Text of Confucianism Part 02

SR No.: 007676
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: James Legge
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1882
Total Pages: 2405
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 43 MB

Page 65

THE YI KING.
CH. III.
is in them. In this Appendix they are used popularly, just as one
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.' The writer moralises from them in an edifying manner. There is ingenuity, and sometimes instruction also, in what he says, but there is no mystery. Chinese scholars and gentlemen, however, who have got some little acquaintance with western science, are fond of saying that all the truths of electricity, heat, light, and other branches of European physics, are in the eight trigrams. When asked how then they and their countrymen have been and are ignorant of those truths, they say that they have to learn them first from western books, and then, looking into the Yi, they see that they were all known to Confucius more than 2000 years ago. The vain assumption thus manifested is childish; and until the Chinese drop their hallucination about the YÎ as containing all things that have ever been dreamt of in all philosophies, it will prove a stumbling-block to them, and keep them from entering on the true path of science.
6. We go on to the third Appendix in two sections, being the fifth and sixth wings,' and forming what is called 'The
The third Great Treatise.' It will appear singular to the
Appendix. reader, as it has always done to myself, that neither in the Text, nor in the first two Appendixes, does the character called Yî, which gives its name to the classic, once appear. It is the symbol of change,' and is formed from the character for the sun' placed over that for the moon 1. As the sun gives place to the moon, and the moon to the sun, so is change always proceeding in the phenomena of nature and the experiences of society. We meet with the character nearly fifty times in this Appendix; --applied most commonly to the Text of our classic, so that Yî King or Yi Shd is 'the Classic or Book of Changes.' It is also applied often to the changes in the lines of the
=
, the sun, placed over 7), a form of the old D =
), the
moon.
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