A Jesuit missionary in Beijing discovered a numerical correspondence between the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching and Leibniz's binary system, which prompted Leibniz to claim that the former was an ancient Chinese "prefiguring" of the latter. At this time the Christian thinker Leibniz was attempting to combat Cartesian materialism by postulating a binary number system that represented creation ex nihilo (0) by God (1). The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe witnessed a search by the Figurists for a cosmic correspondence of the many cultures, religions, and sciences of the world under the supremacy of Christianity. The hexagram omen, as such, is a microcosmic model of a unique moment in the life of the inquirer. So the chance appearance of a given line in a given position, which results in a given omen, is equivalent to a real-life transformation or occurrence of a super-natural event. In the stalk-casting ritual, as the hexagram develops from the bottom upward (reflecting organic growth), each line captures a possible development in the world outside the diviner. Time is a factor of change and is a function of both alternation and progression, just as day and night alternate as the seasons progress. Random change is manifested in the chance appearance of a particular hexagram when cast, which corresponds to the fortuitous occurrence of ominous events in nature. Ordered change-the reversal of polarity-occurs in the alternation of yin and yang lines across each hexagram, corresponding in nature to the alternation of day and night, summer and winter, etc. Each hexagram is a matrix of six solid (yang) and/or broken (yin) lines, which are perceived as dynamic, not static, and thus susceptible to change. In addition to the textual content of the I Ching, each of the sixty-four omen texts is accompanied by a linear configuration known as a gua, or hexagram. The ten commentaries were attached to the sixty-four omen texts, and the book was canonized as the I Ching in 136 b.c.e. The debates eventually resulted in a compendium of ten commentaries, or "Wings," which attempted to picture the Zhou Yi as a coherent system of thought and not merely as a book of divination. As proponents of these incipient philosophies wrangled in the intellectual centers of the day, ancient texts such as the Zhou Yi were newly scrutinized. It was an age of collapsing social norms, and new schools of thought began to develop to account for the apparent degradation of society. This familiarity led to ever-increasing use of the text for rhetorical rather than religious purposes, and much of the original oracular import was forgotten. The latter technique generated random numbers that would then correspond to a particular oracle in the Zhou Yi.Īs the Zhou dynasty waned and as the power of the nobles began to eclipse that of the king, the use of yarrow stalk divination, originally a royal prerogative, permeated virtually all of literate society. When rulers were not confident of their own ability to decide issues of great import (battles, wedding dates, journeys, etc.), they resorted to divination by scapulimancy (reading cracks in heated bones), or by casting lots using the stalks of the yarrow plant. First known as the Zhou Yi, its earliest rendition was a series of sixty-four six-line omen texts and prognostications, which most likely originated in the sacred ritual of oracle bone divination-a tradition dating from Neolithic times. Historical events mentioned in the earliest layers of the I Ching depict the period just prior to and following the founding of the Zhou dynasty (1046–249 b.c.e.). In the past twenty years, catching the wave of the New Age movement, the I Ching has become the focus of various occult and pseudo-scientific thought systems. Jung, the father of modern psychotherapy, regularly consulted the Book of Changes. Only in the twentieth century have mainstream thinkers such as C. The I Ching, or Yi Jing, is one of the oldest books in the history of religious thought, but it was not until the seventeenth century that it attracted the attention of Western scholars, most notably the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the inventor of the binary number system.
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