新書簡述 Words from Scott Davis for his newly published book

外子窮四十多年所有的時間心力，鍛鑄出在最近出版的這本書; 我想我應義不容辭的為他介紹一下。只希望能拋磚引玉或提供參考甚或交換觀點。感謝批評指教。

The Zhou yi 周易 is placed at the head of the classical tradition in China. It is a very old text. Some lines in this text are very similar to language used in the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou dynasty. The name of this text means the functions of “Changes” (yi) of the Zhou, and it is believed to come from the Western Zhou dynasty, three thousand years ago. It is a system to be used for divination. Later thinkers discussed these lines in terms of a cosmological worldview.

When people want to understand this classical text, they can use it for divination or for its systematic presentation of fascinating and profound thoughts about human life in the cosmos. These avenues towards understanding the classical tradition are well-developed, and are rich in contributions from the millennial collection of commentaries that have preserved an ancient way of thinking and living for generations of readers until the present.

If, however, somebody asks questions about the organization of this text that are strictly limited to the problems of understanding it simply as a text, one finds that the traditional commentaries have not attended very well to these approaches. While methods of divination or of wisdom are very complex and highly developed, the usual approaches to literature that ask questions about composition, narrative or argumentative development, point of view, textual structure, and other literary devices, have been neglected, due to the special properties of Chinese classical tradition, and the long and rich circumstances of the thinking that are part of Chinese culture.

Therefore, my book attempts to cut through some confusions that are probably caused by taking this classical work as a book like any other, and tries to establish in what sense it is a book, how it was composed, why different parts of the “book” appear where they do, and what kinds of ideas about “meaning” and “reading” belong with this archaic work. My book is not a translation, certainly; it is also not exactly an interpretation of the Zhou yi, but is an exploration of how it works as a text. My methods derive from structural anthropology, which is a practice of engaging and working with cultural symbolism, that comes from long experience with cross-cultural analysis of ways of life from many different peoples around the world. By reading The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the Yi jing, people may find new patterns in the sequence of 64 hexagrams that comprise the text, along with the accompanying symbolism of the text for each hexagram and each line of each hexagram, so that understanding the composition and nature of the text is easier.

The results of this exploration show that the Zhou yi text is very, very carefully designed as a model of the cultural world of this ancient, Bronze Age culture. The techniques that the composers used to design this work were extremely sophisticated, allowing them to code many different kinds of messages in terms of contrasting and symmetrical patterns. The text is heavily inter-connected, so that the images and symbols that are found therein work like holograms, to show readers different circuits of connectedness within their society and experience of the world. There is a complex formal style that underlies the work, but it is not a straightforward mathematical notation; rather, the symbolism is composed as modules and the text has a modular style of integration that brings in images, symbols, linguistic components, formal symmetries, and design strategies that work together in an overwhelmingly effective way to provide readers with access to the experience of living in an ancient society that was organized with age groups and under the leadership of aristocracy and kings. The use of symmetry in the design strategies of the text is particularly striking, because these symmetries were manipulated and broken in order to indicate “switching-points” in the design that were also points of exchange or transformation within the society. In effect, this holographic model of archaic society was a profound and complex auto-ethnography conceived and executed by some of the finest minds of the ancient world. From it we can learn about Bronze Age China and the Western Zhou dynasty; but we can also learn about how complex formal design was created in a way that included the life worlds of those people, in order to model social and cultural realities of that time. My book is a first, comprehensive review of the issues and fundamentals of this kind of analysis; in the future, there will be further refinement and further discoveries, because the classical tradition of China has many insights for us to learn about how to structure textual symbolisms, as well as how to understand the experiences of being human.