The ''Taixuanjing'' is a

divination Divination () is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic ritual or practice. Using various methods throughout history, diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a should proceed by reading signs, ...

guide composed by the Confucian writer Yang Xiong (53 BCE18 CE) in the decade prior to the fall of the

Western Han The Han dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC9 AD, 25–220 AD) established by Liu Bang and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) and a warring int ...

dynasty. The first draft of this work was completed in 2 BCE; during the

Jin dynasty Jin may refer to: States Jìn 晉 * Jin (Chinese state) (晉國), major state of the Zhou dynasty, existing from the 11th century BC to 376 BC * Jin dynasty (266–420) (晉朝), also known as Liang Jin and Sima Jin * Jin (Later Tang precursor) ...

, an otherwise unknown person named Fan Wang () salvaged the text and wrote a commentary on it, from which our text survives today.

Content

The ''Taixuanjing'' is a divinatory text similar to, and inspired by, the ''

I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yijing'' ( ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. The ''I Ching'' was originally a divination manual in ...

''. The ''I Ching'' is based on 64 binary hexagrams—characters composed of six horizontal lines, with each line either broken or unbroken. Meanwhile, the ''Taixuanjing'' is based on 81 ternary tetragrams—characters composed of four lines, with each line either unbroken, broken once, or broken twice. Like the ''I Ching'', it may be consulted as an oracle by casting yarrow stalks or a six-faced die to generate numbers which define the lines of the tetragram, which is then looked up in the text. A tetragram drawn without moving lines refers to the tetragram description, while a tetragram drawn with moving lines refers to the specific lines. The monograms are: * the unbroken line ( ⚊) for heaven (), * once broken line ( ⚋) for earth (), * twice broken line ( 𝌀) for man (). Numerically the symbols can be counted as ⚊ = 0, ⚋ = 1, 𝌀 = 2, and grouped into sets of four to count from 0 to 80. This is clearly intentional as this passage from chapter 8 of the ''Taixuanjing'' points out the principle of carrying and place value.

Translation

An English translation by Michael Nylan was published in 1993. *

Unicode

In the Unicode Standard, the Tai Xuan Jing Symbols

block Block or blocked may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Broadcasting * Block programming, the result of a programming strategy in broadcasting * W242BX, a radio station licensed to Greenville, South Carolina, United States known as ''96.3 ...

is an extension of the I Ching symbols. Their Chinese aliases most accurately reflect their interpretation; for example, the Chinese alias of code point U+1D300 is "rén", which translates into English as ''man'' and yet the English alias is "MONOGRAM FOR EARTH".

Block

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Tai Xuan Jing Symbols block:

References

External links

*
《太玄經》
- Full text in Chinese

Chinese text with matching English vocabulary {{DEFAULTSORT:Taixuanjing Han dynasty texts Chinese literature Chinese books of divination 1st-century books Unicode blocks