New article

[sergio]

Fresh from professor Liu Dajun's site:
http://zhouyi.sdu.edu.cn/english0/newsxitong/selectedPapers/2009624190743.asp
Sergio

 

[Sparhawk]

Thanks for the link. Interesting stuff.

What do you make of the De La Tours and Dr. Waldo Vieira and their academy down in Brazil? I searched for their names and noticed that they have published several articles in the Center for Zhouyi. This is their place in Brazil: http://www.iacworld.org/

 

[sergio]

Hola Luis;
Thanks for the link.I knew nothing about them,only De La Tour's articles on Liu Dajun's site.
I checked their own site and would like to read/explore more before giving an opinion.Thanks!.
Sergio

 

[cristinabertrand]

About Zhouyi Center

The Zhouyi Center is the most authoritative center of studies of the Yi Jing in China. I just came from Shanghai where I have been for 4 months. The president of the editorial board, Professor Zhang Wenzhi has been the translator of my book: I Ching: Image, Concept and Action which will be published in English and Chinese this coming August by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. I had given several lectures about the Yi Jing in Universities of Shanghai and other public venues. I did my doctoral dissertation about the Yi Jing in the University Complutense of Madrid, Spain in 1987 and now I summarized the dissertation in a book for the general reader. They will present the book in the Book Fair of Shanghai in August and in the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. The Zhouyi Center publishes 4 magazines in English during the year, in the last one they publish the announcement of my cards about the Yi Jing. It is an excellent magazine.

The studies of Yi Jing in China don´t consider the Yi Jing now as a book of divination but a book of wisdom; they study the divination part of the Yi Ching as part of its past use, but the professors I met don´t use the book for that purpose. The methodology I propose in my book is an interactive method in which you yourself look for the chapter which is going to give you the response you are seeking.
If you want to see the Yi Jing paintings and Yi Jing Cards you can go to my website and click in the Yi Jing web in the upper part of the home page.
Cristina Bertrand
www.cristinabertrand.com

 

[Sparhawk]

The studies of Yi Jing in China don´t consider the Yi Jing now as a book of divination but a book of wisdom; they study the divination part of the Yi Ching as part of its past use, but the professors I met don´t use the book for that purpose. The methodology I propose in my book is an interactive method in which you yourself look for the chapter which is going to give you the response you are seeking.
If you want to see the Yi Jing paintings and Yi Jing Cards you can go to my website and click in the Yi Jing web in the upper part of the home page.
Cristina Bertrand
www.cristinabertrand.com

¿Qué tal, Cristina?

Bienvenida!

A couple of months ago, with much delay because I had the link for a while, I posted a link to your site and some announcements about your conference in China.

I'm not surprised formal academia in China, of which the Zhouyi Institute is a part of, sticks to the official party line: i.e. philosophy and wisdom seeking in ancient books is OK, but superstition (divination) is a no-no. It is a very Confucian take on the classic, indeed. If one wants to find the OTHER side of the coin, one must seek the deep Daoist undercurrents that flow through China to this day. They are there.

I subscribe to a number of journals. For example, the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, published by the University of Hawaii, has been a source of superb articles on the Yijing for over thirty years, full of ontology and metaphysics, math and history, but short on serious talk on the divination aspect of the Yijing, because what can't be proven by literary sources and written history is considered un-academic and superstitious and belong to the same drawer as astrology, Tarot and any other mantic arts. Something to sneeze at. Still, I consider the work of modern day "materialist philosophers" of great importance and why I find the articles at the Zhouyi Insitute, and other Journals, so interesting.

Best,

 

[fkegan]

Divination and the Yi

Hi Sergio, Luis and welcome Cristina Bertrand,

Let me first note my remarks in Sergio's other thread in this section " ...yet another order..." about another scholarly order for the I Ching hexagrams as an alternative to the traditional KWS....

As to the Yi as book of Wisdom or book of divination, I would suggest it is both and the view of there being some conflict between the two seems to be a 20th century problem in Chinese belief, as Gia-fu Feng noted that his father spoke to him in the early 20th century about how important it was to study the Western sciences and not just the traditional Chinese knowledge.

However, in reality it is this view of alleged objectivity which is actually medieval superstition. It is based upon Aquinas' mistranslation of the elegant Greek rhetoric of Aristotle as though it were objective philosophy about how the Christian God created the natural Universe.

The word 'scientia' in Latin can be translated by three English words: 1) science 2)knowledge and 3) Book. Thus the Books of Aristotle edited from lecture notes in ancient times became the "sciences" of the medieval Scholastic university curriculum.

One result of that was the assumption that God created the world for the benefit of Christendom and therefore anything inconvenient just needed to be exhausted into God's realm or the Environment to be dealt with by the benevolent Deity.

When the detail that the Planet Earth is a limited globe (or at least glob of Big Bang debris still in explosive expansion) so that things exhausted into the environment started causing big problems, this was a challenge to the medieval Scholastic view, but instead only seen as new problems of the Environment to be solved like other problems by 'modern' science. But 'modern' refers to the moderni or followers of Abelard (CE 1001 to 2000 or Y2K) and the early Medieval monks and that millennium ended abruptly in CE2001.

The hexagrams of the Yi are pure abstract symbolism describing all the possible perceptions of Flux or Change by the human mind. It is a book of Wisdom (cf. my analysis of King Wen Sequence in that other Sergio post or my Flux Tome web page in my signature) and also a book of intimate divination since it reproduces the meaning patterns and capacity of the human brain and its system of synapse relations. Not quite yet in objective science since they have not yet figured out the brain does not operate in language, rather in symbolic patterns like the I Ching which are then put into language as part of the relations between the mind and external perception, communication and relationship.

I was not able to find your web button on your website to see your images. I hope you can check out my website to see my perspective.

I still have fond memories of my summer working as a summer intern in Madrid for the Spanish government land consolidation agency. My boss sent me to see all the lovely cities and then off to Pamplona and on vacation on the grounds he was a summer intern and wanted to tour and not to work hard...

All the best,

Frank