jishengpo 既生魄 jisipo 既死魄 and the seventh day

[peterg]

jishengpo 既生魄 jisipo 既死魄 and the seventh day

''The semantics of po 魄 "white soul" probably originated with 霸 "lunar whiteness". Zhou bronze inscriptions commonly recorded lunar phases with the terms jishengpo 既生魄 "after the brightness has grown" and jisipo 既死魄 "after the brightness has died", which Schuessler explains as "second quarter of the lunar month" and "last quarter of the lunar month". Chinese scholars have variously interpreted these two terms as lunar quarters or fixed days, and (Shaughnessy 1992:136–145) Wang Guowei's lunar-quarter analysis the most likely. Thus, jishengpo is from the 7th/8th to the 14th/15th days of the lunar month and jisipo is from the 23rd/24th to the end of the month. Yü (1987:370) translates them as "after the birth of the crescent" and "after the death of the crescent". Etymologically, lunar and spiritual po < pʰak < *phrâk 魄 are cognate with bai < bɐk < *brâk 白 "white" (Matisoff 1980, Yü 1981, Carr 1985). According to Hu Shih (1946:30), po etymologically means "white, whiteness, and bright light"; "The primitive Chinese seem to have regarded the changing phases of the moon as periodic birth and death of its [po], its 'white light' or soul." Yü (1981:83) says this ancient association between the po soul and the "growing light of the new moon is of tremendous importance to our understanding of certain myths related to the seventh day of the months." Two celebrated examples in Chinese mythology are Xi Wangmu and Emperor Wu meeting on the seventh day of the first lunar month and The Princess and the Cowherd or Qixi Festival held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.''
Thats from etymologies page 3 of 12 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hun_and_po
A great article.I got something out of every paragraph.

Here is an example of jishengpo and jisipo from the ancient texts.
http://ctext.org/shang-shu/successful-completion-of-the-war
Chinese Text Project>Ancient Classics>Shang Shu>Zhou Shu>Successful completion of the war.
I'm not sure about Legge's translation of these characters but if you click on the green 'jump to dictionary' tab, it takes you to a word for word transliteration.The yellow tab takes you to parallel passages.Great research tools.If you click on a single character and then scroll down to the bottom of the page you can search for usage in pre-Qin and Han texts.

 

[peterg]

While researching the hun and po souls I cast 64.4 which is about shake or shock and souls on all sides,the gui fang.I read the CTP Jiaoshi Yilin 64>4 and it was also about souls:
' The icy north..(gui land)..The junzi besieged, surrounded by grief,sadness..and eating grain (guests,a wake?)..Ghost fright at my gate.' Scary.
A few days later news came of the death of an aged neighbour and suddenly there was a lot of funeral activity all around.That same day was very busy, with shock news, guests, VIP visitors, workmen, all at the same time.A shake day.A day when the text comes to life.
Curiously the weather seemed to be matching the occasion.It had been very overcast continuously for a week.About an hour after the funeral the sun broke out suddenly and unexpectedly and stayed out all day, lifting the mood.
Yilin footnote: the parallel passages in the CTP indicate that the vast majority of Yilin texts are repeated, sometimes several times.So there must be significantly less than 4096 poems,in effect.It would be hard work to test them all but I hope to examine a few random hexagrams in detail, to get a clearer idea.