Cosmology and Logic in the Dao of Changes By Ma Baoshan Trans. by Wen Haiming and Christine A. Hale U. Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI: 2019
This book, written by Ma Baoshan — a brother-in-law of Xi Jinping — is absolutely stunning. While some of the foundational material seems at first to be repetitive to the serious scholar of Yi Jing and/or Chinese religions i.e. the Three Teachings and their history, what follows the recapitulation of the foundations of Yi Jing is nothing short of a revelation for Chinese thought and, in context, CPC thought (just ask the average CPC high-ranker how big of a deal “yiology” has been for the better part of the past decade at the Central Party School if you don’t believe me).
The book opens with salutations for Fu Xi, King Wen, Laozi, and Confucius [Kongzi] in that order. I have been pushing for the CPC and China scholars alike to use this structure since I began studying sinology seriously — little did I realize that the CPC and a few top scholars were already in this process! One could perhaps use an analogy that Fu Xi is to Laozi as King Wen was to Confucius.At the heart of Ma’s thesis is that there are “five onto-generative beings” — not to be confused with the Five Phases (wu xing) in the slightest — that can be woven onto a three-dimensional taiji which, in turn, is modeled on data from the Yellow River (“10”) Chart, the Luo Shu (“9”) Diagram, the Pre-Heaven Ba Gua, and the Post-Heaven Ba Gua together in respective pairs. These five onto-generative beings appear to replace the previous model of sanbao in Daoism, though this is not clear. Buddhism and therefore Neo-Confucianism vis-a-vis Buddhism are deliberately left out of Cosmology…Changes for reasons that should be obvious — indeed, the book’s bias is Tang Dynasty de facto.
This thesis is obviously well-measured, and the evidence presented by the Yellow River Chart and the Luo Shu diagram are particularly striking. Still, there should be some skepticism here, as secret knowledge is claimed without explicit grammatical ground, although because the ground is implicit, I don’t think skepticism necessarily warrants cynicism at all — let alone, before considering that the CPC obviously has access to archaeological and general information that I do not.
The same goes for the novel model of the 64 hexagrams — doubled for yin and yang value — which places a measured square within a circle. Clearly the CPC is well-studied in Yi Jing; there is a quick note about phylogeny-ontogeny without given context on page 83 that I think demonstrates that better than any matching of an image-number claim to a verse of the Dao De Jing or expounding on a Confucian claim from the Ten Wings, etc. etc. from throughout the entire book, but is it possible that too much ground is being given up here?It’s plausible, but then again, 1. This is the CPC, and I’m just an anthropologist from New Jersey who happens to be able to read this stuff pretty clearly, and 2. Note that my rhetorical question does not necessarily beg a value judgement at all — not to mention, Ma does an outstanding job in terms of organization and presentation without jumping into the realm of anything I would deem to be sensationalism — there is little question about that: Alas, it does not seem metaphysically possible to me that the traditional sanbao model can co-exist alongside the taiji model which explicitly presents the five onto-generative beings as equal [i.e. all of the sanbao are included as essentially equals to dao and yin-yang], and so if this is the case, the implications are that an entire tradition (Daoism, in this case) will have to be uprooted in favor of novelty in the field of general yiology — which, in my estimation, can easily compliment the rest of the existing Daoist corpus, and so this notion is truly remarkable…
