is the basic foundation of the Analects of Confucius.

 

 The wrong done by succombing to Temptation of Profit can be catastrophic.

The USA/UK Hedge-Fundies used Statistics-Math Obfuscation and Secrecy

at the beginning of the Millenium to build a $500 Trillion Derivative Pyramid

by which they Corrupted the USA/UK Political System

and Wrecked the USA/UK - based Gobal Financial System.

By allowing themselves to be so Corrupted,

the USA/UK Political Leadership violated the Confucian Principle of

 

and thus the USA/UK Political Leadership, and Global Financial System,

lost its Confucian

 The Leading Candidate to succeed to the Mandate of Heaven to Lead Earth is China, Earth's Largest Manufacturer and the Largest Financial System not Corrupted by the USA/UK Hedge-Fundies.

Since today's Chinese Leadership has founded Confucius Institutes worldwide,

they may indeed follow the Way of Confucius and be worthy to succeed to the Mandate of Heaven to Lead Earth.

 - see web pages from the web site at www.friesian.comand (particularly for the modern version of characters and the logo for the Confucius Institute) web pages and pdf files from the web site of the Confucius Institute at North Carolina State University.

What are some details of the Way of Confucius?

"... In China, the theory of five elements coexisted early with the theory of two forces ...

 

... The implications of the theory are displayed in the great book of divination, the I Ching, ,

,

the "Book of Changes."  ...". - see web page at www.friesian.com/yinyang.htm

The binary Yin-Yang produces the 2^6 = 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, also known as Yijing,, which can be put in a symmetrical pattern known as the Earlier Heaven pattern

 

attributed to China's First Emperor, Fu Xi (r. 2953-2838 BC) - see "Feng Shui" by Eva Wong (Shambala 1996) and "Chinese Mythology" by Derek Walters (Diamond Books 1995).

 

A later pattern for ":.. the Yijing ...

...[is supposed]... to have been created by the three greatest of China's historical figures -

King Wen (r. 1099-1050 B.C.) .. who died just before the Shang were finally overthrown ...[by]... his son King Wu ... at the battle of Muye in 1045 B.C. ...

the Duke of Zhou (d. 1032 B.C.) ... younger brother ...[of]... King Wu ...

and Confucius (551-479 B.C.) ..." - see "I Ching, the Classic of Changes", by Edward L. Shaughnessy (Ballantine 1996).

"... after the death of Confucius in 479 B.C.E. ... in the period of intense philosophical debate known as the Hundred Schools ... one of the three traditions of ancient Daoism ... was ... HuangLao, meaning the philosophy of the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, ... the others being those of the Laozi text itself and the ... mystic Zhuangzi ...

HuangLao ... was the philosophy or technique of greatest interest to the early Han emperors Wen (reigned 179-157 B.C.E.) and Jing (reigned 156-141 B.C.E.) ...[and]... Liu An (ca. 180-122 B.C.E.), the Han prince who sponsored the syncretic Daoist book Huainanzi ... Sima Qian .. son ...[of]... Sima Tan ...[used]... HuangLao principles ...[and was]... the grand astrologer of Emperor Wu ... (reigned 140-87 B.C.E.) ...[who]... adopted ... Confucianism ...

After the imperial sponsorship of Confucianism ... the HaungLao Daoist tradition became more and more associated with what eventually was to be recognized as religious Daoism and by the third and fourth centuries C.E., it was virtually forgotten ... until the discovery of the Mawangdui ... cache of manuscripts ... in late 1973 ...." - see "Five Lost Classics: Tao, Huang-Lao, and Yin-Yang in Han China" by Robin D. S. Yates (Ballantine 1997).

In December 1973, archaeologists excavating Han tomb #3 at Mawangdui, in Changsha, Hunan ... discovered ... in the tomb of Li Cang, Lord of Dai (d. 168 B.C.), more than twenty texts written on silk, including by far the earliest manuscript copy of the Yijing or Classic of Changes and two copies of the Laozi ...

The Mawangdui Yijing manuscript was written on two pieces of silk...

The first piece ... contains the text of the classic itself, i.e., the hexagram and line statements often referred to as the Zhouyi ... Certainly the most immediately notable difference between the manuscript text and the received [ King Wen ] text lies in the sequence of hexagrams ... the received [ King Wen ] sequence ... probably .... was in existence ... well before ... the time that this manuscript was copied ...[ since ]... In A.D. 279, an even earlier manuscript text of the Yijing was discoverd in the tomb of King Xiang of Wei, who died in 296 B.C. ... this text was identical to ... the received [ King Wen ] text ...

[ King Wen created his arrangement while imprisoned by the Shang emperor to describe the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty around 1050 B.C.

Perhaps the Mawangdui Yijing was created to describe the period of the end of the Warring States by Unification of the Qin Dynasty around 221 B.C. and the end of the Qin Dynasty and founding of the Han Dynasty around 206-202 B.C. ]

 

... and a second, commentarial text ... generally refer[red] to ... as Ersanzi wen ... or The Several Disciples Asked ... The text is in the form of numerous quotations of Confucius ... regarding the Yijing ...

The second piece of silk ... contains ... text divided into four or five discrete commentaries:

... Mu He ... and Zhao Li ... both names of interlocutors ...

the Xici ... or Appended Statements ...[Some]... argue that the Appended Statements originally derived from Daoist circles, though it was subsequently added to by Confucians ... this "Daoist" view has been rebutted ... this debate is part and parcel of an ongoing reexamination ... of the general nature of Warring States, Qin, and Han intellectual history ...

Yi zhi yi ... or The Properties of the Changes ...[which]... presents a very strong Confucian bias. After a brief introductory passage discussing the interplay of yin and yang, the text goes through a sequential discussion of many of the 64 hexagrams of the Zhouyi. ...

Yao .. or Essentials ... The text ... record[s] a conversation between an aged Confucius and his disciple Zi Gong concerning the Changes and especially the role of divination in its use ... Confucius ...[says]... that while he does indeed perform divinations ... he regards the Yijing as a repository of ancient wisdom ..." - see "I Ching, the Classic of Changes", by Edward L. Shaughnessy (Ballantine 1996).

 "... the Han dynasty court historian, Sima Qian (145-c.85 BCE), in his well-known and often-quoted Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) ... identifyi[es] Confucius' ancestors as members of the Royal State of Song. It notes as well that his great grandfather, fleeing the turmoil in his native Song, had moved to Lu, somewhere near the present town of Qufu in southeastern Shandong, where the family became impoverished. ... Confucius' recorded age at death, 'seventy-two,' is a 'magic number' with far-reaching significance in early Chinese literature. ... tradition has it that he studied ritual with the Daoist Master Lao Dan, music with Chang Hong, and the lute with Music-master Xiang. In his middle age Confucius is supposed to have gathered about him a group of disciples whom he taught and also to have devoted himself to political matters in Lu. ... At the age of fifty, when Duke Ding of Lu was on the throne, Confucius' talents were recognized and he was appointed Minister of Public Works and then Minister of Crime. But Confucius apparently offended members of the Lu nobility who were vying with Duke Ding for power ... and he was subsequently forced to leave office and go into exile. ... In the company of his disciples, Confucius left Lu and traveled in the states of Wei, Song, Chen, Cai, and Chu, purportedly looking for a ruler who might employ him but meeting instead with indifference and, occasionally, severe hardship and danger. ... Confucius returned to Lu in 484 BCE and spent the remainder of his life teaching, putting in order the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents, and other ancient classics, as well as editing the Spring and Autumn Annals, the court chronicle of Lu. Sima Qian's account also provides background on Confucius' connection to the early canonical texts on ritual and on music (the latter of which was lost at an early date). Sima Qian claims, moreover, that, "In his later years, Confucius delighted in the Yi" ...[ I Ching or Yijing ]... divination manual popular to this day in China and in the West. ..." - see web page at plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/

In Analects ( Lunyu ) VII - see web page at classics.mit.edu/Confucius/analects.2.2.html - Confucius is quoted as saying:

"If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi [ I Ching or Yijing ] , and then I might come to be without great faults."

 

Is the Confucian I Ching related to other Divination Systems?

If you take the date of origin of the 8x8 = 2^6 = 64 element I Ching as time of the First Emperor Fu Xi (around 2900 BC)

then it is likely that the Shinto 128 element Japanese Futomani Divination and the16 element Islamic Ilm Al Raml Divination systems are younger derivatives using expansion (doubling) or contraction (8+8 instead of 8x8), respectively.

However - see "In Search of the Cradle of Civilization" by Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley (Quest 1995) -

"... The Rig-Veda is the oldest book in the Sanskrit language, indeed in any Indo-European language. More than that, if we are correct, it is the oldest book in the world ... The fact that the Rig-Veda mentions a stellar configuration that corresponds to a date from 6000 B.C. to 7000 B.C. ..."

so that the 64 element I Ching may have been derived from the Rig-Veda, whose first sukt has 240 elements, as does the root vector polytope of the E8 Lie algebra.

Further, the Rig-Veda (and consequently all the other Divination systems, including the I Ching) may have been derived from an even older (although transmitted orally rather than in writing) Divination system, African IFA, whose 16x16 = 2^8 = 256 elements correspond to the 256-dimensional Cl(8) Clifford algebra from which 248-dimensional E8 can be constructed.

Since the 64 element I Ching can be regarded as the Heart of the 256 element IFA

( for example, in the E8 Physics model based on the 256 elements of Cl(8),

Gravity comes from a 15-dimensional Conformal Group related to a 64-dimensional Cl(6)

and the Standard Model Group is related to another 64-dimensional Cl(6)

and the Fermion Particles, Fermion AntiParticles, and Kaluza-Klein Spacetime each correspond to 64-dimensional subspaces of E8 )

the Confucian I Ching may be regarded as a useful Key to Understanding Nature and Society.

 

Who might be examples of People living in accord with the Principles of the Confucian I Ching ?

 

From recent China, I would suggest:

Zhou Enlai, whose death in 1976 was marked by Comet West;

Deng Xiaoping, whose death in 1997 was marked by Comet Hale-Bopp;

as well as the successors to Deng Xiaoping: Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao (*).

 

In addition, I would suggest a less-well-known individual:

Hua Loo-Keng

- see Biographical Memoir at www.nap.edu [ The National Academies Press ] by Heini Halberstam - "... Loo-Keng Hua ( November 12, 1910 - June 12, 1985 ) ...

Hua was born in 1910 in Jintan in the southern Jiangsu Province of China ... in 1910 it was little more than a village where Hua's father managed a general store with mixed success. The family was poor throughout Hua's formative years; in addition, he was a frail child afflicted by a succession of illnesses, culminating in typhoid fever that caused paralysis of his left leg ...

Hua's formal education was brief ... the first degree he would receive was an honorary doctorate from the University of Nancy in France in 1980 ...

The Jintan Middle School that opened in 1922 just when he had completed elementary school had a well-qualified and demanding mathematics teacher who recognized Hua's talent and nurtured it. ... Hua learned early on to make up for the lack of books, and later of scientific literature, by tackling problems directly from first principles ...

Hua gained admission to the Chinese Vocational College in Shanghai, and there he distinguished himself by winning a national abacus competition ... living costs proved too high for his means and Hua was forced to leave a term before graduating. After failing to find a job in Shanghai, Hua returned home in 1927 to help in his father's store. In that same year also, Hua married Xiaoguan Wu; the following year a daughter, Shun, was born and their first son, Jundong, arrived in 1931. ...

[In 1930] ... Hua showed in a short note in ... the Shanghai periodical Science ... that a certain 1926 paper claiming to have solved the quintic was fundamentally flawed. Hua's lucid analysis caught the eye of a discerning professor at Quing Hua University in Beijing, and in 1931 Hua was invited, despite his lack of formal qualification and not without some reservations on the part of several faculty members, to join the mathematics department there. He began as a clerk in the library, and then moved to become an assistant in mathematics; by September1932 he was an instructor and two years later came promotion to the rank of lecturer. ...

Norbert Wiener visited the university ... and spoke of Hua to G. H. Hardy. In this way Hua received an invitation to come to Cambridge, England, and he arrived in 1936 to spend two fruitful years there. ... Hardy assured Hua that he could gain a Ph.D. in two years with ease, but Hua could not afford the registration fee and declined; of course, he gave quite different reasons for his decision. ...

the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 caused him much anxiety. He left Cambridge in 1938 to return to his old university, now as a full professor. However, Quing Hua University was no longer in Beijing; with vast portions of China under Japanese occupation, it had migrated to Kunming, the capital of the southern province of Yunan, where it combined with several other institutions to form the temporary Associated University of the South West. There Hua and his family remained through the World War II years ...

Hua spent three months in Russia in the spring of 1946 at Vinogradov's invitation. Mathematical interaction apart, he was impressed by the organization of scientific activity there ...

In September 1946, shortly after returning from Russia, Hua ... depart[ed] for Princeton ...[where]... C. L. Siegel was working ... along somewhat similar lines ... bringing with him projects not only in matrix theory but also in functions of several complex variables and in group theory. At this time civil war was raging in China and it was not easy to travel; therefore, the Chinese authorities assigned Hua the rank of general in his passport for the "convenience of travel." ...

in the spring of 1947 Hua underwent an operation at the Johns Hopkins University on his lame leg that much improved his gait thereafter, to his and his family's delight. Also in 1947 their daughter Su was born; two more sons had arrived earlier, Ling and Guang, the latter in 1945 and one more daughter, Mi, was born a little later. In the spring of 1948 Hua accepted appointment as a full professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. ...

on March 16, 1950, he was back in Beijing at his alma mater, Quing Hua University ...

In July 1952 the Mathematical Institute of the Academia Sinica came into being, with Hua as its first director. The following year he was one of a 26-member delegation from the Academia Sinica to visit the Soviet Union in order to establish links with Russian science ... the Chinese government ... agreed to a proposal by the Soviet government to award Hua a Stalin Prize. Following Stalin's death the prize was discontinued, and Hua missed out ...

Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains came out in 1958 and was translated into Russian in the same year, followed by an English translation by the American Mathematical Society in 1963. Most of the results of this important monograph are due to Hua, with some overlap with the work of Siegel. The results have applications to representation theory, the theory of homogeneous spaces, and to the theory of automorphic forms. The monograph also includes joint work with K. H. Look on the Poisson and Bergman kernels. ...

[ It was this monograph that provided the basic mathematical structure for the calculation of Force Strength Constants and Particle Masses in my E8 Physic model. I had been led to Hua's work through the work of Armand Wyler, which was done during the 1966-1976 period of the Cultural Revolution in China. I wonder whether, if Hua had been free to work with Wyler during that period, the history of theoretical particle physics might have been quite different. In particular, perhaps the physics community would have accepted such methods of realistic calculation of Force Strengths and Particle Masses. ]

In 1958 he suffered a rude awakening from utopian dreams with the so-called Great Leap Forward ... Despite his eminence and some protection in high places, Hua had to suffer harassment, public abuse, and constant surveillance. ... in the 1960s, accompanied by a team of assistants, [ Hua travelled ] all over China to show workers of all kinds how to apply their reasoning faculty to the solution of shopfloor and everyday problems. Whether in ad hoc problemsolving sessions in factories or open-air teachings, he touched his audiences with the spirit of mathematics to such an extent that he became a national hero and even earned an unsolicited letter of commendation from Mao ...

In 1966 Mao set in motion ... the Cultural Revolution ... Hua spent many of these years under virtual house arrest. He attributed his survival to the personal protection of Chou En-lai. Even so, he was exposed to harassing interrogations, some of his manuscripts (on mathematical economics) were confiscated and are now irretrievably lost ... With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 Hua entered upon the last period of his life. ... In ... 1985, he reported that ... most of his time now was devoted to "non-mathematical activities, which are necessary for my country and my people." He died of a heart attack at the end of a lecture he gave in Tokyo on June 12, 1985. ...".

 

 

 


(*)

Here I would like to apologize for, and retract, my earlier criticism of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Back in the 1990s, I was at Georgia Tech studying physics. Through students there, I got involved with the Falun Gong (Falun Dafa) of Li Hongzhi. At first it seemed to me that Falun Gong was good and that the Chinese Government agreed, but later in the 1990s conflicts began to appear. I was slow to realize what was really happening, and it was 2003 when I realized that Li Hongzhi was seriously misrepresenting himself (for example, saying that he had "... gathered the lives of all of the cosmos's sentient beings and various elements into his body ..." and that he would "... offer you salvation and turn you into Gods. ... Since the beginning of time, not a single God had dared to do this, and such a thing had never occurred. ..."). Now I realize that actions taken by the Chinese Government have been necessary to avoid serious disruption of Harmonious Order, hence this apology and retraction of my earlier criticism. - Frank Dodd (Tony) Smith, Jr. - 13 April 2009.

 The trigger causing Jiang Zemin in July 1999 to ban Falun Dafa was the USA/NATO attack on Serbia in March 1999 coupled with the May 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the subsequent expansion of USA/NATO influence through Ukraine and the Caucasus into Central Asia, threatening China and potentially using Falun Dafa as a vehicle for covert internal splittist activity.