Find the Synchronicity
In Chinese 311, Yijing hexagraphs are analyzed to explore Chinese text and tradition.
This chart consists of two sets of sixty-four Yijing hexagraphs. One set is arranged in a circular sequence, and the other, as a block of eight layers or columns of eight graphs, or perhaps both. This is one of many charts of hexagraphs produced by scholars who studied the revered Yijing text and traditions surrounding it. Those charts differ with each other in the relative position among hexagraphs. This particular chart, attributed to Shao Yong (1012–1077), is celebrated in part because it was studied by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). The Arabic numerals scribbled in are said to be his handwriting. People argue whether his ideas about the binary code were inspired by the Yijing. The answer from most historians of mathematics is an emphatic no, because Leibniz found the binary system long before he was introduced to the Chinese classic. Early Western reception of the Yijing is not a concern for my course. But this much shall be noted: To say that the Yijing adopts the binary system is not entirely accurate. The binary system stops at the stage of trigraphs. There was a jump over the stages of tetragraphs and pentagraphs to go directly to hexagraphs. There is no continuous extension of the binary system. Charts such as this play an important part in my course. Fragments of recorded description and result of divination were assembled and transformed into a text revered as the "head" of all Chinese classics. Involved in that process was the claim that sages put them into a synchronic system in which every part is intricately connected to all other parts. This chart is an example of such efforts to find the synchronicity. Yijing studies used to be a search for the principles mobilized for the encoding into the system. After more than two millennia of such inquiries, with significant archaeological findings in the second half of the last century, the study now includes the efforts to see beyond the synchronic system and find what may be termed primordial meaning of earliest layers buried and obstructed by the idea of synchronicity.