Walden

[pocossin]

Walden was published in 1854, the year Legge began to translate The Changes. Because of Walden's Daoist nature, students of The Changes are, I believe, also likely to be students of Walden. The first eighteen hexagrams are a helpful guide to the contents of Walden.

Like the hexagrams, the chapters of Walden were originally unnumbered, but numbers are needed, and I have added them. Also like the hexagrams, the chapters are a sequence of contrasting pairs that proceed in time order, the whole covering the cycle of the year from one spring to the next.

1. "Economy": principles = Heaven.
2. "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For": place = Earth.
3. "Reading": books as a stimulus to awakening the sleepers = sprouting.
4. "Sounds": trains and cargo, owls, frogs, distant traffic, and other animals heard at Thoreau's house at Walden. The noisy, importuning 'young fool'. Kan = ear, hearing; Ken = persistence, house.
5. "Solitude": being alone as in "Waiting."
6. "Visitors": intruders.
7. "The Bean-Field": The hoe is the weapon against invading weeds.
8. "The Village": 8. Holding Together [Union].
9. "The Ponds": Nature's beauty = Taming Power of the Small.
10. "Baker Farm" : excursions, that is, Treading.
11. "Higher Laws": Peace (human perfection) by balancing heavenly and earthly natures.
12. "Brute Neighbors": contains the Battle of the Ants.
13. "House-Warming": construction of chimney. Hex 13 looks like a chimney.
14. "Inhabitants and Winter Visitors": human, material remains (old home sites, things left after death, signs of visitors) = Possession in Great Measure.
15. "Winter Animals": animal cries and visitors, but no cock or giant Korean hamster.
16. "The Pond in Winter": inspiration from signs of life during the depth of winter = 16. Yu / Enthusiasm.
17. "Spring": The ice begins to break up, or Thunder in the Lake.

"The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature."

"The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes
and prevents their biting."

18. "Conclusion": Tend to matters at home. Explore yourself rather than tour the world. Human potential (health) can overcome the human sickness of social illusions. Ku means sickness, illness, and disease. Whincup translates it as 'Illness'. The first sentence of this chapter is: "To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery."

This relation between Walden and The Changes seems to me to be uncanny. I have not found that Thoreau had any direct experience of The Changes.

Tom

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/roots/hdt-tao.html
Thoreau and Taoism by David T.Y. Ch'en

 

[bradford_h]

My daughter once got me to listen to "Dark Side of the Moon" while watching The Wizaed of Oz with the sound off. Just as uncanny.
Then there's the Ox Herding pictures of Zen Buddhism placed in ascending order on the Qabalah's Tree of Life. Entrainment and convergent evolution I spoze.

 

[candid]

Or diffusion. The Chariot came to China from south-east Europe, for example.

 

[pocossin]

Happy Confucius' Birthday!

"Confucius - A Chinese sage of the sixth century B.C., known for his sayings and parables collected under the title Analects. His teachings gave rise to a sort of secular religion known as Confucianism, which served as a model for the Chinese government in subsequent centuries. Confucius also had a significant effect on the Transcendentalist movement, and was one of Thoreau?s favorite authors."


"Somewhat "Confucingly" to Westerners, the birthday of this sage is celebrated on two separate days. September 28, his birthday in the Western solar calendar, is also known as National Teacher's Day in the Republic of China, in memory of the importance that Confucius placed on learning and scholarship, and his radical populist doctrine that knowledge was the right of everyone, not just the privilege of the aristocracy. His birthday is also marked in the Chinese lunar calendar, however, and falls on the 27th day of the eighth lunar month (between the end of September and the beginning of November)."

Tom

 

[pocossin]

On further inquiry I find that Thoreau might have been familiar with The Changes through the Latin version of Regis published by Mohl in 1834, 'Y-King, antiquissimus Sinarum liber'.

Jules Mohl (Julius von Mohl) was an accomplished orientalist. Some references to Persian literature in Walden may come from Mohl's translations from Persian to French. If so, then it is even more likely that Thoreau was acquainted with the Latin Changes.

Thus, possibly The Changes was the source of the structure of Walden, but did it actually happen? Did Thoreau's trading with the Celestial Empire include modeling Walden on a Confucian classic? I am unable to say until I find out whether he read Mohl's Changes.

If Mohl's Changes were held by either Harvard or Emerson, then Thoreau would likely have read it. Now I need to know if there is any way to determine what was in those libraries.

Why -- so far as I know -- has Mohl's Changes never been discussed in any discussion group?

Tom