As a book studying the nature of change, Zhou Yi has always been known as the ancestor of the Ten Thousand Classics, and its main role is mostly used for deduction. For ordinary people, it is guided by its profound philosophy. The book has derived many famous sentences that have been circulated for thousands of years, such as "Tianxingjian, a gentleman who never ceases to improve himself", and there are also mysterious and mysterious recipes that have made posterity argue endlessly for more than two thousand years, such as "The number of great Yan is fifty, and its use is forty with nine", the former is familiar with encouraging future generations to imitate the Heavenly Dao and never stop. But the meaning of the latter is confusing, but although there is no standard answer, the reference answer is enough to make people reminisce.
The controversy over the "number of great Yan" is roughly based on the Qin and Han dynasties as the dividing point, and there was no relevant controversy about the "number of great Yan" before the pre-Qin, and the Qin and Han dynasties have been very popular since then. It was not mentioned in the ancient books related to easy learning, which inexplicably gave rise to the feeling of why 1 + 1 equals 2 is also never mentioned in mathematics. It seems that this is a basic truth that is easy to learn, and there is no need to explain it at all. Especially in traditional culture, advanced learning seems to be passed on from heart to mouth and is always in the hands of a few people.
The most significant era of cultural faults is between the Qin and Han dynasties, the sons and hundreds of families do not return to Confucianism, the study of easy learning is very few people, and then after the chaos of the world at the end of the Qin, most of the easy learning has been ancient, and later exclusive confucianism, easy learning has become a secret. Later generations can only explore this "great number" of ancient common sense through residual data. In the final sense, it is indeed the common sense deduced from the I Ching. The ancients mostly divided into two kinds, namely Bu and Zheng, the former using turtle shells and the latter using yarrow. The use of only fifty yarrows has become a common sense that has not changed for thousands of years, and the fifty here and the "fifty of the great yan" are the same meaning, and before the deduction begins, one of the fifty yarrows should be taken out of the fifty yarrows and shelved, and the remaining forty-nine yarrows are the second half of the sentence "It is used forty out of nine".
The "shelved" yarrow did not participate in the entire deduction process, it seems that it did not participate in the next deduction, but all the changes caused by it, so most of the ancients believed that what it symbolized was tai chi. At the beginning of Tai Chi, it is a constant and static state, and after Tai Chi is gone, the balance is broken to give birth to two instruments, and after the two instruments move, all things are produced, which is the same as Lao Tzu's saying of "three births and all things". Some people also understand it as a glimmer of life, they think that there are fifty avenues of heaven and earth, but only forty-nine people can walk, and think that this representative variable that has gone away is the variable that people often say that "people are not as good as heavenly calculations" in "doing their best and obeying the destiny of heaven". The remaining one is a danger for those who have already succeeded, and a life force for those who have repeatedly failed. However, knowing its dangers and not committing crimes is also a vitality, so this "one" that has passed away is a glimmer of life left by the Heavenly Dao to all things.
It is worth mentioning that in recent years, some scholars have found that the number of cell divisions in the human body will not exceed fifty, whether it is normal division in the body or stimulated division in vitro, they seem to remember that their division times are fifty and end. This inevitably makes people wonder why the ancients thousands of years ago could conclude that "the number of great yan is fifty", and why fifty yarrows can deduce the law of the rise and fall of people in the operation of heaven and earth? So is man's life in the same order as fatalism in these forty-nine yarrows? It is gratifying that as long as we imitate the Heavenly Dao, although these questions are still incomprehensible, the disappearance of the Heavenly Dao makes us always have unlimited possibilities.