Yin and Yang, not so equal

(Abstract for the 2019 conference of the Sophia Centre of Cultural Astronomy, UK, about "Light and Dark", about the philosophy of the Yijing; it was rejected.)

In New Age circles and modern culture generally, it is routinely claimed that the Chinese twin principles Yin (cloudy mountain slope, shadow) and Yang (sunny mountain slope, brightness) are equal. This is contrasted with and deemed superior to "Western" dichotomies such as good vs. evil. The equality is deemed crucial when these two principles pertain to the sexes (Yin feminine, Yang masculine) but, eventhough gender equality may be desirable, it does not follow from the Yin/Yang symbolism. Equality is a product of culture, it is artificial (like other desirables: justice, marriage) and is hard to find in the state of nature; whereas Yin and Yang are descriptors of all processes in nature.

The Yin/Yang classic par excellence, the Book of Changes, could in fact be called the Bible of Sexism ("she should not give in to her whim; she should stay inside and prepare dinner"). The text is proto-Confucian, i.e. hierarchical and conservative, and finds its fullness in the Confucian commentary The Ten Wings, a text said to have "bewitched" Chinese civilization for more than 2,000 years. Likewise, it is historically not about commoners but about the upper class, and not about spirituality but about politics. Indeed, it is essentially a justification of the Zhou vassals' coup d'état, -11th century, grabbing the "Heavenly Mandate" from their suzerain, the Shang emperor, in response to an unexpected solar eclipse interpreted a s sign from Heaven to strike forthwith.

It is only in the Daoist classics by Laozi and Zhuangzi, some 500 years after the Book of Changes, that we get a Yin-friendly corrective. It has always been only a dissident counterstream, though a necessary counterpoint as per the Yin/Yang philosophy itself. But even that current does not teach "equality": Yin (dark, feminine, empty, hidden, soft, flexible) is so important and indispensible precisely because it is the opposite of Yang and allows Yang to shine.

This is clearest when we read Yin and Yang in their basic meanings: shadowy c.q. bright. As per Isaac Newton's optics, light and darkness are of a different nature: light is something, it has specific measurable properties, whereas darkness is nothing except the absence of light. (We find a counter-view in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's optics, where darkness is seen as an entity in itself; but except in Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, it never caught on.) The Yin/Yang doctrine is a more philosophical elaboration of the preceding Shang period's solar cult, in which the sunlight was desirable and the clouds were merely what came in the sunrays' way, hence undesirable. Whether we like it or not, such was the old school.

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The history of the Yijing

It is since about seventeen years that I take an actively skeptical view of the Yijing, the Chinese Book of Changes. Ever since, I have followed the ongoing debate at a distance but, save for a booklet in 1997 and a few lectures around 2010, not really taken part in it. Other people with more drive or more leisure for exploring the subject have devoted themselves to original researches into it, triggered by several discoveries of ancient texts and artifacts as well as by the disbelieving but benevolent spirit of the times.

A fairly recent book confirms my viewpoint that the Yijing is, to a far larger extent than realized by the starry-eyed New Age users of this classic, the story of a successful coup d’état. King Wen held the Zhou fief at the western border against the barbarians, and therefore had a better army than the other feudal lords. He formed a threat to the regime of the imperial Shang dynasty. He spent 7 years in prison at Youli, and was, at least according to a later tradition, released after eating his own eldest son Yi Kao. He then prepared to seize power but died. A single battle against the established overlord was enough for his successor as vassal, his second son King Wu, to topple the Shang regime and establish himself as sovereign. Not only was it a military and political success story, it was uniquely successful as a propaganda exercise: the propagandistic justification of the coup d’état, viz. the depiction of the last Shang emperor Zhouxin as a model of wickedness and decadence begging for replacement, and especially the doctrine of the Heavenly Mandate allotted to successive dynasties, became the state ideology of a whole civilization for three Thousand years.

S.J. Marshall’s book The Mandate of Heaven (Columbia University Press, New York 2001) fills in a lot of detail that most Sinologists including myself will be surprised to learn; not to speak of the wholly new world that it will open to New Age enthusiasts of the Book of Changes. It confirms that a number of Yijing characters hitherto given a general meaning (by the Chinese tradition as much as by Western translators) actually refer to specific places or persons that played a role in the coup d’état.

This much was clear already from the mention of Prince Ji (36/5), a privileged witness of the corruption of the Shang court; but unlike him, others were forgotten. Thus, Feng, the character that serves as title of hexagram 55, and usually translated as “fullness”, is actually the name of the temporary military capital built by King Wen in preparation of the attack on his Shang overlord. Just as the character Kang has recently been found to refer to “the Marquess of Kang”, an early title of the later Duke of Wei, i.e. Feng, the 9th son of King Wen and faithful brother of King Wu, and not to the traditional “brave marquess”; so now, the character Fa, “send out”, now turns out to refer to the personal name of King Wu. Meng, usually translated as “the youthful folly” (hexagram 4), means “the deceitful boy”, a nickname which King Wu earned as a lad and which the Shang nobles remembered all too well when he had conquered their capital. The mention of penultimate Shang emperor Di Yi marrying his younger sister off (hexagram lines 11/5, 54/4) pertains to her marriage to King Ji, the father of King Wen whom she bore.

Mingyi, traditionally “the darkening of the light” and translated by some modern scholars as “the bright pheasant” (hexagram 36), may refer to the meng Yi, the “allied Yi-(barbarians)”, who attacked Shang from the east to facilitate the Zhou attack from the west; an added “bowl” radical to the character ming turns it into meng, and such variations in writing were commonplace in archaic Chinese.  The lines refer to an archer shooting a bird in the sky, but may also refer to a solar eclipse, an occasion for shooting arrows at the dog supposedly eating the sun.

Immediately after the death of King Wen, his temporary capital Feng witnessed a complete solar eclipse, detailed in the lines of hexagram 55. This eclipse allows the author to date the event, agreed to be vaguely around 1100 BC, to 1070. His successor King Wu saw this as a sign from heaven that the mandate of the Shang dynasty had lapsed and passed to him. Instead of observing the prescribed period of mourning, he immediately amassed his troops and went on the attack. He crossed the river separating his domains from the Shang’s (his own Rubicon, as it were) and met the Shang army at Muye, “the wilds of Mu”. Hexagram 7/5 says that the elder brother leads the army, the younger carts the corpse: King Wen’s dead body was taken along into the battle by his younger son, the marquess of Kang, while the army was led by his elder son, King Wu. The judgment of hexagram 18 refers to the Jiazi day, i.e. the first day of the 60-day cycle, when the battle was timed to take place.

Some hexagrams refer to older forms of divination or shamanic magic. We already knew this of hexagram 31, about “feeling” in the successive parts of the body. This was a very simple form of divination: if a feeling somewhere spontaneously presented itself, it meant something. Even now, some people still think that if your ears start ringing, it means people are talking about you. Similarly, hexagram 1 refers to an old belief in dragons sleeping at the bottom of the well, then conjured awake, rising through the well and finally taking flight in the sky, followed by clouds and then rain. It is a rain-provoking ritual performed in days of great drought,-- which is the ordinary meaning of the hexagram’s name Qian. By the time of Wang Bi, the 3^rd-century AD philosopher who promoted a symbolic reading of the Yijing, elite circles had mostly forgotten about this belief or evinced skepticism of it, but rural folk practiced this dragon magic till last century. The last line refers to the autumnal constellation Kang Long, “Dragon’s Gullet”, the autumn being the time when the dragon redescends into his well for hibernation.

The lines of hexagram 18 refers to bu, the ancestral curse that explained misfortune, and that could be remedied by sacrificing to the specific ancestor whose grievances had led to this revenge. Hexagram 53 refers to interpreting the flight of geese by a young wife as predicting the return or non-return of her husband from the war that King Wu had declared. Hexagram lines 2/1, 44/2-4, 47/3-6 refer to marriage customs.

There are also references to older beliefs held in common at the time of the coup d’état. Yu the Great, dike-builder and founder of the Xia-dynasty which preceded the Shang-dynasty, is mentioned in hexagram lines 43/4 and 44/3, speaking of a difficult walk due to the damage that the heavy work has done to the legs. His impaired walking ability is well-known, even ballet dancers have a standard imitation of “the walk of Yu”. Incidentally, he was also credited with discovering the Luoshu, “the book of the river Luo” found on the back of a tortoise climbing out of the river, which the Neo-Confucian interpreters took to be the magic square of 3 x 3. Hexagram 8 and its top line refer to a custom instituted by Yu, viz. the beheading of whomever comes too late at an important meeting.

Oh, and where does the character Yi in the title come from? Here, Marshall only confirms what I read in some French book 25 years  ago. The character shows sunrays peeping through the clouds, indicating the “change” from cloudy to sunny, from yin to yang (to use later concepts, here in their literal meaning, “cloudy” and “sunny”), and most relevant here: from Shang to Zhou. The Book of Changes describes a revolution (geming, revolution-of-Mandate, Ge being the name of hexagram 49), and I may emphasize: a political revolution.

Much to the chagrin of most of its users, the book is not about spiritual matters, or about emotions and relationships and personal growth. It is a hard-headed book about politics and war. It is an upper-class book, not for petty-bourgeois dabblers in the soft arts.

This year, the Dutch Yijing symposium should take place for the 5^th time. The first two installments took place in the hippie colony Ruigoord, and the dominant voices were the old spiritualists with their touchy-feely interpretation. The last two, in the cultural centre of Soest, gave more space to the hard Sinological reading of the Changes. This is symptomatic for the change from an unhistorical anything-goes understanding of the book to a more down-to-earth one.

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The Book of Changes in Ruigoord

Last Saturday I attended the Yijing Conference, on the Book of Changes and its defining concepts of yin & yang, in Ruigoord, a hippie colony outside Amsterdam. It was a blast from the past in more than one respect.



Amsterdam used to be an attractor of hippie types from all over Europe and North America. I went there several times aged 16 to 20 to pick up the vibrations. It was already a decade past the mildly historic events of the Provo movement, but people kept on coming there to bring to it the very atmosphere that they hoped to find there. I recall visiting the boat of the Lowlands Weed Company where marihuana was selected and improved to turn it into the strong stuff now known as Nederwiet. The Aquarian activities centre De Kosmos had its own "house dealer", quality guaranteed, but its core business was all manner of "spiritual" stuff that was heady back then but today is on offer in every cultural centre in Europe, from Astrology to Zen. Real groovy. That's where I saw an announcement of a visit by Swami Hariharanada Giri who initiated people into Kriya Yoga, the beginning of the end of my seeker years.

A leftover of hippie Amsterdam is Ruigoord, a tiny village lying in a remaining slice of greenery between a line of windmills (for energy generation, not the old pîcturesque ones) and the industries expanding from the harbour. Nobody really wants to live there anymore ever since it found itself in the flight path to the nearby airport. So the place was cheap and accessible for penniless entrepreneurs in the "alternative" sector. One or two decades ago, the Ruigoord crowd had tried to prevent the industries from coming too close, so they used witchcraft rituals to keep the spirit of modernity, exploitation and pollution at bay, but in vain. Nonetheless, once you're inside the village, you could still imagine being in the middle of the premodern Dutch countryside.

But the decoration is not so Dutch. The old church now sports pictures of the Dalai Lama and paintings of Shiva. In the middle of the meadow is a huge totem pole. Gotta think global before you act local. Next to the gate is an inscription of the Vedic Gayatri Mantra, with a few spelling mistakes. No marihuana conspicuously in sight, not even in the herbal-teahouse, but some old T-shirts demanding its legalization. So, it was a good place to spend a sunny day and dig the old spirit. Moreover, I was in the fine company of an Amsterdam-based lady friend of Chinese-Indonesian origin, a teacher of Neijia gentle martial arts splendidly embodying the whole yin-yang thing.

Most speakers told us about their personal experiences with the Yijing oracle. I learned the word "enantiodromia", "change into its opposite", meaning that when yang becomes extremely yang, it turns into yin, and vice versa. Light allows you to see things, but extreme light blinds; cold water cools but ice causes burns. I don't know if practice proves it true, though: if you hate someone hard enough, do you start loving him as a consequence? Some speakers could't keep themselves from bringing in quasi-Buddhist ideas, e.g. that fear, longing and clinging cause "bad energy". But right on the Yijing mark was the lone Flemish speaker who uttered (quoted?) the maxim that "except that everything changes, everything changes". So what doesn't change? The fact that everything changes. And what's absolute? That there's no absolutes.

Simon Vinkenoog, the octogenarian poet and icon of hippie Amsterdam, had to absent himself because of illness. He was to speak about his own Yijing interpretation. He at least called it an interpretation, not a translation. Several of the speakers claimed to have made their own translations of the Yijing or of Laozi's Daodejing, but from their mispronunciation of Chinese words you could deduce some doubts about that claim. What they meant was probably that they had cobbled together some pleasing bits and pieces from existing translations. So this was the problem that I as a trained Sinologist had with this whole scene: after having studied the Chinese classics in the original and in their historical context, I can't reconcile myself anymore with most Yijing users' naive reliance on the existing interpretation, a Han dynasty (2nd c. BC) version of a then 900-year-old non-fixed "text", which in the process of translation got overlaid with Jungian mytho-psychology and feelgood psychotherapy.

Mind you, I have been there too. At 19, I assisted in founding an Aikido association, Seishindo Aikikai Leuven, and we chose as its logo the Yijing hexagram 51, Zhong Fu, "inner truth" (today I would rather translate it as "core sincerity"). Once when we had to take an important decision, we literally swore with our hands on the Book. Hey, even Chairman Mao had consulted the Yijing, so why not us progressive young men? So I really know how it feels, the trust in the Oracle. In my studies of history, this knowledge has served me very well, as omens and astrology have played a central role in numerous political deliberations and cultural-ideological developments in every known civilization. Yet, once a man is equipped with the modern outlook and takes a critical look at the mantic disciplines, he will end up finding it hard to keep the faith. At least I found it hard, e.g. when I saw how a friend of mine was encouraged by the Oracle to pursue a particular woman who nevertheless kept on rejecting him.

In particular, how can anyone put faith in the Yijing oracle once he knows that the text we now use (and I mean the Chinese standard text, let alone the mutually contradictory translations) probably diverges in every chapter from the original intent of its early Zhou dynasty author(s)? Thus, a much-used expression in the Yijing is "li zhen", "favourable (mantic) determination", "auspicious oracle". Already the Han Confucians understood it differently, not as oracular but as ethical advice. Today, it is mostly translated as "constancy is favourable". So when people get this answer when they ask the question: "Should I move to Australia?", they think it means: "Stay where you are!", when in origin it means: "Pursue the course you're contemplating."

Moreover, apart from the meaning of the text, its whole purpose has also changed. Ancient diviners tried to know the will of the Gods, and how to propitiate them. Hence the frequent references to sacrificial rituals in the Yijing, often with details about what and how to sacrifice. To the modern mind, this is doubly irrational: not only do you try to decide a question with a procedure of pure coincidence (toss of a coin, the pattern of cracks in a heated turtle's plate, direction of birds' flight, shapes in the liver of a sacrificed animal), the question itself often concerns the wishes and actions of ethereal beings whose existence remains to be proven.

Finally, the concerns of the Book's original users were very different from the pretty little worries of its modern users, who want an oracular light to shine upon their floating "relationships" and their "spiritual growth". The Zhou family that wrote or patronized the original Yijing ca. 1100 BC, was more interested in justifying its coup d'état against its suzerain, the Shang emperor. What would have made the old Duke of Zhou and his relatives laugh out loud is the modern assumption that theirs is a "Daoist" text favourable to the feminine principle. In would be more accurate to classify it as proto-Confucian (aristocratic, patriarchal, political, ethical) rather than Daoist (rooted in the artisanal classes, more appreciative of the feminine, averse to politics, mystical), and even to call it the Bible of Sexism. Later interpreters started discovering the weakness at the heart of displays of strength and the strength of the weak, the white dot in the black fish and the black dot in the white fish. But the core Yijing's view of these primeval polar opposites is simple and straightforward: the weak should bend before the strong, the woman should submit to the man. It emphatically prefigures the Confucian view that "if man is truly man and woman truly woman, the world is in order". So, ladies, know your place.

Anyway, most people at the conference had no idea of the complex and as yet still partly unclear text history of the Book of Changes. Except for one, Harmen Mesker, and his explanation of his new translation in progress, taking hexagram 48 ("the Well") as example, was thoroughly scholarly and up-to-date with the latest discoveries of the oldest Yijing manuscripts. He replaced characters with other characters attested in manuscripts, changed the division into sentences, and restored old meanings to characters obscured in the 18th-century reading on which Richard Wilhelm based his classical translation. He opined that the title character jing, "well", may have been a mask for a similar-looking character meaning "law", motivated by a need (either for the original Zhou conpirators or for an Yijing commentator/rewriter in the subsequent Zhou period, 11th-3rd c. BC) to cloak criticism of the regime in innocent-looking language. Yet he had not lost faith in the Oracle.

How he solved the problem of the doubts about the intended text? He simply took the best approximation. If two of the three oldest manuscripts give a particular character where the standard version gives another, he prefers the text of the manuscripts and alters the reading accordingly. But on that text, though still seven centuries younger than the Duke of Zhou and beset with uncertainties due to the then non-uniformity of the Chinese writing system, he does base oracle consultations. After all, he argued, people using any of the present translations, though these diverge from each other and from the original quite widely, seem to be satisfied with the results. Someone volunteered the observation that the Bible too is used as an oracle by some of its believers. Yes, he replied, "even Pietje Puk [a Dutch series of children's books featuring a postman] could serve as an oracle".

That's practical, and also likely to be welcomed by most oracle users, who resent criticism and prefer to wallow in the bubble bath of feelgood spirit beliefs. But to such people, the search for the original Yijing would thereby lose its importance: if it's all only subjective, any text that falls into your hand (probably by a benevolent cosmic coincidence) will be good enough to serve as your private guidebook. Yeah, why not? If it's all only "spiritual", distinctions don't really matter.

So that's why I liked this Harmen's work. Though not believing his research necessary for the oracular use of the Yijing, which was its originally intended purpose, his desire for finding out as much of the truth as possible proved too strong to ignore. That gives him a place in an old tradition. During the entire premodern age, oracle consultation was not a pastime of "seeker" types but a highly official matter with political consequences, and many top-ranking Chinese thinkers devoted their best energies to discovering the logic and inner necessity of the Yijing text.

Today, it's a dangerous topic for Sinologists who want to be taken seriously. In the 19th century already, organizers of academic conferences decreed that the voguish topics of "the origin of language" and "the Book of Changes" be disallowed as unfruitful and attractive of sloppy thinking. So don't tell any of my friends in academe that I went to Ruigoord.



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