1. The Great Treatise of the Yijing
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Joseph A. Adler [+]
Kenyon College
Description
The Yijing (Book of Changes), originally an ancient Chinese divination text, is considered the first and most profound of the so-called Confucian classics. Between roughly the 5th and 2nd centuries BCE a collection of separate texts became associated with the Book of Changes, some of them being commentaries and some separate treatises. The most important of these appendices, in terms of both its philosophical richness and its influence on the history of Chinese thought, is called the Xici zhuan (Treatise on the Appended Remarks) or the Da zhuan (Great Treatise). The treatise, which is divided into two parts, is a collection of statements by multiple unknown authors about the Book of Changes as a whole and how it functions as both an oracle and a representation of the most fundamental natural and moral principles. It is tantamount to a metaphysics of change—both ordered change (yin-yang alternation) and unordered change (the randomness at the heart of the divination process). The excerpts in this entry is a selection from the Great Treatise of some of the most influential passages concerning cosmology.