Academic literature on the topic 'Astrology, Chinses. China'

Of the thousands of inscriptions, both stones and metals, there is only small number known as dated. Other parts are damaged, worn, or missing for various reasons. Generally, inscription contains elements of the date, month, and year in the Saka dates. With a particular method, Saka dates can be converted to AD dates. Even through the knowledge of astronomy, the element of hours can be interpreted. These four elements, namely the date, month, year, and hour are absolutely necessary in the analysis of astrology. Originally astrology is used to predict human life. However, with the development of science, it can also predict the non-human aspects, such as the important events in the history of the world. Through incisive analysis, knowledge of astronomy and astrology is very useful for epigraphy, although the time was far behind. There are several types of astrology it is commonly known, the West Astrology or Greek Astrology and East Astrology of India and China. Actually, almost all major civilizations in the world knew astrology. But among the many traditions, currently only popular Western Astrology, Chinese Astrology, Indian Astrology. Since a few years ago the West began to introduce Archaeology Metaphysics, one of them through the analysis of astrology.

The Hsiu-yao Ching ( HYC) is a Chinese text on Indian astrology composed in the middle of the eighth century. Its full title can be rendered as 'Good and bad time and day and beneficient and maleficient mansions and planets promulgated by Bodhisattva-Mañjuśrī and other sages'. As the title shows the book is ascribed to the legendary Mañjuśrī and other sages, but the actual author is the Buddhist monk Amoghavajra (A.0.705-774) whose native place was somewhere in north India. His Chinese name Pu-k'ung Ching-kang is a literal translation of the Sanskrit name. Like most of the texts on Buddhist astrology and astronomy, HYC is contained in Vol.21 of the Taisho Tripitaka compiled by the Japanese Buddhist scholars during the Taisho Period (1912-1926). From many corruptions in the texts it seems that the compilers were not much interested in Buddhist astrology and astronomy in general, and that they did not try to secure better manuscripts either. Specifically in the case of HYC they simply based their edition on the text of the Korean Tripitaka and put in the footnotes the variant readings found in the Chinese Tripitaka of the Ming Dynasty.

This article introduces various definitions and criteria for the astronomical phenomena of “encroachments” (close lunar and planetary conjunctions) in pre-modern China. With improvements in observations and mathematical astronomy, the standard of encroachments began to undergo many changes leading to more precise explanations of the phenomena. Before the adoption of Huihui Lifa (Islamic-Chinese calendrical astronomy), traditional Chinese methods could not predict the phenomena of encroachments, and records of encroachments were mainly based on actual observations. These records abound in Chinese dynastic histories, and they play an essential role in the interpretation of astrological omens. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the prediction of encroachments became an effective approach for examining the accuracy of different elements of calendrical astronomy besides solar and lunar eclipses. In the meantime, with the introduction of western astronomical knowledge into China, people had a better understanding of the principle of encroachments, and they began to question its rationality in astrology. Moreover, new knowledge of encroachments also brought new insights and inspired some philosophical discussions on the structure of the cosmos. However, these new astronomical methods still served the old astrology, due to the continued requirements that astronomers interpret astrological omens.

The article focuses on the report of the International Workshop on “17th Century Polish Jesuits in China: Michal Boym, Jan Mikolaj Smogulecki, and Andrzej Rudomina” held at the University School of Philosophy and Education in Poland organized by the Monumenta Serica Institute (Sinological Institute for Chinese Studies). The author focuses on the Chinese philosophy lecture by Professor Shi Yunli about the influence of Smogulecki on Xue Fengzou, Chinese culture and science and their work on astrology and astronomy.

It has been said that “ astrological interpretations are neither mumbo jumbo nor unsuccessful science. They are best understood, like modern economic indicators, as a technical framework for policy debates, resolved, as often as not, on other grounds. Faith in the validity of astrological categories, like confidence in extensively manipulated statistics today, persists despite their repeated failure to deliver accurate predictions.” The same might be remarked of divination as an element in the formation of imperial Chinese policy. This study aims to demonstrate that astrology, siting, and hemerology, because they provided a form for resolving opposed interests, played focal roles in great events . Their neglect by historians of science is unwarranted. Conversely, it is impossible without considering the involvement of divination to understand many changes in government policy. Yang Kuang-hsien’s celebrated anti-Christian movement in the K’ang-hsi era deeply influenced the scientific and cultural interchange between China and the West. Most previous studies of these movements have been focused on the calendar controversy between Yang and the Jesuits Johann Adam Schall vo n Bell (T’ang Jo-wang) and Ferdinand Verbiest (Nan Huai-jen). The inquiry summarized in this paper, however, indicates that deliberations in 1658 on the time of burial for Prince Jung, the fourth son of the Shih-tsu. the Shun-chih emperor, were pivotal for the fortunes of Christianity in the late seventeenth century. Hemerology, the choice of lucky days, an art tied to (among other activities) the siting of tombs, has been since the Han one of the most important responsibilities of the court astrologer, who was expected to propose dates for state ceremonies. Two groups of people, led by Yang and Schall respectively , used different traditions of hemerology in their attempts to control the Imperial Board of Astronomy. Both sides used sudden shifts in the political situation to attack their opponents. The controversy prompted the royal astronomers to involve themselves in what had been a long-standing dispute over siting among astrologers serving the common people. This case, previously seldom discussed, was in many ways the most important of the incidents that triggered the anti-missionary agitation in the early K’ang-hsi period. This seemingly trivial polemic over the time of an infant’s burial, in view of its fateful consequences for the introduction of Western thought into China, will serve as an excellent example of the political significance of astrology, siting, and hemerology. A second example discussions of the Dalai Lama's visit to Peking in 1652, in which traditional astrology played a larger role, demonstrates that its uses in political debate were part of a set of roles shared by the divinatory arts.

It is proved that the Futian calendar, a non-official one compiled in the Jianzhong reign period (780-783) in China, was brought to Japan in 957 by a Buddhist monk and was employed as the basis of horoscopes by the Buddhist school of astrology (Memo 1964). It was also used in competition with the official Chinese xuanming calendar for the usual functions demanded of a Chinese type lunisolar ephemerides, such as eclipse predictions. According to the view of the Song Dynasty Chinese scholar Wang Yinglin that the Futian calendar was “originally an Indian method of astronomical calculation” but Kiyosi Yabuuti has commented that Wang Yinglin’s appraisal of the Futian calendar is solely based on a resemblance in form as it copied the trivial point of taking its epoch as the Jiuzhi calendar according to Indian astronomical methods and does not display a fundamental understanding of the Indian calendar (Yabuuti 1944).

This article investigates the early history of a Chinese mantic practice unattested before the late first century CE known as zhanhou 占候 (lit., omen watching; divination through observation; divination of atmospheric or meteorological conditions). While early occurrences of the term primarily present it as a learned form of divination used to forecast human fortune through the interpretation of anomalous emanations of qi 氣 in heaven-and-earth (e.g., wind; clouds; rain; rainbows), zhanhou is also variously classified as an astrological, Five Agents, or military technique; and variously identified as a hemerological, medical, and contemplative-visualization practice by the end of the Tang. I not only contend that zhanhou’s inherent polysemy and its multiple identities helped broaden and perpetuate its transmission during the first millennium of the Common Era, but also that the same messy multiplicity makes its early history and development difficult—but not impossible—to trace and understand. Zhanhou closely resembles many earlier named forms of astrology and divination focused on the observation and interpretation of macrocosmic qi conditions or phenomena, but late Han and early medieval writers carved out a space for zhanhou. This was done through increasingly frequent use of the term, by explicitly distinguishing it from similar families of techniques (e.g., astrology; turtle and yarrow divination; yinyang; algorithmic mantic techniques), and by identifying and constructing networks and lineages of practitioners, both of which helped form and perpetuate zhanhou’s identity as a discrete technique (shu 術). The present study compares different definitions and translations of zhanhou, analyzes a handful of late Han occurrences, and illustrates the term’s increasingly widespread medieval circulation, chiefly through biographic narratives and technical texts.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0cm 0cm 6pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Asia, there is, in general, a great reverence held for the tiger. The tiger has been imitated and reigns supreme as king of all the beasts throughout Asia. The relationship between man and tiger holds a strange duality in that as much as the tiger is feared for its fierce savagery and destructive power, it is also revered for these very same qualities and for its majestic nature. Therefore, the very symbolic essence of the tiger has permeated all levels of the Asian community and culture; art, mythology, religion, astrology, herbology, and military fighting strategies. The purpose of this article is to show the many rich aspects that the tiger exhibits, and its influence and impact on Asian culture and Chinese martial arts in particular. Martial arts such as Cantonese Hung Gar (Hong Family) and Hasayfu Hung Gar (Hong Family Four Lower Tigers) dedicate a portion of their systems to achieving awesome strength and speed, and to imitating the tiger’s physical prowess. By doing so, they may achieve higher levels of effectiveness within the martial arts.</span></span></span></p>

The Yi-jing易經(Canon of Changes), or Zhou yi周易(All-Encompassing Cyclical Changes of the Zhou [era]), is “the book of books” of Chinese culture, which is also claimed to be the primary source of binary numeration, first described in the West by Leibniz. He was always interested in China, familiar with the binary code of tri and hexagrams (gua) of the Yi-jing and acknowledged its mythical creator, the ancestor emperor Fuxi, as the discoverer of binary arithmetic, and himself – as the one who found it again after four thousand years. At present, historical data do not allow us making an accurate conclusion about the dependence or independence of this outstanding discovery in Europe from the Chinese prototype. The time of the penetration of the initial information about the Yi-jing into Europe is still hidden by a veil of secrecy. The lack of a message about it in the book of Marco Polo is one of its mysteries. At the same time in the Mediterranean area traces of acquaintance with the Yi-jing studies are visible in such cultural phenomena as astrology and alchemy, Kabbalah and the teachings of Ramon Llull, sextine and hexachord. The beginning of the European study of the Yi-jing was laid by Jesuit missionaries who arrived in China at theend of the 16th century. Among them, by the end of the 17 th century, a whole trend of “Yi-jingists” or “figuralists” was formed. They saw Yi-jing as the Chinese Bible, embodying the original Divine Revelation in the form of the kabbalistic “figures” of the gua and being an expression of the common, sacred and antediluvian “hieroglyphic science” of the ancient world, that is, “Metaphysics of numbers, or general scientific method”, “containing all other knowledge”. Apparentlythe first information in Russia about the Yi-jing was published by the first Russiansinologist, German historian and philologist-polyglot G. (Th.) S. Bayer in the two-volume Museum Sinicum (Petersburg, 1730) in Latin. In Russian the primary in -formation about Yi-jing became available to the reader half a century later owing to the coryphaeus of Russian sinology of the 18th century Aleksei L. Leontiev. In 1782 he published an illustrated and commented translation of a fragment from Yi-jing (named Convenient Base) as an appendix to his translation of the Manchu text of the Statutes of the Great Qing (大清會典Dai-Qing hui-dian). Leontiev mentioned the French abbot who visited St. Petersburg in 1769 as the initiator of his appeal to the Yi-jing, but did not indicate his name. Petr E. Skachkov (1892–1964) agreed with Vsevolod S. Kolokolov (1896–1979) that this abbot was the famous French Jesuit missionary and versatile scientist Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759). However, he died ten years earlier. Most likely the interlocutor of Leontiev was a well-known theologian and economist-physiocrat, French abbot Nicolas Baudeau (1730–1792), who held confidential negotiations with Catherine IIin 1769 in St. Petersburg in connection with the situation in Poland. The secrecy of this mission on the eve of the first partition of Poland fully explains the concealment of his name in 1782 when he was still alive and preparing the second partition of Poland. Apparently, a look at the Yi-jing of the French enlighteners184 and physiocrats, expressed by F. Quesnay (1694–1774) and reported by Baudeauto Leontiev prompted him to link the ancient canon with Statutes of the Great Qing. Vasilii P. Vasiliev (1818–1900) expressed a number of original thoughts about the Yi-jing, which may have influenced the creation of his graphic system of Chinese characters and Mendeleev periodic table. Yulian K. Shchutsky (1897–1938), the first Russian researcher who specially studied the Yi-jing and wrote an extensive monograph about it, strangely ignored the statements of his domestic predecessors, but his innovative approach anticipated the neo-mystic Jungian tendency in Western interpretations of the Canon in the 20 th century. Due to the psychologization and aestheticization of the Yi-jing sanctified by world authorities in this field, after the Second World War this neo-mysticism penetrated the mass Western culture which repeated the initial success prepared by figuralists three centuries earlier on a new level and larger scale.

Abstract This article analyses the place and value of occult arts in the healthcare market of Republican China (1912–1949). Medical historiography has long neglected the resilience of such occult arts as talismans, astrology and divination in the context of China’s search for modernity. Focusing on the production, trade, and consumption of goods and services related to talismanic healing, I give voice to Chinese occultists by investigating the formation of a ‘market of the occult’ in the Republican era. I adopt a global perspective to clarify the changes that occult healing underwent following the popularisation of new printing technologies, mass media and transnational spiritualism in early twentieth-century China. Erstwhile embraced in secrecy, the occult was now being made public. Cheap manuals, wide-circulation newspapers and book catalogues reveal that in contrast to past studies that herald the disenchantment of the world as the hallmark of Chinese modernity, occult healing did not simply survive but thrived in the face of modern science and technology.