50 replies to this topic

[The Stoic]

Hey folks - i was just wondering if anyone here knew of any english language resources regarding texts related to the Fangshih or to the YinYang School prior to its incorporation into the Han Synthesis or Daoist thought.

I thought it would be interesting to look at these two subjects in isolation from Daoist thought to see what was previouisly asserted and what had to be adapted to Daoist thought.

[Bao Pu]

Ho Stoic,

I can't think of any books. Robin Yates' Five Lost Classics deals with the Yinyang school a bit. But it is more part of the Huang-Lao Daoism of 3rd century BCE. He does translate what Sima Tan had to say about the Yinyangjia. As for the fangshi, I think Burton Watson translated a chapter about them from the Shiji. I have it here somewhere. There's not much pre-Han material about either.

[Craig]

Hey folks - i was just wondering if anyone here knew of any english language resources regarding texts related to the Fangshih or to the YinYang School prior to its incorporation into the Han Synthesis or Daoist thought.

I thought it would be interesting to look at these two subjects in isolation from Daoist thought to see what was previouisly asserted and what had to be adapted to Daoist thought.

There are a couple of excellent general survey works, but they may not give you that clear isolation that you seek. Still, they are worth a look:
'Taoist Body' by Kristofer Schipper
'Taoism: The Road to Immortality' by John Blofeld
One of Joseph Needhams volumes in his 'Science and Civilisation in China' may help more tha the above. I don't remember the volume number, but it deals in depth with the dancing Wu, Tao Chia, the Fang Shih and the shamanic roots of liturgical Taoism.

[The Stoic]

Bao Pu, Craig, Thanks for the suggestions - i'll definitely comb through them when i get the chance.

I've been trying all the major Chinese Philosophy anthologies too, but no luck yet.

Yeah i figure there wouldn't be a lot out there - either in Chinese or English. Some folks i've spoken to tell me that its also rather speculative to consider the YinYang School to have been an established "separate" school as opposed to a generally accepted cosmology or acknowledged important methodology.

[Bao Pu]

Bao Pu, Craig, Thanks for the suggestions - i'll definitely comb through them when i get the chance.

I've been trying all the major Chinese Philosophy anthologies too, but no luck yet.

Yeah i figure there wouldn't be a lot out there - either in Chinese or English. Some folks i've spoken to tell me that its also rather speculative to consider the YinYang School to have been an established "separate" school as opposed to a generally accepted cosmology or acknowledged important methodology.

I think Sima Tan's criticism of the Yinyangjia would have been shared by more than a few, so I'm not so sure it was "generally accepted."

[rookie]

the founder of yinyang school is 邹衍.i dont know whether he is prior to the founder of lao tzu ,in fact the taosim tradition can trace back to the ancient 黄帝。if u think that way ,taosim is definitely older than yinyang school.And lao tzu is older than kong zi,who have visit Lao tzu ,and learnt from him.
yup,i remembered ,yinyang school have a theory that's 五德终始论，which think that the emperor is just a continous repeatation of the five element,and following 周文王，should be Kongzi,the actually emperor ,let's why ppl call kongzi as 素王

Edited by rookie, 28 May 2008 - 04:46 AM.

[madalibi]

Hey folks - i was just wondering if anyone here knew of any english language resources regarding texts related to the Fangshih or to the YinYang School prior to its incorporation into the Han Synthesis or Daoist thought.

I thought it would be interesting to look at these two subjects in isolation from Daoist thought to see what was previouisly asserted and what had to be adapted to Daoist thought.

Hi!

This is my very first post on this forum. Your question is really hard to answer. The main issue is whether there ever was a "Yinyang school" before the Han. I think most people have taken Sima Tan's classifications too much for granted. They assume that the "six jia" 六家 he described were six text-based "schools" with distinct founders. This is probably why you hope to find pre-Han texts that belong to a distinct scholarly tradition. Actually you're not alone in seeing things this way: scholars started to see pre-Han intellectual history in that way as early as the Later Han, I think. But some scholars are now pointing out that Sima Tan thought of his "jia" not as ancient schools of thought, but as political stances that were current in his time.

Of the jia Sima Tan discussed, only Mo ("Mohist") and Ru ("Confucian" or "classicists") were recognizable before the Han. This means that people might have said "I a Ru guy" or "a follower of Mo," but no one would have claimed to be a "Legalist" (fa jia), a "yinyang-ist," or even "a Daoist."

Robin Yates (the guy who wrote Five Lost Classics, the book that Bao Pu recommended) also wrote an article called "The Yin-Yang Texts from Yinqueshan" (Early China 19 [1994]: 75-144). (For a little more on Yinqueshan, check http://en.wikipedia....eshan_Han_Slips. The texts Yates studies are those listed as Yinyang shiling shanhou 陰陽時令占候, a title chosen by the modern editors.) The Yates article is very dense scholarship, but it says quite a bit about what "yinyang" might have meant at the time. Yates concludes that yinyang conceptions "permeated the esoteric arts in Warring States and early Han China," but can hardly be called a school. So I think your friends were right to say that yinyang was just a collection of cosmological assumptions that were current at the time. I think Sima Tan chose to put them together and call them "Yinyang jia" in order to criticize them more easily as one block.

If you're interested (and if you have a good library nearby), there are some great articles on new interpretations of "jia" in early Chinese thought:
Mark Csikszentmilhalyi and Michael Nylan. "Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions Through Exemplary Figures in Early China." T'oung-Pao 84 (2003): 59-99.
Kidder Smith. "Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, 'Legalism,' 'et cetera'." Journal of Asian Studies 62.1 (2003): 129-156.
J. O. PETERSEN. "Which Books Did the First Emperor of Ch'in Burn? On the Meaning of Pai Chia in Early Chinese Sources." Monumenta Serica 43 (1995): 1-52.
E. Ryden. "Was Confucius a Confucian? Confusion over the Use of the Term 'School' in Chinese Philosophy." Early China News 9 (1996): 5-9, 28-29.
Hans van Ess. "The Meaning of Huang-Lao in Shiji and Hanshu." Etudes chinoises 12.2 (1993): 161-77.
These articles also have quite a bit on what you call "Daoist thought."

I know almost nothing on fangshi. From what I understand, fangshi was just a general name that more orthodox scholars applied to "technicians" of various sorts: doctors, diviners, engineers, etc. For all we know, some Mohists might have been referred to as fangshi simply because they had technical knowledge. Those that others called fangshi were probably educated, but I don't know if they ever wrote texts that have survived to this day. Anyway, I don't think anybody would have said "I'm a fangshi" at the time. If you want something good on fangshi and other similar terms (fangji, daoshi, daoren, etc.), you should check Nathan Sivin's article "Taoism and Science" in his book Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China. Good news, this article and many others are available for free on Sivin's website: http://ccat.sas.upen...sivin/writ.html.

All right, I hope this helps!

[Yun]

Excellent post, madalibi. Welcome to CHF!

Rookie: There is so little known about Zou Yan, Laozi, and Huangdi - including doubt about whether the latter two even existed - that there is no point trying to establish which came first, the 'Daoist school' or the 'Yin-yang school'. And as Madalibi has just pointed out, thinking in terms of 'schools' may itself be misleading.

For English reading on the fangshi, I would recommend Michael Loewe's Ways to Paradise: The Chinese quest for immortality (1979) and Kenneth DeWoskin's Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies of Fang-shih (1983). Neither of them is recent, but neither has been superseded by later work, as far as I know.

[rookie]

Hi!

This is my very first post on this forum. Your question is really hard to answer. The main issue is whether there ever was a "Yinyang school" before the Han. I think most people have taken Sima Tan's classifications too much for granted. They assume that the "six jia" 六家 he described were six text-based "schools" with distinct founders. This is probably why you hope to find pre-Han texts that belong to a distinct scholarly tradition. Actually you're not alone in seeing things this way: scholars started to see pre-Han intellectual history in that way as early as the Later Han, I think. But some scholars are now pointing out that Sima Tan thought of his "jia" not as ancient schools of thought, but as political stances that were current in his time.

Of the jia Sima Tan discussed, only Mo ("Mohist") and Ru ("Confucian" or "classicists") were recognizable before the Han. This means that people might have said "I a Ru guy" or "a follower of Mo," but no one would have claimed to be a "Legalist" (fa jia), a "yinyang-ist," or even "a Daoist."

Robin Yates (the guy who wrote Five Lost Classics, the book that Bao Pu recommended) also wrote an article called "The Yin-Yang Texts from Yinqueshan" (Early China 19 [1994]: 75-144). (For a little more on Yinqueshan, check http://en.wikipedia....eshan_Han_Slips. The texts Yates studies are those listed as Yinyang shiling shanhou 陰陽時令占候, a title chosen by the modern editors.) The Yates article is very dense scholarship, but it says quite a bit about what "yinyang" might have meant at the time. Yates concludes that yinyang conceptions "permeated the esoteric arts in Warring States and early Han China," but can hardly be called a school. So I think your friends were right to say that yinyang was just a collection of cosmological assumptions that were current at the time. I think Sima Tan chose to put them together and call them "Yinyang jia" in order to criticize them more easily as one block.

If you're interested (and if you have a good library nearby), there are some great articles on new interpretations of "jia" in early Chinese thought:
Mark Csikszentmilhalyi and Michael Nylan. "Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions Through Exemplary Figures in Early China." T'oung-Pao 84 (2003): 59-99.
Kidder Smith. "Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, 'Legalism,' 'et cetera'." Journal of Asian Studies 62.1 (2003): 129-156.
J. O. PETERSEN. "Which Books Did the First Emperor of Ch'in Burn? On the Meaning of Pai Chia in Early Chinese Sources." Monumenta Serica 43 (1995): 1-52.
E. Ryden. "Was Confucius a Confucian? Confusion over the Use of the Term 'School' in Chinese Philosophy." Early China News 9 (1996): 5-9, 28-29.
Hans van Ess. "The Meaning of Huang-Lao in Shiji and Hanshu." Etudes chinoises 12.2 (1993): 161-77.
These articles also have quite a bit on what you call "Daoist thought."

I know almost nothing on fangshi. From what I understand, fangshi was just a general name that more orthodox scholars applied to "technicians" of various sorts: doctors, diviners, engineers, etc. For all we know, some Mohists might have been referred to as fangshi simply because they had technical knowledge. Those that others called fangshi were probably educated, but I don't know if they ever wrote texts that have survived to this day. Anyway, I don't think anybody would have said "I'm a fangshi" at the time. If you want something good on fangshi and other similar terms (fangji, daoshi, daoren, etc.), you should check Nathan Sivin's article "Taoism and Science" in his book Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China. Good news, this article and many others are available for free on Sivin's website: http://ccat.sas.upen...sivin/writ.html.

All right, I hope this helps!

i think the author you mentioned, include yinyang as a school, is just because they translate yinyang jia to yinyang school, there is nothing more to say about that, yinyang jia basically take the yin yang element out of bagua, to form some theory. But is it a school already, i think yes, because yinyang jia is quite often named in chinese text, i guess, when jia is in use, it mean his theory already matters somehow, and infuluence future analysis.As i said, although yinyang jia is not quite famous so. But zhou yan is already quite famous among chinese. But seems that, chinese scholar, reluctant to accept yinyang jia in the framework of chinese culture, so nowadays, no more know them too much.

[Bao Pu]

Hi Rookie,

i think the author you mentioned, include yinyang as a school, is just because they translate yinyang jia to yinyang school, there is nothing more to say about that, yinyang jia basically take the yin yang element out of bagua, to form some theory.

I think Zou Yan's theories about Yin and Yang forces developed around the same time as the Yijing commentators forumlated their theories.

But is it a school already, i think yes, because yinyang jia is quite often named in chinese text,

There are no texts that mention "Yinyangjia" prior to Sima Qian's Shiji.

i guess, when jia is in use, it mean his theory already matters somehow, and infuluence future analysis.As i said, although yinyang jia is not quite famous so. But zhou yan is already quite famous among chinese. But seems that, chinese scholar, reluctant to accept yinyang jia in the framework of chinese culture, so nowadays, no more know them too much.

I'm not sure what you mean by Zou Yan being famous. Do you mean in his time or ours? The "Books of Zou Yan" (鄒衍之書), as Wang Chong called them, have all been lost and no pre-Qin thinker that I recall mentioned him.

[Yun]

yinyang jia basically take the yin yang element out of bagua, to form some theory.

I hope you do not also believe that the bagua (Eight Trigrams) were invented by Fuxi?

[rookie]

Hi Rookie,



I think Zou Yan's theories about Yin and Yang forces developed around the same time as the Yijing commentators forumlated their theories.

Here i don't quite understand you by saying yijing commnetator, are you refering to Kongzi, I think he maybe the first Yijing commentator, in later age, there are also alot people comment on Yijing

I'm not sure what you mean by Zou Yan being famous. Do you mean in his time or ours? The "Books of Zou Yan" (鄒衍之書), as Wang Chong called them, have all been lost and no pre-Qin thinker that I recall mentioned him.

At least i know, and his famous theory of 五德终始论 is also well known among chinese scholar, i think in his time, he is also famous, but not so famous

[rookie]

I hope you do not also believe that the bagua (Eight Trigrams) were invented by Fuxi?

Even though bagua is not invented by Fuxi, it do have long history, there are 先天 bagua, and 后天bagua, one believe invented by Fuxi, the other is invented by zhou wenwang, there are there version of I ching, one is 连山，one is 归藏，the other is 周易，lianshan is believed used in Xia dynasty, guizang is believed used in Shang dynasty, and zhouyi is in zhou dynasty, So i believe bagua is prior to lianshan, but no reliable history resource can trace back prior to xia dynasty, so who invented bagua is unknow, but chinese tend to think Fuxi is a tribe leader, and he invented that.

[Yun]

there are 先天 bagua, and 后天bagua, one believe invented by Fuxi, the other is invented by zhou wenwang,

But in reality, there is no evidence for the 先天八卦 existing before the 《皇极经世》of the Song-period scholar Shao Yong. Even if Shao Yong claimed that this arrangement was invented by Fuxi, he gave no evidence to support this claim. Some scholars believe he invented the arrangement himself. Of course, the 繫辭傳 section of the Yijing (traditionally attributed to Confucius, but without evidence) says Fuxi invented the Eight Trigrams (古者伏羲氏之王天下也，仰則觀象於天，俯則觀法於地，觀鳥獸之文與地之宜，近取諸身，遠取諸物，於是始作八卦), but that is no more credible as historical evidence than the idea that Cangjie invented writing.

As for King Wen of Zhou:

當代的學者懷疑周文王、孔子並非《易經》的作者，部分學者更認為六十四卦的概念比八卦更早形成。學者比較過長沙馬王堆出土的《易經》和周朝的鐘鼎文之後，認為《易經》不可能是周文王所著，最可能的成書日期應是西周後期，大約公元前九世紀末。現時一般認為《易經》並非任何一個傳說或歷史人物的著作，而是西周時期占筮用的文字編纂而成。

http://zh.wikipedia....org/wiki/周易

are you refering to Kongzi, I think he maybe the first Yijing commentator

I assume you mean the 繫辭傳. What proof is there that Confucius wrote it?

[rookie]

But in reality, there is no evidence for the 先天八卦 existing before the 《皇极经世》of the Song-period scholar Shao Yong. Even if Shao Yong claimed that this arrangement was invented by Fuxi, he gave no evidence to support this claim. Some scholars believe he invented the arrangement himself. Of course, the 繫辭傳 section of the Yijing (traditionally attributed to Confucius, but without evidence) says Fuxi invented the Eight Trigrams (古者伏羲氏之王天下也，仰則觀象於天，俯則觀法於地，觀鳥獸之文與地之宜，近取諸身，遠取諸物，於是始作八卦), but that is no more credible as historical evidence than the idea that Cangjie invented writing.

As for King Wen of Zhou:

http://zh.wikipedia....org/wiki/周易



I assume you mean the 繫辭傳. What proof is there that Confucius wrote it?

i think everything happend in history, don't have exact proof, kongzi said, 加我数年，五十而读易可以无大过。he like yijing very much, in fact most of the value he boasted, are from i jing like 君子，i believe kongzi write it. But i have no proof, in fact even though 繫辭傳 is not written by Kongzi, but in fact, it's good, and help us understand the I jing.
Some of the history is passed down verbally before word invented, So i am quite sure, some our ancient ancestor invented bagua, maybe his name is fuxi, or wangxi ,or lixi, but it does not matter, anyway I ching, and the thought of i ching, is fully absorbed by chinese people, and facilitate it in life.

當代的學者懷疑周文王、孔子並非《易經》的作者，部分學者更認為六十四卦的概念比八卦更早形成。學者比較過長沙馬王堆出土的《易經》和周朝的鐘鼎文之後，認為《易經》不可能是周文王所著，最可能的成書日期應是西周後期，大約公元前九世紀末。現時一般認為《易經》並非任何一個傳說或歷史人物的著作，而是西周時期占筮用的文字編纂而成

that's assume zhou wenwang invented houtian bagua, but i think bagua and i ching are different, bagua, or 64gua are just method , but i ching, are the text to interpretate the gua, and i ching are not only used as a fortune telling text, but it's thought, the sequence of each gua, have been interpretated by chinese scholar, and become some culture infuluence chinese people's thinking, like the last two gua, 既济 and 未济， 既济 mean everything already perfect, but last gua weiji, show that, after jiji, everything start allover against, become inperfect, this thinking also become confucius' teaching, 物不可极，物极必反，

Edited by rookie, 02 July 2008 - 02:11 AM.