Coping with the Future (2024)

An Overview of Divination in China from the Song through the Qing: Some Issues and Approaches

My paper titled "An Overview of Divination in China from the Song through the Qing: Some Issues and Approaches," for the workshop on “Divinatory Traditions in East Asia: Historical, Comparative and Transnational Perspectives,” Rice University, February 17-18, 2012

Early Chinese Divination and Its Rhetoric.pdf

Divining Bureaucracy: Divination Manuals as Technology and the Standardization of Efficacy in Early China

The authors of divination manuals dating to early China (c. 220 B.C.E.-c. 400 C.E.) treated divination as a technology to gain access to hidden empirical knowledge. By transcribing this knowledge in cosmological language and through the use of diagrams, the authors of these manuals attempted to standardize knowledge for capable readers. The manuals thereby mark a crucial departure from ancient China (c. 1600-c. 300 B.C.E.), when divination authority was invested in privileged individuals, whose skills were monopolized by the wealthy and powerful. The standardization of divinatory techniques and hidden knowledge in these manuals fits the context of bureaucratic expertise and the expanding scope of influence of written culture in the early imperial period. Using an historical approach, I argue that the knowledge recorded in divination manuals points to a view of divination as a perfectible technique for the discovery of practical knowledge. I carefully differentiate such information from the imagined perspective of the manual authors and the manual users. Each chapter focuses on selections from texts containing divination manuals. The texts I will draw on originate from three caches: the Dream Divination Book from the Yuelu cache of bamboo slips dating to the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.E.-206 B.C.E.); five divination sections from tomb 6 at Yinwan, Jiangsu Province and dating to 11 B.C.E. (the Han Dynasty 206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.); and a section from the manuscript Pélliot-Chinoise 2856 (Recto) discovered in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, Gansu Province, dating to c. 400 C.E. Using specific examples from each cache, I discuss how the texts disclose specific methods for using divination as a technique for readers to interpret their dreams, choose auspicious dates for various activities, and heal their bodies from illness.

Compte-rendu de: Marc Kalinowski, Divination et société dans la Chine médiévale : Étude des manuscrits de Dunhuang

Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 2004

Contradictory Forms of Knowledge? Divination and Western Knowledge in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Coping with the Future: Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia, 2017

Lisa Raphals. "Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece"

Frontiers of Philosophy in China

Yijing Divination and Religion during the Tang Dynasty

The Other Yijing The Book of Changes in Chinese History, Politics, and Everyday Life, 2021

This chapter presents how the Yijing was understood and “used” in different religious, mantic, and other forms of practices in the Tang period, as shown in the historical texts. Beyond the philosophical as well as metaphysical understandings of this classical text, it is important to note the alternative use of the Yijing during the Tang dynasty in order fully to comprehend how this book was perceived in China in the past. In other words, the book itself was not only treated as a“canon”for abstract exegesis, but also as a toolfor explaining various and diverse issues within daily life as well as within religious techniques. This chapter investigates the attitudes toward the Yijing at the Tang court, together with the social landscape of Yijing divination among the social elites in the Tang, as well as how elements of the Yijing entered different religious and technical spheres at that time. We shall see how the Yanjing, as a cosmological, divinatory text, was received by various social communities and how such a reception shaped the social landscape regarding the understanding of the Yijing.

Divination and fate manipulation in a popular myth of late imperial China : The wedding of Zhougong and Peach blossom girl (International consortium for research in the humanities : fate, freedom and prognostications. Coping with the future in East Asia and Europe: Selected lectures, nov. 2010)

The tale of the wedding of Zhougong and the Peach blossom girl may be characterized as a popular myth of late imperial China. First appearing in a Yuan dynasty zaju play, it was retold in many vernacular novels, popular operas and folktales. This paper, after recalling the way diviners and divination are depicted in late imperial Chinese literature, focuses on a vernacular Qing Dynasty novel that recounts how Zhougong, leaving his post as a minister within the corrupt Shang dynasty, establishes himself as a professional diviner. All of his readings of fate prove accurate until the Peach blossom girl begins to help those whom he has doomed to die to escape their fate. Enraged by this unexpected opposition, Zhougong tries to turn his divinatory skills into a mortal device. He asks his young opponent to wed his own son, while carefully selecting the most baleful days and hours for the moment of the wedding in order to have her perish. Thanks to her own divinatory and magical skills, Peach Blossom girl survives the ordeal and ridicules Zhougong. This rather brilliant comedy, poking fun at the prestigious name of the Duke of Zhou, sheds interesting light on the Chinese conception of divination and fate seen from the point of view of popular culture. Zhougong is portrayed as a skilled, well-wishing diviner. Peach Blossom Girl is a diviner too, but she is also a mistress of the white magic arts that permit people who are doomed to die to escape their fate and thus disprove the very decrees of Heaven. She uses some specifically feminine magic to disturb the yin-yang 陰陽 order of fate, and is thus able to “break the trigrams” (pogua 破卦) of her opponent. This narrative is a late imperial comic illustration of a very old Chinese conception: that, though we all have a ming命, an allocated lifespan, this “fate” can be manipulated in various ways, and that it may always be possible to “extend longevity”, yanshou 延壽,

Divination, Fate Manipulation, and Protective Knowledge in and around The Wedding of the Duke of Zhou and Peach Blossom Girl, a Popular Myth of Late Imperial China

This chapter focuses on the depiction of mantic arts and fate in the popular late imperial popular myth The Wedding of the Duke of Zhou and the Peach Blossom Girl. After discussing the role of divination in vernacular (tongsu 通俗) narratives in general, it turns toward the particular plot that pits the magician Peach Blossom Girl (Taohua nü 桃花女) against a diviner named Zhougong周公 , ‘Duke of Zhou’, a reference to one of the most eminent and respected figure of Chinese culture. Peach Blossom Girl allows several people doomed to die by Zhougong to escape with their life, humiliating and defeating Zhougong in the process. By showing a lowly girl able to ward off and defeat an eminent diviner at every point of their struggle, reversing in the process what seemed to be fated deaths, the story turns cultural hierarchies on their head, and calls into question the immutable nature of fate. The editorial history of the tale also shows us that it was sometimes assimilated to therapeutical or exorcistic treatises, proving how vernacular narratives were used in late imperial China to expand and strengthen “serious” religious or therapeutic knowledge.

Women and Divination in Traditional China: Some Reflections