Text/Jiang Tianjian
In the northwest of the Sanyang River in Qin'an County, Tianshui City, Gansu Province, there is an inconspicuous small earth mountain called Guatai Mountain. The relative height of the mountain is only two hundred meters, and the shape of the mountain is like an upside-down bowl, unlike the bare mountain next to it, which is planted with pines along the south-facing slopes. The Wei River at the foot of the mountain takes a huge S-bend in the Sanyang River, dividing the nearly oval Sanyang river basin into two halves, like a natural Taiji diagram. Guatai Mountain is located in this natural Taiji diagram fish eye. According to legend, this is the place where Fu Xi made gossip.
In the autumn of 2019, I had the honor to accompany Mr. Ouyang Weicheng, a famous contemporary Yi scholar and mathematics educator, to visit Guantai Mountain. From the halfway up the mountainside parking lot to the mountain there are steep two or three hundred steps, Mr. 85 years old, the figure is like a tiger, vibrating straight up, did not make a moment of stay, calm and relaxed, a relaxed. At the top of the hill, there is a not-so-large flat land, on which there is a view, and the main hall enshrines the first ancestors of Chinese humanities, known as fuxi temple. The temple was built in the Ming Dynasty, destroyed and then rebuilt; the courtyard is planted with a number of ancient cypresses, and under the shade there is an inscription of the "Record of the Fuxi Temple on Guatai Mountain" written by Mr. Huo Songlin, a village sage. There are Taoist priests on duty in the temple, the incense is cold, and there are few tourists.
Standing at the top of The Guantai Mountain, we looked far away, the barren mountains were surrounded by barren mountains, and the fields at the bottom of the mountains were crisscrossed, and the houses looked like houses; the east side of the mountain was the Tianwei Highway, the west was the Longhai Railway, and the Wei River snaked to the southeast and disappeared at the end of the sky of the clouds steaming xiawei. The wind objects under the four are immersed in the earthy yellow tone, quiet and thick, and there is an inexplicable desolation, which is very different from the kind of spiritual beauty in Jiangnan. But this humble land is where the gossip and the I Ching came in, which so profoundly shaped the spirit of our nation, just as the Vedas were to India and the Temple of Delphi to Western Europe. "What is seen is for the sake of true vision." The beauty of the mountains and rivers can be appreciated by everyone who is immersed in sensibility and has a slight aesthetic ability; but the inner cultural spirit requires a certain historical accumulation, and only after the careful regurgitation of tourists can they appreciate insight. Guatai Mountain belongs to the latter.
Bagua is a relic as old as the history of our national civilization, and it is a distant and clear shadow left by the ancient ancestors to future generations. In ancient myths and legends, Fuxi and Nuwa gave birth to the Chinese ancestors together, who were snake-headed, intelligent and astute, and similar to the Egyptian Sphinx. Whether there are really people or not is not the key to the problem, because all the ancient civilizations in the world have similar origin legends. But pottery excavated from the Dadiwan Cultural Site, which is more than 20 kilometers away from Guantai Mountain and has lasted for 4,000 years, can prove that it is indeed the birthplace of China's oldest civilization.
Teacher Ouyang told me that Bagua is also called Bagjing Gua, and Shao Yong called it Innate Bagua, which is the basis of the I Ching. "Zhou Yi ZhiXia" Yun: "The ancient King of the Bao Clan, Tianxia Ye, looked up at the heavens and looked down at the law on the earth; the birds and beasts were written and the earth was appropriate; the near body, far away from all things, so he began to make gossip, with the virtue of the gods, with the love of all things." "At the time of the Shang Zhou Dynasty, King Wen of Zhou expanded the deduction of bagua into sixty-four gua; after the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty, the court set up a special divination officer, and successively recorded some classic divination words after each guaxiang, which became the gua yao ci, which is the main content of the I Ching. Later, many well-known and unknown scholars, including Confucius, made various annotations and commentaries on the I Ching, for the Yi Chuan; the I Ching and the Yi Chuan combined are the Zhou Yi. Judging from the book unearthed from the Mawangdui Han Tomb, the "Zhou Yi" has taken shape by the early years of the Western Han Dynasty at the latest, and the main content is no different from the "Zhou Yi" we read today. According to the Eastern Han Dynasty classicist Zheng Xuan, before the Zhou Yi, there were also Lianshan Yi and Guizang Yi, but they had been scattered.
Although it is estimated that at least a thousand years have elapsed since Bagua and the I Ching were finally written, given that Bagua and the I Ching have been so closely integrated, we have to regard it as one: Gua is not separated from Yi, and Yi is not separated from Gua. The Zhou Yi is known as the first of the Qunjing, and for more than two thousand years, the annotated works have been abundant and numerous. However, the nature of the book "Zhou Yi" is still cloudy and foggy.
The dry wind, with the smell of the earth, shakes the low pines on the mountainside. The warm sunlight, through the smoke and dust of history, left a mottled shadow on this slightly barren mound. Except for the occasional car driving down the hill, the land is as quiet and serene as it was thousands of years ago. I wondered to myself, what kind of purpose and inspiration did the ancestors create such a mysterious and wonderful system in the state of existence of the blue wisps of the road and the calloused hands and feet?
True freedom is the grasp of necessity. Whether it is an individual or a group, on the road to freedom, we must first grasp the object, and at the same time, we must grasp ourselves. Almost all peoples at the beginning of civilization did not create "gods" one or the other, hoping to achieve their goals and influence the world through the worship, sacrifice, and dialogue of gods. Of course, this god is also divided into two kinds, one is the god of will, that is, the "god" is conceived as a kind of being who can control nature but has the same joys, sorrows, emotions and desires as human beings themselves, which generally leads to superstition, which will cause people to eventually become servants or slaves of "god" on the road to profit and freedom, which is the case in Indian Brahmanism; and the other imagines "god" as a kind of cold and ruthless universal necessity, which will lead to deism and indirectly awaken the rational instinct of human beings. The Yi Gua founded and developed by Fu Xi and King Wen of Zhou belonged to the latter. The rational spirit of the I Ching, through the mediation of Lao Tzu and Confucius, has formed the basic character of Chinese culture that emphasizes history, reproduction and practice.
The Zhou Yi has long been considered to be the Book of Divination, and Yi Gua was indeed originally used for divination. But why can Zhou Yi be used for divination? There is a general answer in the "Genealogy and Upload": "Yi is accurate with heaven and earth, so it can militate the way of heaven and earth, look up to astronomy, and look down at geography, which is the reason why it is known and clear." The original anti-final, so know the theory of death and life. As for why Yi can be "in line with heaven and earth", there is no further explanation here. In essence, divination is also a way of judgment and doubt, even the most important way in the case of extremely scarce human scientific knowledge reserves. And any judgment, whether correct or not, must involve "yes" or "no." The roles of yang and yin in bagua are similar to the affirmations and denials in propositional judgments. Whether it is the Eight Classics or the Sixty-Four Gua that developed later, it is actually a model of event factor analysis, the Eight Classics is a three-factor analysis model, and the Sixty-four Gua is a six-factor analysis model. According to the purpose of divination, the advantage or disadvantage of each factor is expressed in the model as yang or yin. Without the subjective mind, the heavens and the earth are nothing but chaos, and the so-called "God has no direction and is easy to have no body." That is to say, for an observer, the visible sensibility is cut using the empirical intuitive forms of time and space, and then the individual things can be clearly "yes". The curiosity of the I Ching does not dwell on the question of the nature of individual things, directly ignores the specific distinctions, and quickly makes all appearances highly abstract, directly expressed in yin and yang. This is very different from the Western concept of subject-object separation, which uses quantity and quality to define existence, and the judge of the I Ching is "the present" rather than the "observer", and focuses on the relationship between things in a way that is isomorphic image thinking between heaven and man (yin and yang are not concepts but images). It is from this unique way of understanding the world that it is possible to achieve "Yi" and "Heaven and Earth". This kind of analogous image thinking has become the basic characteristic of our Chinese thinking.
Through the different arrangements and combinations of yin and yang, Yi Gua has formed a basic model of the development of sixty-four things, and has been given various meanings and interpretations. In fact, if you change the six-factor model to eight factors or nine factors or more, it is not impossible. Later generations of Yi scholars have indeed made this attempt. As such an important classic, the I Ching has been studied by countless people for more than two thousand years. These studies can be roughly divided into four categories, one is to regard the "I Ching" of the Gua Xiang, The Position, gua change, etc. as a system of axioms; trying to explain the way of everything in the universe contained in it, and developing the science of elephant numbers; the second type regards the "I Ching" as the study of the righteousness of philosophical books, borrowing the subtle meaning of the "Yi" to express the spiritual blocks in their hearts; the third type is the precept school that has emerged in modern times, trying to treat it only as an important ancient document, cleaning up and restoring it from the perspective of archaeology and philology The fourth school is the scientific school, which originated in the 1940s, mainly to attach some important modern Western natural science theories to the Zhou Yi; it is believed that some major natural science advances in modern times are closely related to the Zhou Yi, such as the binary system and the computer language based on the binary system, the study of the biological genetic code, chaos theory, dissipative structure theory, etc. have been inspired by the ideas of the Zhou Yi" (for details, see Ouyang Weicheng in the "Zhou Yi New Solution"). Combined with his profound mathematical skills and decades of dedicated research, Professor Ouyang Weicheng has created a new school of easy-to-learn research, that is, the mode of thinking. He believed that gua was the prototype of a Boolean vector in modern higher algebra, and that the easy gua was equivalent to the six-dimensional Boolean vector. "The two are not only structurally isomorphic, but also arise for the same reasons—the two states of things are represented by symbols, and the functions used are the same—and the nature of things is judged." Gua and Boolean vectors are essentially two-and-one things. Mr. Ouyang believes that Yi Gua is a unique mathematical model of all things in ancient China, and based on this, he has developed a set of mathematical operations with Yi Gua, which can not only solve general mathematical problems, but also solve some difficult Olympic number competition problems in a concise way. Until the age of eighty, he was one of the final judges in the algebra of the High School Mathematics Olympiad in Hunan Province. He has written a series of books such as "Zhou Yi New Solution", "Yi Gua - A Mathematical Model of Everything", and "Easy to Learn from the Perspective of Thinking Mode". His research was highly affirmed by the philosopher Zhang Dainian and he personally wrote a preface to the "Zhou Yi New Solution", in which he pointed out Ouyang's Yixue research: "There is a reason for holding on to it, and it is true that it has become a family's words."
Thought is the fruit of language, and language is the bud of thought. Needless to say, the mathematical ideas contained in Yi Gua are indeed equivalent to Boolean algebras, but this mathematical idea was not conscious until Western mathematics spread to China. Due to the lack of support of the deductive logic system based on axioms and concepts, this kind of thinking has been clamped down by "elephant thinking", and has not been able to be stereotyped and developed, and has been in a latent state, unable to move from the individual to the universal. Just as Shang Gao in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty already knew about the three strands, four strings and five strings, he could not elevate this empirical knowledge to express it as a +b = c in the Pythagorean way.
This holistic, analogous image thinking of the I Ching was perfectly sufficient in the agrarian era, and from the level of daily experiential life, it was not inferior to the conceptual formal logical thinking that originated in the West. Moreover, from the perspective of survival theory, it does not separate heaven and man, alienate life, and help Chinese civilization to find a basis for settling down in this world, although this view of life is more focused on groups rather than individuals. What we in China are called the land of poetry is not unrelated to this dominant elephant thinking. Art is an individual sexual innuendo about the universal essence. The I Ching's guaxiang is such a meaningful system of implications, and Zhuangzi's verse: "Heaven and earth are born with me, and all things are one with me" can be seen as the best commentary on this spirit. From this, there were beautiful poetry and paintings like the literati of all generations.
However, after entering the industrialized society, we should also fully reflect on the limitations of this analogous image thinking: we are satisfied with what we see and like, and we have not been able to establish a super-sensory conceptual world based on concepts, judgments, and reasoning, so we cannot use the axiomatic system to carry out long-range reasoning, so in Chinese civilization, mathematics has not achieved the status of an independent discipline, which is the most fundamental reason why quantitative modern science cannot be born in China; for this kind of analogy image thinking, Mo Jia, who focuses on logical discernment, wrote in "Mozi. It is pointed out sharply that "it is a word of remoteness, scrounging, and aid, which varies from line to deed, turns to danger, is far away and lost, and is displaced and loses its roots, it must not be untried, and it cannot be used often." In 2004, Professor Yang Zhenning also pointed out at a seminar that it was the I Ching that hindered the development of Chinese science, but unfortunately Professor Yang only gave a sentimental description of this, and failed to explain the deeper reasons.
The influence of analogous elephant thinking on Chinese civilization is far more than that. This kind of philosophical isomorphism of heaven and man, while having the advantages of "unity of heaven and man" and "people and things", has also created a kind of historical cycle theory, which is embodied in the historical process of China, that is, after the Qin and Han Dynasties, China's history has entered a kind of successive dynastic divisions and replacements at the same level, only experienced parallel accumulation, and no breakthrough and transcendence in essence, but also due to the continuous strengthening of autocracy, the spirit of the elite class is trapped in the cage of power and morality, and it has become increasingly mediocre and cowardly after the Yuan ming. Therefore, in modern times, we will be keen on tree arches, benchmarks, industrial Science Daqing, Agricultural Science Dazhai.
Of course, this may be an unnecessary harsh rebuke to the I Ching. A generation has a generation's mission, the ancestors of the ancients only have the responsibility to solve the problems they face and carry out theoretical abstraction, as for the creation of a philosophical system of thought suitable for modern industrial and commercial society is the responsibility of our descendants, there is no once and for all, cure the disease of the idea of medicine. Our introspection is the beginning of this creation. The introduction of Western philosophy and natural science in recent times, and the popularization of education in different disciplines are the proper meaning of this process, which is also the key to China's gradual rise in the past hundred years. "Although the zhou is an old state, its life is renewed." Specific to the "I Ching" itself, with the development of modern information technology, it is already possible for people to overcome various limitations by expanding the dimension, so that the model of Yi Gua, which is like a quasi-universal, can truly complete the fine description and transcendence of the real world in the virtual world.
At the same time, the I Ching is also the starting point of the mainland's simple dialectical thinking. Zheng Xuan believes that "Easy" has three meanings: "simple", "easy" and "not easy". It is precisely because the sages saw the flow of all things and did not dwell, that they would have the desire and idea of finding "the unchangeable in change". With superior wisdom, they keenly discovered that things generally contain the power of opposites ("one yin and one yang is the Tao"), which is the fundamental force that drives the development and change of things, and then they consciously use the law of the unity of opposites to understand and derive all things, so as to achieve "the transformation of the scope of heaven and earth, but the curvature of all things." This is the core essence of the I Ching. In that era of extremely limited productivity, the ancestors were able to "take charge of themselves with the Tao" and explain how bold and confident it was to elaborate such ideas! This may be the underlying logic and top-level wisdom of our Chinese civilization that has lasted for five thousand years. Furthermore, it may also be the precursor gene for modern China to quickly accept Marx's dialectical materialism.
The Tao Te Ching inherits the dialectical ideas of the I Ching, and systematizes the dialectical ideas of the I Ching, refining a series of opposite propositions such as "the movement of the anti-Tao, the use of the Weak Dao", "the great straightness is like bending, the great coincidence is clumsy, and the great debate is like ne". In turn, the idea of "the meaning of life is easy" has developed into a cosmic model: "Everything under the heavens is born of existence, and there is birth of nothing" "The Tao gives birth to one, one life two, two births three, and three births to all things." All things bear the yin and embrace the yang, and the breath thinks that it is harmonious. "The basic pattern and tendency laid for traditional Chinese dialectical thought, after more than two thousand years, there have been basically no major changes, and it has become the source of traditional Chinese wisdom.
Therefore, the dialectic of easy gua or the dialectic of simplicity is compared with the materialistic dialectics of later Marx. In the I Ching, "change" is the first core category, and yin and yang are only expressions of the nature of objects, which are secondary categories. The premise of "change"—existence in time—is tacitly acquiesced to as an established fact. The judgment of yin and yang is a symbol of the observer plus the object, rather than the "existence" itself developed through self-negation in the torrent of time. This leads to the fact that the dialectic in the I Ching lacks the most important and reflective starting link, and becomes a methodology that has nothing to do with ontology, or even a technique of scheming, such a "dialectic", if not careful, may become a "trick", and the so-called "heavenly reason" may become a plaything in the hands of the monarch. In the process of history, it is that we ancients had enough wisdom to cultivate Qi Zhiping, but we could not get rid of the chaotic cycle of history and could not achieve a spiral breakthrough in epistemology. This is not unrelated to the birth defects of the anti-essential way of thinking in the I Ching.
With the gradual study of the West and the East, modern philosophy and science have profoundly changed our production and lifestyle, and the study of the I Ching is undergoing the greatest turning point and deepening since its birth, and after creative transformation, the Zhou Yi is transforming from a book of divination into an action guide for us to understand the world and ourselves in the information age. The wisdom and spirit of tradition, which we cannot abandon, can be continued. Just like the land beneath your feet.
Standing on the top of this guatai mountain, sir and I talked, thinking about the ages, wandering in all things, sighing in the world, distinguishing between the poor and the poor, and not knowing when the sun had sund in the west. In the twilight of the sky, my husband and I went down the stairs, the cool breeze gradually rising, and the autumn mood was full of joy. I think this coolness comes from both the ancient times and the future.
bibliography:
1. "Zhou Yi New Solution", Ouyang Weicheng, China Bookstore Publishing House
2. "Easy To Learn from the Perspective of Thinking Mode", Ouyang Weicheng, South China University of Technology Press
3. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel, Shanghai People's Publishing House
4. "The Tension of Speculation", Deng Xiaomang, The Commercial Press
5. "Returning to Original Thoughts: Chinese Wisdom from the Perspective of Elephant Thinking" Wang Shuren Jiangsu People's Publishing House