http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Explication of the /I Ching/ Portions of /The Invisible Landscape/ by Terence and Dennis McKenna by Jack Rabbit _Background_ My friend Larry knew I was studying the history of the /I Ching/ and Chinese history in general. He asked me to check out the parts of /The Invisible Landscape/ by Terence and Dennis McKenna that deal with the /I Ching/ and let him know what I thought. He said something to the effect of, "I know you're not a big fan of his, but ?" I didn't really want to do it, but I would do just about anything if Larry asked me. So, here I go. I'll try to explain my initial bias even though I know it's impossible for me to do that accurately. My favorite part of the McKennas' book (which I'm going to call "the text") is the quote from Whitehead on page 30: "*Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its chains of reasoning.*" This quote is applicable to the text and my explication. Terence McKenna's work attracted me many years ago because his amazing mixture of brilliance and blarney was sometimes informative, sometimes opaque, but usually highly entertaining. I was nonplussed when he acquired a cult-like following, but I think we all want someone to look up to. Most of our political leaders seem stupid, venal, self-serving. The major religions are totally failing humanity; their followers continue hating and killing one another. Terence McKenna was engaged in what I think were important investigations and offered his unique interpretations as a gift. I became a bit uneasy when, it seemed to me, his adherents began to turn his speculative thinking into some kind of dogma and he became a quasi-religious figure. Unfortunately, he died in 2000 at the young age of 53, from brain cancer. I expected my explicating to be fun, even though I was doing it reluctantly, but almost as soon as I began I started feeling pretty bad about the whole thing. After I was about half finished I told my wife that it wasn't going so well and I didn't want to continue. She suggested that I call Larry and just tell him that. I tried to call him about six or eight times that day, but he wasn't home. Larry and I both like the /I Ching/, so I got out the coins and asked, "What will happen if I finish this and send Larry the results?" I threw a hexagram-it turned out to be #19, /Lin/, with changing fourth and fifth lines, resulting in #58, /Dui/. I turned to Kunst's translation (p. 277). Fourth line-"Wailing to an extreme. No misfortune." Hey, now! I thought there might be some wailing, but it says "no misfortune." Fifth line-"Expertly oversee the great ruler's yi sacrifice to the soil. Auspicious." Hmm. Well, it sounds pretty good. Then I turned to the judgment for #58 (p. 355)-"Treat. A favorable determination." ("Treat" here means sacrifice.) So I decided to finish the explication and send it to Larry. As I continued, I reached a point where my feelings about the text changed, and I thought I finally understood what the author was trying to do. This is all explained below in my explication. Now I'm glad Larry asked me to do it because I learned so much about the /I Ching/, about calendars, about Chinese history, and about Cosmic Pranksters. Also, in the process I acquired three more versions of the /I Ching/ to aid in my research, and I became acquainted with the awesome work of Joseph Needham and with the /Cambridge History of Ancient China/. It will be easier for me to explicate our text if we have some information in common to begin with. It isn't really controversial stuff, but all of it isn't necessarily "true." Future archeological findings may require us to revise our current ideas. First is a traditional chart of the Chinese dynasties that will be mentioned. The time frames will be helpful. The Chinese empire was unified by the first Qin emperor, Qin Shih Wang Ti. The Shang and Zhou kingdoms were historically important local powers in northeastern China that later Chinese historians claimed as predecessors of the Chinese empire, not dynasties that ruled China (however, in their prime the Western Zhou controlled a large part of north central and northeastern China). Neolithic Age -- ends circa 2000 BC with Qijia bronzes Xia Dynasty -- ?? - c. 1700 BC legendary Shang (Yin) Dynasty -- c. 1700 -- c. 1100 BC historical age begins with oracle bones c. 1200 BC Zhou (Chou) Dynasty -- c. 1100 - c. 249 BC Western Zhou -- c. 1100 -- 722 BC Spring and Autumn Period -- 722--481 BC Warring States Period -- 403--222 BC Qin (Chhin) Dynasty -- 221 - 206 BC Han Dynasty -- 206 BC - 220 AD Western (Early) Han -- 206 BC - 8 AD Hsin -- 9 - 23 AD Eastern (Later) Han -- 25 - 220 AD ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chin Dynasty -- 265 - 420 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tang Dynasty -- 618 - 907 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Song Dynasty -- 960 - 1279 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ming Dynasty -- 1368 - 1664 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Qing Dynasty -- 1644 - 1912 Shang Oracle Bones In the late 1890's a farmer discovered some strange bones with inscriptions on them, which turned out to be relics from the Shang dynasty. The Shang used a divination method wherein the diviner heated a poker and applied it to shoulder bones of cattle or buffalo (different accounts) or to the bottom part of a turtle shell (the plastron). This produced a crack, and from it the king, and only the king, deduced the answer to his question (Keightly, in Loewe and Shaughnessy, p.247). The fullest inscriptions include the date, diviner's name, topic, prediction, and verification of the prediction (Shaughnessy, p. 3). Over two hundred thousand of these have been found so far (Keightly, in Loewe and Shaughnessy, p.237). They have provided scholars with a large amount of information about the development of the written Chinese language and about Shang customs, astronomy, religious observances, etc., from the somewhat peculiar perspective of the ruler's need for divinations. The Shang may have learned this divination method from some northern neighbors, the Zhukaigou people (di Cosmo, page 899). The Zhou began using it after their conquest of the Shang and continued to do so, often in conjunction with the yarrow-stalk /I Ching/ method, throughout their history. This story is recounted in many books. Needham (1,2,3) and Allan have lots of material dealing with the subject. The most up-to-date and complete information about the Shang (and the Zhou) that I've seen is in Loewe and Shaughnessy, /The Cambridge History of Ancient China/, 1999. Scholars continue to look for correspondences between the oracle bones and the /I Ching/, but they seem to be separate traditions. Calendars It's important to understand a few things about calendars. I can imagine our ancestors looking at the skies for tens of thousands of years, trying to understand their situation, starting absolutely from scratch. Dark at night, cold in winter. Lights moving across the sky. Only their senses and minds. No writing, no math. People are so amazing! The following information about calendars is general knowledge. It's on the Internet in various places and in encyclopedias and books. I learned it from different sources, mainly Needham (3 pp. 390-436), Bodde (pp. 26-34), Rutt (p. 20), and Yabuuti (pp. 91-103) and various Internet sites. The purpose of a calendar is to predict seasons, to synchronize the affairs of man with the sun and moon. As human knowledge has increased, knowledge of astronomical cycles has been refined and calendars have become more and more accurate. I can't find any record of a calendar being succeeded by a less accurate calendar, or of any super-accurate lost calendars; it makes no sense to think that people would change to a less accurate calendar. People aren't that stupid. By Neolithic, or Stone Age times (these "ages" are broad archeological generalizations; the Neolithic lasted until people began working metal in the Bronze Age-this occurs at different times in different cultures), it appears that people almost everywhere understood the solar, or tropical, year to be approximately 365.25 days long and lunar cycles to be about 29.5 days long. The length of the year can be derived easily once the solstices are known, and the lunar cycle is easy to observe. From the Shang oracle bones we know that those people figured these numbers out to 365.25 and 29.53 (Needham 3, p. 293 and 392). The problem for the calendar maker is that there are an uneven number of lunar cycles in a solar year, roughly 12.3 (I did the math myself, by hand, 365 divided by 29.5). If you want to keep track of the lunar cycle and the sun cycle, and be able to predict (so important for agricultural people and for religious ceremonies), you need two calendars. The way most people did this was to have lunar years of 12 lunar months, which made them lose about 11 days a year to the solar calendar. Then every two or three years they would insert an extra (intercalary), thirteenth month into the lunar calendar so it would coincide better with the solar calendar. (12 lunar months of 29.53 days gives a lunar year of 354.36 days, and 13 lunar months would be 383.89 days; I admit, I figured this out with my own pencil). Then, when people became able to keep good records for long periods of time they noticed that 19 solar years almost exactly equaled 235 lunar cycles (there is an approximate two-hour difference). This means, for example, if the moon is full on the summer solstice, the next time this will happen will be 19 years later, and the previous time it happened was 19 years earlier. It also means that if you usually have 12 lunar months in your lunar year, and you insert seven intercalary months during any 19-year period, your calendars will be pretty good (12 x 19 = 228, + 7 = 235). Of every 19 lunar years, then, 12 will have 12 lunar months and seven will have 13 lunar months. And if you make extremely accurate observations over very long periods of time, you will realize that adding one day every 222 years will give you an exceptionally precise calendar. This is very powerful knowledge. 19 years is called the Metonic cycle or period, because Meton of Athens is credited with being the first to discover it, around 432 BC (Needham 3, p.406). In China there is evidence from oracle bones indicating the Shang were aware of this cycle about eight centuries earlier (Needham 3, p.407). At least as far back as Shang times the Chinese were using the method described above of inserting an intercalary month into the lunar calendar as needed, to keep it more or less in tune with the solar calendar. Originally they added a thirteenth month at the end of the year, but "by the end of the dynasty and throughout the Zhou period intercalary months seem to have been interpolated into the year after any month that had drifted thirty days out of its proper placement in the tropical year"(Shaughnessy, in Loewe and Shaugnessy, pp. 19-20). It was up to the king to decide when to do it, with certain restrictions. Needham says, "? the promulgation of the luni-solar calendar (li) in China was the numinous cosmic duty of the imperial ruler" (/Time and Eastern Man/, p. 232). The Chinese continued this way until the "Grand Inception" calendar reform of the Han in 104 BC (Yabuuti, p. 91, 95). Then they began proscribing when the seven months would be inserted during the 19 years (spread out as evenly as possible, every two or three years). To further complicate matters, at least since Shang times the Chinese have used six ten-day weeks in a 60-day cycle that runs independently of the solar and lunar years (Keightley, in Loewe and Shaughnessy, p. 250; Needham, /Time and Eastern Man/, p. 232). Each of the 60 days has a distinct name. In the first century B.C. the Han began applying these names to years, also, thereby coming up with 60-year cycles with no astronomical correlation (Needham, 2, p. 396). The Chinese today still use their lunar calendar with its seven intercalary months every 19 years and their solar calendar and their 60-day and 60-year cycles. They also use the western, Gregorian calendar for many purposes, including international affairs. If you would like to know more about the Chinese calendar, I urge you to visit Dr. Helmer Aslaksen's excellent site at http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/calendar/chinese.shtml *The Historical /I Ching/* Some general information about the book known as the /I Ching/, or /Yijing/, will be useful. The word /I/ (/Yi/) is ambiguous-it can mean "change" or "easy"; Ching means "classic book." The heart of what we call the /I Ching/ consists of 64 "hexagrams," sets of six horizontal lines. Two types of lines are used, straight lines and lines broken in two. (64 is the number of different six-line sets that can be produced using two different types of lines: 2 to the 6th power = 64.) Traditional analysis breaks each hexagram into two three-line "trigrams"; there are 8 different trigrams (2 to the 3rd power = 8). The Chinese word for hexagram and trigram is /gua/ /(kua/). Needham (2, p. 309) says the written form, or graph, for /gua/ originally meant a tablet; more recent scholarship notes that it is a combination of the graph for baton (sometimes mistakenly translated as "tablet") and the graph for divination, and "?seems originally to have meant yarrow-wand divination" (Rutt, pp. 102, 295). Then, each hexagram is accompanied by a statement pertaining to the hexagram as a whole and statements corresponding to each of the six lines. The line statements can have from one to four parts from among the following: an observation or omen of some sort, a comment on that, a prediction, and an observation on the prediction (see Rutt, pp. 132-134). In the Wilhelm version, this material is in Book I (along with the Third and Fourth Wing, which are sections of the commentary--see below; Wilhelm and some others call this commentary the "Image"). This core material--the hexagrams, hexagram statements, and line statements--is known as the "/Zhouyi/", which in English means the "Changes of Zhou" or "Easy Zhou." No one knows just how old this material is. I'll be using the phrase "/Zhouyi/" to refer to this material, that is, the /I Ching/ without the "Confucian" commentaries (see below). It's not possible to assign a date to the hexagrams themselves. The system could very well be older than recorded history. Recent studies of the archeological evidence indicate that originally a series of six numbers, even and odd, may have been used, and that the straight and broken line system may have developed in the Warring States period (Harper, in Loewe and Shaughnessy, pp. 852-860). If this is verified, it would lend credence to the notion that the received, or King Wen, sequence (see below) is also a Warring States development. Kunst, who seems to be pretty rigorous academically, thinks the text of the /Zhouyi/ grew organically over a period of many centuries, perhaps millennia, as it was used by the diviners who used the yarrow plant to obtain oracles" (Kunst, p. 4). Most scholars agree that it was compiled during the Western Zhou period, about 800 BC (Kunst, p. 4), or, less precisely, 700-800 BC (Needham 2, p. 307). This dating is done by comparing the vocabulary, place names, and historical figures mentioned in the text with other texts and with archeological evidence such as inscriptions on bronzes. The next layer is what is called the Ten Wings, commentaries on the system that apparently were written at various times from the Warring States period through the Han dynasty. These are dated by comparing the language used in them and the concepts discussed in them with other texts from those same years. They are sometimes called the Confucian commentaries, although intellectual sparring continues as to whether or not Confucius had a hand in any of them (see Peterson, pp. 72-79, for a review of these arguments). Sometimes they are called the Han commentaries and sometimes just the Commentaries. In the Wilhelm version the Ten Wings are in Books II and III, except that the Third Wing is spread throughout Book I as well as Book III. The outer layer would be a commentary on the core text and often the Ten Wings, too, by translators, philosophers, or anyone who is interested. I have 13 different versions of the /I Ching/ and I like them all. Most of them don't contain the Ten Wings, just the /Zhouyi/ and a commentary. Each translation and commentary reflects the time of its writing and the psyche of its author. Lately I've been enjoying /The Fortune Teller's/ /I Ching/ by Kwok Man Ho /et al/. There are a number of classic Chinese commentaries. An early influential one is that by Wang Bi (226-249 AD), available in English in a beautiful volume translated and annotated by Richard Lynn (see bibliography). Other historically influential commentaries were written during the Song dynasty by Cheng Yi (1033-1107) and during the Ming dynasty by Hu Guang (1370-1418) (Rutt, p. 41). These commentaries are interesting to scholars because of what they reveal about philosophical and political thought in those eras. The best-known western translation and commentary is Wilhelm's; this version is largely responsible for the popularization of the /I Ching/ in the west. The /Zhouyi/ and the Ten Wings were explained to him in Chinese by Lao Naixuan and he carefully translated this into German (Rutt, p. 76). Lao was a scholar in the Song dynasty tradition; his interpretation follows this tradition as modified during the Qing dynasty to reflect the " Kangxi emperor's fascination with /Yijing/ as a moral and political guide" (Rutt, pp. 40-41,48-49, 76-79). Wilhelm introduces his own German Protestant theological background into the mix, especially in his lengthy, moralizing commentaries. Wilhelm's book, written from 1913-23, was published in German in 1924. At Karl Jung's urging, Cary Baynes translated it into English (it was she who decided to use the terms "trigrams" and "hexagrams" in place of Wilhelm-Lao's /zeichen/, "sign"; James Legge had used these terms in his 1882-88 English translation). Her translation was first published in 1950. (This information is in Rutt, pp. 76-78, p. 467, n.85.) So the Wilhelm/Baynes version is a translation of a translation, and is really the Lao/Wilhelm/Baynes version. The version of the /I Ching/ that has been used in China since the Han times "? is believed to have been collated by Liu Xiang (79-08 BC), and is associated with the name of the guwen commentator Fei Zhi (c50 BC - AD 10)?" (Rutt, p. 39) (guwen means "old script"). This version is called the "received" version, or the Kangxi version (because in the Qing Dynasty the Kangxi emperor ordered it published in an official version in 1715)(Rutt, p. 40). All the western translations that I know of are based on it, including Wilhelm's, except Shaughnessy's, which is discussed below. On the other hand, according to a history book written in 635 AD during the Tang dynasty, the /Jinshu/, or /History of the Jin/ (Chin) Dynasty, in 279 AD a copy of the /I Ching/ was found in the grave of King Xiang of Wei, who died in 296 BC, and it was identical to the received version (paraphrased from Shaughnessy, p.18). Apparently this copy is no longer extant. This is the earliest date I can find associated with the received version. (Chinese history is often contradictory-part of its charm.) In the received version the hexagrams appear in a certain order sometimes called the "King Wen" sequence, or, nowadays, the "received" sequence. King Wen was the father of King Wu, founder of the Zhou dynasty. There's no way to trace the received sequence to King Wen (c. 1050 B.C.) but it is the oldest known sequence; if we accept the report from the /Jinshu/ in the preceding paragraph, we can say it dates back to some time prior to 296 BC. By the way, Ma Rong (79-166 AD) is credited with the story saying that King Wen invented the line statements and the Duke of Zhou, another of King Wen's sons and therefore King Wu's brother, invented the hexagrams statements (Rutt, p. 39). Needham (2, p. 306) says, "?now no one would maintain that either King Wen or the Duke of Chou (Zhou) had anything to do with the book." From 175 to183 AD the Han emperor had a different /I Ching/ version, one compiled by Jing Fang (77-37 BC), carved into stone (Pirazolli-t'SerStevens, p.198; Rutt, p. 38.). Only about twenty per cent of it has been recovered (Shaughnessy, p. 286, n.2). Rutt (p. 102) says that the hexagrams in this version are in the received sequence. Whincup (p. 18) is not as specific, but he does say that this version is closer to the received version than the Mawangdui manuscript is (see below). The only obvious basis for the received sequence is that each hexagram is paired with its inversion. In those cases where a hexagram doesn't change when inverted, the pairs are formed by changing all the straight lines into broken lines and vice versa. In this way all 64 hexagrams are paired up. Speculation continues as to the reasons for the sequencing of the hexagrams within each pair and the overall ordering of the 32 pairs. Some amazing mathematical properties, including many magic squares, can be found in the received sequence if the hexagrams are converted into binary numbers (broken line = 0, straight line = 1). Then they are arranged in an eight by eight chart using the received sequence, starting with Hexagram 1 in the top right corner, working across the top in sequence to Hexagram 8 in the top left corner. The next row begins again at the right and runs from Hexagram 9 to 16, and the process continues in this manner for the remaining hexagrams, putting Hexagram 64 in the bottom left. These properties seem to have been noticed first by Immanuel Olsvanger, publishing in 1948; Needham (2, pp.342-343) mentions them but is skeptical about them for two reasons: first, because he finds these mathematical properties strained, and second, because although the predilection of the ancient Chinese for magic squares is well known (Needham 3, pp.55-60), no record exists showing that the ancient Chinese were acquainted with binary numerals. These properties are thoroughly discussed and demonstrated in Rutt (pp.108 -113), along with similar discoveries by Robert Thacker, who published in 1993, and could be the rationale behind the received sequence. Rutt also shows here that if certain relationships that exist between this binary number sequence and the material in Section IX of the Fifth Wing had been known to Needham, he might not have been so skeptical. If these properties are accidental effects of the order, it's quite a coincidence. I think this stuff is great! Rutt (pp.113-114) also mentions in less detail a theory developed along these lines by Francois Ropars, publishing in 1991, who attempts to show that this order can be attributed to the Zhou court. Incidentally, I really like Rutt's book, very readable and by far the most comprehensive I've seen on the history of the /I Ching/. There are many interesting sequences of the hexagrams. Thomas Cleary, a prolific translator of Chinese Taoist and Buddhist texts, says "? the esoteric mandalas associated with the /I Ching/ and its inner teachings are said to originate among the Taoist methodologists (/fang shi/) of the Han dynasty," and proceeds in his book to discuss some of these mandalas and the interesting sequences they produce (Cleary, p. 1). In 1973 Chinese archeologists working at a site called Mawangdui unearthed a copy of the /I Ching/ on silk, buried in 168 BC. Naturally /I Ching/ scholars around the world were excited. The Chinese published the text in 1984. Edward Shaughnessy (1996) has translated it in a fascinating book, with notes on the differences between it and the received version. There are five sections of commentary that are not in the received Ten Wings, including one purportedly by Confucius explaining why he changed his mind about the /I Ching/. This discovery has rekindled the debate mentioned above over the extent of Confucius' involvement with the Ten Wings. The sequence in the Mawangdui manuscript is totally different than the one we are familiar with; it's based on trigram order rather than complementary pairs. Although this was buried about 150 years or so before Liu Siang is believed to have assembled the received version (see above), there is enough evidence to convince scholars that the received sequence preceded the Mawangdui sequence. The main reason is that in the commentaries found at Mawangdui, the hexagrams are discussed in pretty much the received order (Shaughnessy, p. 18). I haven't been able to find a reference to an "original" _sequence_, because there is no possible way to know what it might be (Rutt, p.117). The received _sequence_ is the oldest known at this writing. Who knows what further archeological discoveries will reveal? This concludes the preliminary section. *BIBLIOGRAPHY * *COMMENTS? * *BACKGROUND* *EXPLICATION * *HOME *