Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 11

Whether it is called Yuan, Dao, Taiyi, Taiyi, Xukuo, Mingyu, they all refer to the non-material things outside of time and space. Why did this mother of all things give birth to the world? Where was the driving force? Did she get tired of being isolated from the world and suddenly decided to create something out of nothing? Qin and Han philosophy did not explain this, which is a little strange.

When Yang Xiong joined the competition, the ontology had already had dozens of names, and the Han people had also imagined many details of what happened, describing them in a very detailed way, as if they were watching the world being created. Yang Xiong also told a story, but he did not spend much time on it. His ambition was greater: to create a complete index of the world, with objects, people, and events, and how they operate, all clearly visible.

At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, there were several talented people, Yang Xiong was one of them. Some people think Huan Tan was more intelligent than Yang Xiong, which is probably true, but Yang Xiong made up for his shortcomings with diligence and became the most knowledgeable person at that time. We can see two tendencies in him. One is to attach importance to empirical evidence and believe that knowledge should be accumulated. For example, he really put a lot of effort into writing "Dialects". The other is confidence in intelligence, thinking that the wisdom of philosophers is higher than the practical knowledge of ordinary people. He wrote an article "Qin Qingyin" about music stories, and he was a layman in music. Huan Tan, who was proficient in music theory, said "Yang Ziyun has great talent but does not understand music", probably because he was angry at Yang Xiong's crossing the line, but in Yang Xiong's view, philosophy is music theory, as for music, it doesn't matter to philosophers whether they understand it or not.

Taixuan is the culmination of the latter tendency. The format of this book imitates the Book of Changes, and the theory is an extension of the Book of Changes. It is not too mysterious. My saying "not to read" is redundant, because few people read it in the first place, fulfilling Connor Liu's prophecy of "covering the vase". I don't even intend to introduce the content of this book, because I really can't find a way to describe it without making readers feel bored. At that time, some people ridiculed Taixuan for "wasting energy here and bothering scholars there". Although it is a vulgar saying, it is not far from the truth.

This is a pity for Yang Xiong. Because Yang Xiong's spirit of "keeping silent and guarding my great mystery" is very respectable. He does not pursue fame and fortune, does not care about the opinions of the times, and is like a true philosopher in his own spiritual world. His philosophy itself has little influence on later generations, but his philosophical ambition, concern for the essence, and passion for universality make him far superior to vulgar scholars.