficult to understand how they might be used in divination.

Anyway, I kept working on it for awhile, and I created, in effect, a modern Yi exactly the way our academic friends would go about it. It was bigger, more inclusive, more accurate, more scientfific, better. Better? Actually, it sucked. I couldn't do anything with it in terms of divination. All I had for answers were a pastiche of rarefied abstractions that told me nothing, left me cold and dry in my search for answers.

When you do something like this, as crazy as it sounds, it teaches you something about what divination really is and why the Yi has lasted for so long. I really recommend it. Try thinking about how you would improve the Yi. You'll be surprised where it takes you.

Lindsay

bradford said:

But something that everybody wants to overlook is the relationship between philosophy and psychology, in the way our attitudes shape our perceptions, and how we philosophize best when we first understand our (often cowardly) motives for doing so. I think the Zhouyi authors had a great handle on this field of study and in fact I would credit them with writing the first psychology text as well as an ethical philosophy.

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Well, I forgot to make my point. When I tried and failed to make my own new and improved divination book - the "Book of Lindsay" - I began to understand what Bradford is saying above. The Yi contains a key to psychological truth that cannot be easily replicated. It is "true" in a way that my concoction was "false", and this "true/false" thing plays out in a psychological arena that is still not very familiar to most of us. I believe this is exactly the quality of the Yi that attracted Carl Jung to the it. Whatever you think of Jung, he was certainly a person who was trying to illuminate dark and dim parts of the human mind. I think divination takes us into those shadowy areas. We barely know how to talk about what we are doing, our language is so saturated with the habit of rational analysis. But we know we are doing something more than making fools of ourselves, deceiving and deluding and excusing ourselves. I would like some of our smart people to talk and think about this in a serious way. I would like to hear what professional thinkers think about what is going on here. I would like some of the experts who are paid to ponder to take a look at something besides the usual, thread-bare philosophical and psychological issues of modernism. So far I have mainly been disappointed in this hope.

Lindsay

Lindsey
You will have noticed from the IMHO thread that I tend to be a bit of a Jungian, and believe that the wisdom that we perceive in the Yijing is mediated by our unconscious minds, the personal and collective unconscious. This process of absorbing experience and transmuting it into some form of "wisdom" happens to everyone who is disposed to be receptive /in tune / meditative or whatever. The beginning of the Yijing was by individuals making sense of life's positive and negative experiences. Those who added to it, added after reflecting on their own experiences.
The Yijing is a collation of such wisdom.
But it has never stopped. All cultures have examples of the same process, although maybe not as sophisticated as the Chinese.
There are sites on the web which encourage people to develop their own oracles. I tried my hand using poetry, drawings and surreal proverbs. (As with all divination some ambiguity allows the unconscious room to work). Much to my surprise it worked fine, and was accurate.
The text is the ingredients, but the mind is the cook.
Enjoy your supper

Bob

lindsay said:

6. main part of alloy: the main metal component in an alloy

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Since you went through the trouble of posting that, I'll throw in some metal structures and matrices and something that I associate, perhaps, with the Yijing:

Windmastätten Patterns

When you do something like this, as crazy as it sounds, it teaches you something about what divination really is and why the Yi has lasted for so long. I really recommend it. Try thinking about how you would improve the Yi. You'll be surprised where it takes you.

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Tell me about it...

lindsay said:

We barely know how to talk about what we are doing, our language is so saturated with the habit of rational analysis. But we know we are doing something more than making fools of ourselves, deceiving and deluding and excusing ourselves. I would like some of our smart people to talk and think about this in a serious way.

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We are quite safe in this environment but, step outside and the "rational cynics" out there will certainly look at us funny. There is a good reason Hogwarts is in a parallel reality... Now, who are the smart people that are supposed to think about this in a serious way? Specially when it is "smart" to avoid certain subjects. People can go to wars in the name of "faith" but most shy away from "ridiculous subjects." It is safer to leave fate to the Providence than to try to figure fate out.

I would like to hear what professional thinkers think about what is going on here. I would like some of the experts who are paid to ponder to take a look at something besides the usual, thread-bare philosophical and psychological issues of modernism. So far I have mainly been disappointed in this hope.

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Most likely they are concerned about loss of income...

Yes, Luis, I know I'm ranting here. I guess I just want somebody to give me a hug and say it's OK to value the Yi. A teddy bear would help, too. Maybe some warm milk and a cookie. I know everyone is doing a good job, and everything that needs to be said is being said, and that this is the best of all possible worlds.

But still ... I can't seem to find a bridge between rational, scientific, critical, analytical thinking and the world of felt experience, intuition, non-rational understanding. I can't seem to resolve this science/religion thing, of which divination is a footnote. I can't even figure out the meaning of life.

Anyway, I was hoping the smart people would pay attention at some point. This divination business isn't rocket science, so why can't we figure it out? Maybe we could figure it out if it was rocket science?

I know, I know. Everybody's going to tell me not to think about it. Just do it.

Lindsay

But still ... I can't seem to find a bridge between rational, scientific, critical, analytical thinking and the world of felt experience, intuition, non-rational understanding. I can't seem to resolve this science/religion thing, of which divination is a footnote. I can't even figure out the meaning of life.

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Hi Lindsay,
There is a lot written about this, just not from the rational science side. Much of what is written on science vs. religion defined science as Newton (and his Whig and Anglican Church fanaticism) vs. the Roman Catholic views (based in mistranslating Aristotle who taught rhetoric using conventional wisdom of Athens in his day). When Darwin published, he was considered a footnote to the real debate between Lyle's Geology and Genesis on the origins of mountains.

Divination is personal and thus subjective. The academic is limited to sources accepted in the University libraries as proper and objective. Ultimately, just different interests. In order to appreciate divination one has to care about including the living individual and their own understanding in one's considerations. The academic traditionally only fully appreciates the published books of deceased authors--how else can you be sure you have their complete body of thought.

There is no limitation in occult literature or practice about science or rational inquiry, although popular celebrity in the field is easier without it. Marc Jones uses his college training in identifying an animal species by a single bone to develop his insights into interpreting horoscopes. We are still waiting upon historians of science to notice how new science theory arises in the early years of a century. Even the established fact that Mendel's genetics work was published in 19th mid-century but first cited in 2 papers in the first years of the 20th century is assumed must result from some unknown improvement in indexing--rather than the realization his work on pure bred seeds became the only laboratory-like result available when the new 20th century rejected natural environments and sought lab purity for expected better results.

That there isn't better academic work on divination is just part of the sad story of most of the current environmental disasters arising from the unnoticed but logically obvious consequences of what was heralded as great technological advances.

Divination serves well for living humans throughout millennia. Other perspectives serve only their own current politics. Beyond the intellectual questions you note is our current reality of solely celebrity marketing. Scientists and journalists now have to maintain a fan base to be credible.

So, do think about the questions you have, just look to your divination for better insights than you will find from objective comments by alleged smart people. Remember, rocket science only involves simple physics in the context of a system of fixed angular momentum. It is only that now we have enough strong propellant to send some bits of toxic trash into orbit to do things the ancients managed by just simple tools and observation. In less than 100 years that will be considered on the same level as medieval medicine and torture as the toxic pollution limits human life and activity and makes the daily weather forecast involve chances of toxic rain this week.

Frank

lindsay said:

Anyway, I was hoping the smart people would pay attention at some point. This divination business isn't rocket science, so why can't we figure it out? Maybe we could figure it out if it was rocket science?

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Lindsay, don't despair. Reality proves, over and over, to be stranger than fiction:

Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?

Of course, for them, "divination" is too metaphysical. Oh, the irony. Like that isn't...

sparhawk said:

...Translators will not ever be able to completely detach themselves from their own contemporary cultural background and their personal understanding of reality ...

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Luis:

Trying the link for Kidder Smith´s «The Difficulty of the Yi Jing» I saw it´s broken, maybe this will function:

The Difficulty of the Yijing, by Kidder Smith © 1993

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~cmedst/gmap/uploaded/The Difficulty of the Yijing.pdf

Fortunately.

Charly