The Chinese self-designation Hua and the root-word Ᾱrya

(India Facts, 13-04-2017)

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It is but rare that I take the trouble to write a mere summary of a paper I have read with increasing enthusiasm. Here is one occasion. It pertains to “The earliest Chinese words for ‘the Chinese’: the phonology, meaning and origin of the epithet Ḥarya — Ᾱrya in East Asia” by Christopher Beckwith, published in Journal Asiatique 304:2 (2016), p.231-248. Some comments and background data are mine, but for the factual frame, the entire credit goes to Beckwith.

I had never suspected that the Chinese word for “Chinese” has a foreign origin. But yes, it does. In fact, the same foreign word has been borrowed twice and yielded two different Chinese words, one of which is widely used as the ethnonym for “Chinese”.

The procedure for adopting a foreign word is to identify it with a similar-sounding Chinese word. The concomitant character has a certain ordinary meaning, and the adopted meaning may be totally different; but when at all possible, preference is given to a similar-sounding character that also has a similar meaning. Thus, “Coca Cola” yields kekoukele 可口可樂, “what a!, mouth, what a!, fun”, more or less the carefree image that this brand tries to propagate. Sometimes a new character is created around an existing character of which the sound is borrowed regardless of the meaning. “Buddha” yields Fo 佛, which came about by composing the root signifying “man” with the existing simple character fu弗, “not”. Though later apologists tried to make sematic sense of it by explaining “not” as an allusion to Buddhist concepts like “emptiness”, it really had to do with the similarity in sound, at least to Chinese ears of the period. Whereas English words in -ize or -ation keep on reminding us of their Greek or Roman origins, the Chinese loanword gives no hint anymore that it is etymologically foreign.

After the legendary ancestral emperors in the -3rd millennium (including the Yellow Emperor, r. -27th century), the first imperial dynasty in the Yellow River basin was called the Xia 夏 dynasty, r. -21st to -16th century. We have no contemporary sources about this Xia dynasty, which is why many scholars dismiss it as a legend or even a propagandistic construction from the time of the Zhou 周 dynasty (-11th to -3rd). The Zhou had come to power through a coup d’état against the earlier Shang 商 dynasty (-16th to -11th), and they invested a lot in justifying this transgression.

The most important instrument they created to this end was the doctrine of the Heavenly Mandate (tianming 天命). This held that the founder of the Zhou dynasty had received a sign from heaven, in the form of a solar eclipse above his capital, that a heavenly mandate to rule had fallen to him because the Shang emperor had squandered it by proving himself decadent, unjust and no longer worthy of it. To anchor this doctrine, the Zhou ideologues claimed that the Shang had no reason to complain, since this coup d’état was only a repeat performance of the way the Shang themselves had come to power at the expense of the preceding dynasty.

The Chinese are strongly conscious of their national history, and even a half-educated Chinese knows that this preceding dynasty was the Xia 夏. However, around the millennium, scholars active in the government-ordered Three Dynasties Project (i.e. Xia-Shang-Zhou) remarked that there were no known sources giving the early Zhou the name or any other data about this first dynasty, so they had to have invented it. Strictly speaking, there may have existed an aristocratic family drawing its name from the genuine Chinese word xia, 夏“summer”, and it may have served as an imperial dynasty, who knows? Then again, the name may have been arbitrarily assigned to an invented ancient dynasty as well.

At any rate, the same word, or etymologically a homophonous loanword which came to be written with the same character, came to serve as the name of “us, Chinese”. According to Beckwith, in this meaning the term does not predate the Warring States period, the final part of the Zhou age (-5th to -3rd). At that time, knowledge was extant about distantly neighbouring countries, including Daxia 大夏, meaning “Greater Bactria” or “the Bactrian Empire”, i.e. Central Asia, then firmly held by the Iranian-speaking Scythians. These were a predominant influence from Croatia to Mongolia, where they imparted their lucrative knowledge of metallurgy and horse-training (Scythian legends pertaining to these skills were interiorized even by the Japanese). Their ancestral heartland was Bactria, i.e. present-day northern Afghanistan and southeastern Uzbekistan around the Amu Darya river (Greek: Oxus), an oasis friendly to agriculture and habitation amidst a harsh and inhospitable region.

The later Chinese tended to identify themselves with their ruling class. The Qin 秦dynasty (-3rd) yielded the international name China, Sanskrit Cīnā; the Han 漢 dynasty (-3rd to +3rd) lent its name to the usual self-designation of the ethnic Chinese as distinct from the minorities within China as “the Han”. It might be that a Chinese elite for some reason had identified itself with the expanding Scythians.

We do find such a reason in the alternative sinification of the same foreign word. Then pronounced very similarly to the character Xia 夏, it is now pronounced Hua and written 華. This character is a self-designation of the Chinese both internally and abroad, e.g. the Chinese minority in Vietnam is known as the Hoa. Its basic meaning is “civilized, elite” (apart from “flower”, with the same character), the opposite meaning of “barbarian”. The Chinese do indeed consider themselves as the civilized ones, as distinct from the barbarians.

The oldest attestation of Hua 華 as a self-designation is among the ruling class of the feudal state of Zhao 趙. Originally, it seems to have distinguished that elite from all others, not just foreigners but also the Chinese commoners in their state of Zhao. This state lay on the northern border, partly in what is now Mongolia, where the Scythians had come to form an elite. Apparently the ruling class there had Scythian origins, had fully assimilated into China but had preserved a collective self-designation referring to their distinctive ethnic origins and its ancestral homeland of Bactria. A millennium earlier, the Zhou had had a similar history as half-barbarians living near the border, getting enlisted as border defence against the all-out barbarians (like the Roman Empire hiring and thus “domesticating” Germans to defend its border against “wild” Germans), becoming fully Chinese in the process, and finally even capturing the Chinese throne. Further, in the classical account, there is even a hint that the Yellow Emperor, kind of the Father of the Nation, had been an immigrant nomad.

As during the Warring States period Zhao was one of the most powerful states (the last to hold out against the Qin 秦 bid to unify the empire under their own rule), this usage percolated among the elites and then also the masses of the neighbouring Chinese states. Except perhaps to aged and highly cultured members of the Zhao elite, no one was aware anymore that Hua 華 had entered Chinese as a loanword, moreover one that designated a foreign nation. Thus, it finally came to mean “we, the Chinese”. It still has that meaning today, along with Zhong, “middle”, from Zhongguo, “the Middle Kingdom, China”. We still see the two together in Zhonghua Minguo 中華民國, “Republic of China”, and Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo, 中華人民共和國, “People’s Republic of China”.

The origin of the words Xia 夏 and Hua 華 is the collective self-designation of the inhabitants of Bactria, a country of which the Greeks rendered the Iranian name as Ariana. This is still the name of Afghanistan’s air company. The Iranians called themselves Aiirya, corresponding to the form Ᾱrya in Sanskrit, Arus in Anatolian (Hittite). In each of these languages, it originally meant “us”, “one of us” (as against “them”), “fellow countryman”. Surrounding or subject nations, and finally the Iranians themselves, used the word as an ethnonym for the Iranians. Indeed, Iran comes from Aiiryānām Khšathra, “kingdom of the Iranians”.

In Vedic Sanskrit, it meant the self-designation of the Paurava tribe within which the composition of the Vedic hymns took place. For non-members culturally influenced by the Vedas, it came to mean “Paurava”, Vedic”. Thus, the name of the modern Hindu reform organization Ᾱrya Samāj, working under the motto: “Back to the Vedas”, means approximately: “Vedicist Society”. The Vedic country, North India, became Ᾱryāvarta, “circle of the Āryas”.

In all cases, the word had an elitist connotation. In India, this could be taken to follow from the reservation of a Vedic initiation to the upper castes, but the elitist usage is probably older. The meaning “noble”, well-known internationally for being mentioned by the Buddha in the “four noble truths” and in the “noble eightfold path”, can be interpreted both as “Vedic” (since the Buddha himself had considered his own teachings as a revival of the Vedic seers’ original instructions before they got corrupted by the priestly class, a less literal way of going “back to the Vedas”); and more generally as “socially upper-class”, and hence metaphorically “morally upper-class”. This is the same semantic evolution as in English, where “noble” originally means: “Characteristic of the hereditary upper class”, but now predominantly has its metaphorical, meaning “morally upright, magnanimous”, as opposed to “petty”. (To pre-empt false conclusions, let me add that the appearance of this word in Chinese long predates the transmission of Buddhism to China.)

At any rate, the Iranians came to boast of their Aiirya-ness, as does Cyrus, founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, in his well-known Cyrus Cylinder inscription of ca. -535. So did the Bactrian aristocracy. It is with this elitist connotation that the word also came to mean “us, Chinese”, whence developed the meaning “the Chinese”.

And so, in the state of Zhao and later in all of China, the character Xia also acquired the meaning of “grandeur (in manners)”, “courtly sense of ceremony”, while the character Hua also came to mean “splendid”, “excellent”. As a name for the Chinese people, Hua is unapologetic in its claim to superiority.

So, the same word came to designate the ethnic specificity of Afghanistan, Iran, North India and China. The unexpected commonality between India and China is reflected in Tibetan. There, the word for the Chinese is Rgya, from Hua, from Ᾱrya; for India it is Rgyagar, apparently from Ᾱryavarta. At any rate, most of Asia called itself Ᾱrya at one time.

Here we are reminded of the Manu Smṛti, in which it is said that even the Greeks and the Chinese (both of whom the Indians met in Bactria) had once been Ᾱrya, but had lapsed from that status due to a lapse from Dharmic norms, a barbarian-type conduct. Manu was not much of a historian, but at least he was right in seeing something Ᾱrya in the Chinese. For us, then, this glimpse into the strange itinerary of the term Ᾱrya is a healthy exposure to the relativity of core Vedic vocabulary.

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India as a civilization-state

 

India’s biggest neighbour is rethinking its own identity. In this context, Zhang Weiwei’s path-breaking book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State (World Century, Shanghai 2011) deserves to be discussed in detail and with respect to its China-centric purpose: to give China’s remarkable progress an ideological consistency and justification. Its Indian equivalent is yet to be written. However, here we would like to focus on Zhang’s central concept of the “civilization-state”. Though the states to which it can be applied are hardly numerous, it has universal validity.

China used to be a civilization, culturally relatively united, especially by the elite medium of the written language, transcending the dialect borders; and politically also mostly united, first in a feudal network under Shang and later Zhou overlordship, then in a bureaucratic-centralistic empire since the unification under Qin Shihuang in 221 BCE. “Politically united“ is also relative, in the sense that an ancient emperor, no matter how autocratic, was much less present in his subjects’ daily lives than any modern regime, no matter how democratic. As the Chinese people say: “Heaven is high and the emperor far away.”

It is the growth of the nation-state that changed the rules of the game. In the 19^th century, the country with the highest Gross National Product and by far the largest population in the world was no match for the military aggression by the British (Opium War) and the modernized Japanese. In the 20^th century, China was forged into a nation-state by the Republic (1911-49) and the People’s Republic (1949-); but it was an unusual one, because its domain practically coincided with the millennial Chinese civilization. At first, China as a civilization found itself unequipped for the modern world, and was humiliated. But now it has adapted itself and come into its own,-- and look at the result. In the process, it has transformed itself into the world’s only civilization-state.  

The only one? Perhaps not. The European Union has the civilization-state as its distant goal, uniting the “provinces” of European civilization, but it has never experienced this unity in the past. Easily the most credible contender, however, is India. Indeed, the country’s self-understanding does imply a similar claim as China’s.

Zhang argues specifically that India has always lacked political unity, which China has usually had. He has picked up the usual “secularist” misconception that India was only cobbled together by Queen Victoria. In fact, the ideal of political unification existed already in ancient times, and came fairly close to realization in the Maurya, Gupta, Moghul and Maratha empires. More importantly, even in a condition of political fragmentation, India showed a remarkable civilizational unity. That makes modern India a civilization-state par excellence: it is a state that unites regions with little politics but much civilization in common. 

Zhang also argues that China alone has a civilizational continuity stretching back five thousand years. In India, by contrast, you can frequently hear China enumerated among the areas that have lost their civilizational continuity because of foreign interference. Europe and America lost their souls to Christianity, Egypt and Babylon lost theirs to Islam, and likewise, China has seen a thorough overhaul of its way of life under Mao Zedong. Only India enjoys civilizational continuity since at least the Harappan period.

However, Zhang Weiwei argues that Maoism, though brutal and paying lip-service to the Western ideology of Marxism, was but a short intermezzo, without profound civilizational effect, and in some ways even beneficial. Thus, there was no foreign domination (as parts of India suffered from Caliphate Viceroy Mohammed bin Qasim in 712 to British Viceroy Mountbatten in 1947), and once the suppressed Chinese religion revived from the 1980s onwards, it turned out not to have suffered seriously from an erasure of its traditions, which largely survived even the excesses of the Cultural Revolution by lying low. Around 1970 there was an all-out campaign to blacken the nation’s most prominent sage, Confucius, but today the People’s Republic is founding Confucius Institutes everywhere. So, in spite of some dramatic events, China does boast of a civilizational continuity.

Indians should not begrudge the Chinese their continuous civilization. But they should muster the ambition to make the same claim, and outline a similar agenda, for themselves. They have suffered far longer and sometimes worse oppression by hostile forces than the Chinese under the Cultural Revolution, and incurred serious losses in terms of lives, territory and self-esteem, yet they have survived. So here they are, reclaiming what is theirs after centuries of foreign rule and over a half-century of depreciation by the “secularist” elite, Indian in blood but hostile to India in spirit.

Why should a civilization incarnate itself in a common state? After all, it has held out for millennia even when being politically fragmented. But today, the state is far more important than at any time in the past. It can provide security to its constituent regions when these are attacked precisely because of their civilizational identity.

To be sure, the usual suspects are bound to oppose this civilizational viewpoint. With their studied superficiality, the secularists view India as a hodge-podge of “communities”, of which a very recent one, concocted by the “Orientalists”, is Hinduism. Just as I finish this article, my attention is drawn to a French magazine celebrating the appointment of an Indian secularist historian to the Collège de France with an interview. There, he speaks out against the very notion of a Hindu civilization. The whole is not real, only the fragments are. The notion of an over-arching civilizational unity and long-term continuity may be obvious in China, and get applause there, but in India it is “communal!”

Finally, we should add that the concept of civilization-state has the merit of being more true to India’s real status than the concept of “nationalism”. In the days of the Freedom Movement, it made sense to be a nationalist for it meant not being loyal to foreign rulers. Heirs of that period, such as the Congress Party and the RSS “family”, still go on swearing by this concept. But now it is time for a more nuanced and precise understanding of what India is. Nationalism with its connotation of homogenization cannot do justice to India’s profound pluralism and respect for differences.  Depending on how you define “nation”, India has known several divisions into what would be rated as “nation” elsewhere. Of course we can fuss over definitions and maintain that even complex and pluriform India is still a nation-state somehow. But it is more economical and more credible to dispense with this terminology altogether and call India a civilization-state.

China has one big and four small stars in its flag to signify that its major nation and a number of minor nations are united in a single state. India has the 24-spoked wheel of the chakravarti or universal ruler in its flag, meaning that within his empire, every tribute-paying vassal state had its own autonomy and traditions. In modern and more egalitarian terms: the Indian federation unites many communities into a single civilization-state. 






(published in The Pioneer, Delhi, 17 July 2014)

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A sociologist on religion and secularism

 

On 27 August 2013, the Jesuit think-tank UCSIA inside Antwerp University (Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen) hosted, as part of its series on “Religion, Culture and Society”, a lecture by the sociologist of religion, José Casanova of Georgetown University. He spoke with a heavy Spanish accent about “Types of Secular States and Regimes of Religious Pluralism: USA, India, China”.

Casanova noted a veritable paradigm shift among his colleagues. We live in an era of globalization of both the religions and secularism, and under an increasing familiarity with an Increasing diversity of religions. The scholars are now admitting that their secularization thesis (that modernization would lead to a decrease in religiosity everywhere) is not correct. Religion has adapted and made many gains even in formerly secularized circles and societies. We live in a postsecular world. He also saw a shift in methodology: religious scholarship is increasingly interdisciplinary and studies religion and the secular in their mutual relation.

There are two types of secular state: assertive or aggressive secularism in order to free politics from religion, as in France and now in China; and secularism as the dis- or non-establishing of a state religion, striving for neutrality between the different denominations, as in the US and to a large extent in India.

In Europe, there were since ca. four centuries mostly confessional states under the principle “Cuius region, illius et religio”, i.e. “to whom the region belongs, his is also the religion”. In a certain  sense, this arrangement has continued after the population has largely secularized. This means that while all West-European countries have a large “unchurching”, no country has crossed the line from having Catholicism as the state religion to being in majority Protestant; or vice versa. Many Europeans associate modernization with secularization. So, there has been an unchurching but no conversion. In America, by contrast, many unchurched people joined a religion (or as they call it in the US, a religious “denomination”) after finding a place in American society, and associated it with the progress that America would bring.

On China and India, he introduced himself as a dilettante, a mere sociologist. Let us reassure him: nothing to worry about, with his sociological glasses on  he would not stand out in a typical South-Asian Studies department. There, Sanskrit and classical studies are neglected and shunned (because deemed fostering “Hindu fundamentalism”) while the focus has shifted to studying social groups oppressing or oppressed by caste and other so-called evils of Hindu society. He proposed to concentrate on religion. 

In mainland China, the official policy has been a rejection of religion (“smash temples  and build schools”). In the Marxist scheme of things, religion is part of the childhood of mankind, which we have outgrown in this age of science. Even before China became Communist, the modernizing processes were deemed to be hampered by traditions and religion. These were considered “feudal” vices. Zongjiao, “religion”, is a 19^th-century neologism, and strictly denotes a sectarian group. With the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and since, the toleration of religion has gradually increased. Now religion is used to some extent for harmonious social development. Half the Chinese books on religion are less than ten years old. Chinese folk religion or minxin (short for minjian xinyang) , “people’s faith” is the most popular religion in China, in which most people participate to some extent, e.g. by celebrating Chinese New Year. However, the five religions recognized by the state are Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism; others, including native sects such as the “evil sect” of Falungong, are illegal. However, these five are not really equal, for Daoism and Buddhism have a weaker sense of membership (and hence exclusivity and militancy) than the other three. Only 10% of the population is member of a religion. Members of the ruling Communist Party are required to be atheist.

India, by contrast, chose for a mobilization of the religions, as the annihilation of religion was deemed impossible. Religion permeates the whole society and, like in Northern Ireland, religious identity proves very resilient: even a declared atheist, depending on his provenance, is deemed a “Hindu atheist” or a “Muslim atheist”. According to Rajeev Bhargava, India’s secularism is no copy of Western secularism, based on keeping or creating a distance in the relation between religion and the state. Instead, it embraces religion, but tries to keep neutrality between the different religions. Except that it makes a distinction between the majority and the minorities, which get privileged in the Constitution, the laws and political practice, in order to protect them from the majority. Thus, a parliamentary majority involving non-Hindus imposed reforms on Hinduism but does not touch Muslim law. Even Casanova, unlike most Westerners, was aware that India discriminates against the majority.

In fact, India is not a secular state at all. Casanova is a well-meaning but unforewarned Westerner swallowing and reproducing what he is spoon-fed by Bhargava. The latter is a cunning representative of India’s rulers, who has an interest in pretending that India practices “secularism”, and that anything that might seem unsecular to Westerners is due not to a defect in India’s secularism but to the observers being Westerners who don’t understand India’s unique approach to secularism. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

India does not satisfy a minimum definition of a secular state (which means Bhargava and all the other self-described secularists are wrong). This does not follow from Indian secularism being Indian as against Western, but from it being secularism. First of all, a minimum condition of a secular state is that all citizens have to abide by the same laws. In India, by contrast, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis have separate law  codes, at least for marriage, family matters and inheritance. Most parties allow this constitutional non-secularism. The only major party that promises real secularism, i.e. a Common Civil Code, is the Hindu nationalist BJP, which is (paradoxically and counterfactually) accused of being “a threat to Indian secularism”. Secondly, the anti-majority discrimination is not “secular”, and by definition it is not secular in the sense of “neutral” between different worldviews. It is inconceivable that the American Constitution would prohibit a Protestant citizen from becoming President, or any other office. To apply an example really on the statute books in India, it is inconceivable that the American Constitution would allow the religious minorities to set up state-subsidized faith schools but withhold this right from Protestants, forcing Protestants to redefine themselves as a non-Protestant religious minority, the way the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission have gone to court to get themselves recognized as non-Hindu minorities.

It may also interest some people that Casanova reaffirmed the observation that conversion is the most revolutionary event, and not only demographic. Among those who are left behind as loyal members of their parental religion, it triggers a crisis as if their central beliefs were overturned. Well, Mahatma Gandhi would have approved, for in Indian society such as it is, conversion cuts families or communities down the middle. For this reason, he was dead against conversion. His opinion that it should be outlawed, however, was overruled by the secularists who took power upon decolonization, for in the Constitution they gave a guarantee of “freedom of religion”, including “propagation” (i.e. missionary activity). This too was a serious discrimination, for implying “propagation” in the free practice of religion accords with the historical experience of Christians and Muslims but not of Hindus or Parsis. Eventhough in Western circles some travelling Gurus have advertised their “path”, Hindus traditionally don’t really propagate, and many communities don’t accept converts. For Parsis, any form of conversion into their religion is excluded. So the freedom to propagate does not count for them. It was only given a place in the Constitution to satisfy Christians and Muslims, the groups served by the secularists.

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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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