Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 10

Not reading the Book of Changes

The history of the Book of Changes in China can be described as a painful history of the mind. For thousands of years, an innocent book has been entangled in deception and self-deception, soaked in anti-intellectual fertilizer, and grown into a towering tree of ignorance, shading the ancient anti-civilization motives in civilized society.

The ancients valued the counsel of ghosts, because in the world they lived in, the inexplicable things far outnumbered the known things. The Yin people valued divination with oracle bones, and at that time there were also divinations with yarrow, which was easier to obtain than tortoise shells, so it had a lower status. The Zhou people originated from the western frontier, and they had to attach importance to divination. When they destroyed the Yin and Shang dynasties and launched cultural transformation, the status of divination rose. The diviners of the Western Zhou collected the signs and explanations obtained from divination, selected the best, and compiled them into a book, which is what later generations call the "Book of Changes".

There are two contents in the Book of Changes: hexagrams and divinations. The hexagrams are arranged neatly, which is just a math game for elementary school students today, but it was very interesting to the ancients. As for divinations, most of them are mixed up. Half of the reason is that they are collected from different sources, and the other half is that the diviners want to make their words as vague as possible, with many ambiguous and inexplicable meanings, so that they can easily justify themselves afterwards. This feature of divinations was later greatly utilized.

There are many kinds of divination in later generations, including divination by dreams, divination by objects, divination by the stars, divination by the wind, divination by sneezing, divination by tinnitus, divination by using chess pieces such as Lingqijing, divination by using ivory cards such as Yapaijue, divination by using three copper coins such as Huozhulin, divination by using five copper coins such as Jinqian Gua, in addition to Fuji, Lingbei, drawing lots, divination by characters, Chenwei Tuibei, Liuren Dunjia, etc. Each method has its own reference book. The Book of Changes, after all, is just such a reference book, but it was written very early. It is remarkable that the Zhou people could compile such a book, and its status as a document is beyond doubt.

But the story has only just begun. Later generations are not enterprising. Faced with the myriad things, they neither use their hands nor their brains to seek the ancients for their opinions. Especially those who have little knowledge but strong faith, or take their own opinions as the ancients’ opinions, or do not seek knowledge but seek not to know, do not accumulate knowledge but accumulate ignorance, until they reach the supreme state of dreaming. The honest people among them really believe that the Book of Changes contains the ultimate explanation of the sun rising from the east, water flowing to the west, the creation of all things, and their own unfortunate fate.

The most foolish thing in the world is to allow oneself to be foolish. If we agree that the ancients, who had the least experience with the vast world, had the best explanation, then we also agree that the purpose of reason is superstition, the purpose of knowledge is chaos, the inaccumulable is higher than the accumulable, the unverifiable is better than the verifiable, and we also agree that the direction of civilization has been reversed from the beginning, from the end to the starting point, and its significance at most is to maintain the life of mankind so that it has time to reach the state that the ancients have reached - ignorance.

The Book of Changes is only half of the Zhouyi. The other half, usually called the Yi Zhuan, was written from the Warring States Period to the Former Han Dynasty. It is the text of ancient philosophers interpreting the Book of Changes. There is no philosophy in the Book of Changes, but there is in the Yi Zhuan, which is a mixture of several pre-Qin schools of thought. The meaning is ordinary, but the text is beautiful. At that time, there were many kinds of essays based on the Book of Changes. The one in the current Zhouyi is part of it.

The Yi Zhuan set a trend, and later generations followed suit and created the Yijing. Some commentators say that the philosophy in the Yijing cannot be ignored, and that few classical Chinese philosophers did not study the Zhouyi. Then, didn't the Zhouyi make a great contribution to the development of Chinese philosophy? This is equivalent to saying that King Wen was imprisoned and played the Eight Trigrams (of course, this is just a legend and cannot be trusted), so the imprisonment also contributed to the Zhouyi. Chinese philosophy is indeed closely related to the Yijing, but what benefits has it gained from this relationship? We cannot say that without the Zhouyi, those minds would stop thinking. Instead, we can see that from the Han Dynasty to the Song and Ming Dynasties, countless intelligence was wasted in closed structures. Moreover, the structure of the Zhouyi was primitive to the Zhou people and childish to later generations. Chinese classical philosophy has remained childish for two thousand years. Who can say that it has nothing to do with the Zhouyi?

The Book of Changes is innocent. It is our intellectual tradition that is at fault. If you look for the Book of Changes on a bookshelf, you will not find one. But if you look for it in people's hearts, you will find it for sure. The anti-intellectual nature of tradition has permeated us to such an extent that we are not aware of it. What is even more frustrating is that facts and logic, the two forces we think are the most powerful, are not enough to shake the believers of the Book of Changes, because what they believe in is precisely to ignore facts and logic. If you want to persuade those who are half-believing and half-doubting, you can only appeal to daily experience, such as asking them to think about whether those who like to talk about the Book of Changes among the people they know are those who are honest and clear-headed, or vice versa?

The so-called "no need to read the list of books" is only for daily reading. Scholars must read the "Book of Changes", but for ordinary readers, there is no other book like the "Book of Changes" that you cannot help but feel uneasy and unreasonable if you don't read it.

Don’t read Taixuan

How did the world come into being? Our ancestors, everywhere on the earth, had the same question. This is very admirable, because the lives of our ancestors were hard, they were hungry and cold, but they still had the mood to think about such ontological questions. The emergence of civilization was indeed not lacking in motivation. Our ancestors had no physical means and their knowledge system was extremely simple, so it was very natural for them to rely on myths or fantasy to explain. Humans also had childish interests in the childhood of knowledge, just like when we were young, we would ask this question to our parents. But usually, we get an answer, such as "It was made of mud by an old man", and then we feel at ease. When we get older, we put aside this interest and turn to practical affairs. In this regard, the ancients who faced the eternal question of heredity should be a little embarrassed.

Philosophers two or three thousand years ago had a common tendency to believe that the world's emergence, like the world's structure, was a process of complexity arising from simplicity. Their task was to define one or several factors that could logically infer all phenomena in the world. If this simplification work is compared to a competition, the philosophers of the pre-Qin period undoubtedly went the furthest, because both the Huncheng of Ethan and the Tai Chi of Yi Zhuan are indescribable entities, without physical properties, and - in a strict sense - without philosophical properties, because it is more the end of knowledge than the starting point of logic.