"... In China, the theory of five elements coexisted early withthe theory of two forces ...
... The implications of the theory are displayed in the great bookof divination, the I Ching, ,
,the "Book of Changes." ...". - see web pageat www.friesian.com/yinyang.htm
The binary Yin-Yang produces the 2^6 = 64 hexagrams of the IChing, also known as Yijing,, which can be put in a symmetricalpattern known as the Earlier Heaven pattern
attributed to China's First Emperor, Fu Xi (r. 2953-2838BC) - 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 threegreatest 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 periodof intense philosophical debate known as the Hundred Schools ... oneof the three traditions of ancient Daoism ... was ... HuangLao,meaning the philosophy of the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, ... theothers being those of the Laozi text itself and the ... mysticZhuangzi ...
HuangLao ... was the philosophy or technique of greatest interestto the early Han emperors Wen (reigned 179-157 B.C.E.) and Jing(reigned 156-141 B.C.E.) ...[and]... Liu An (ca. 180-122B.C.E.), the Han prince who sponsored the syncretic Daoist bookHuainanzi ... Sima Qian .. son ...[of]... Sima Tan...[used]... HuangLao principles ...[and was]... thegrand astrologer of Emperor Wu ... (reigned 140-87 B.C.E.)...[who]... adopted ... Confucianism ...
After the imperial sponsorship of Confucianism ... the HaungLaoDaoist tradition became more and more associated with what eventuallywas to be recognized as religious Daoism and by the third and fourthcenturies C.E., it was virtually forgotten ... until the discovery ofthe Mawangdui ... cache of manuscripts ... in late 1973 ...."- see "Five Lost Classics: Tao, Huang-Lao, andYin-Yang in Han China" by Robin D. S. Yates (Ballantine1997).
In December 1973, archaeologists excavating Han tomb #3 atMawangdui, in Changsha, Hunan ... discovered ... in the tomb of LiCang, Lord of Dai (d. 168 B.C.), more than twenty texts written onsilk, including by far the earliest manuscript copy of the Yijing orClassic of Changes and two copies of the Laozi ...
The Mawangdui Yijing manuscript was written on two pieces ofsilk...
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 themanuscript text and the received [ King Wen ] text lies inthe sequence of hexagrams ... the received [ King Wen ]sequence ... probably .... was in existence ... well before ... thetime that this manuscript was copied ...[ since ]... In A.D.279, an even earlier manuscript text of the Yijing was discoverd inthe tomb of King Xiang of Wei, who died in 296 B.C. ... this text wasidentical 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 ... generallyrefer[red] to ... as Ersanzi wen ... or The Several DisciplesAsked ... The text is in the form of numerous quotations of Confucius... regarding the Yijing ...
The second piece of silk ... contains ... text divided into fouror 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.85BCE), in his well-known and often-quoted Records of the GrandHistorian (Shiji) ... identifyi[es] Confucius' ancestors asmembers of the Royal State of Song. It notes as well that his greatgrandfather, 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' recordedage at death, 'seventy-two,' is a 'magic number' with far-reachingsignificance in early Chinese literature. ... tradition has it thathe studied ritual with the Daoist Master Lao Dan, music with ChangHong, and the lute with Music-master Xiang. In his middle ageConfucius is supposed to have gathered about him a group of discipleswhom he taught and also to have devoted himself to political mattersin Lu. ... At the age of fifty, when Duke Ding of Lu was on thethrone, Confucius' talents were recognized and he was appointedMinister of Public Works and then Minister of Crime. But Confuciusapparently offended members of the Lu nobility who were vying withDuke Ding for power ... and he was subsequently forced to leaveoffice 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 butmeeting instead with indifference and, occasionally, severe hardshipand danger. ... Confucius returned to Lu in 484 BCE and spent theremainder of his life teaching, putting in order the Book of Songs,the Book of Documents, and other ancient classics, as well as editingthe Spring and Autumn Annals, the court chronicle of Lu. Sima Qian'saccount also provides background on Confucius' connection to theearly canonical texts on ritual and on music (the latter of which waslost at an early date). Sima Qian claims, moreover, that, "In hislater years, Confucius delighted in the Yi" ...[ I Ching orYijing ]... divination manual popular to this day in Chinaand in the West. ..." - see web page atplato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/
In Analects ( Lunyu ) VII - see web page atclassics.mit.edu/Confucius/analects.2.2.html - Confucius isquoted as saying:
If you take the date of origin of the 8x8 = 2^6 = 64 element IChing as time of the First Emperor Fu Xi (around 2900 BC)
then it is likely that the Shinto 128 element Japanese FutomaniDivination and the16 element Islamic Ilm Al Raml Divination systemsare younger derivatives using expansion (doubling) or contraction(8+8 instead of 8x8), respectively.
However - see "In Search of the Cradle ofCivilization" by Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley (Quest 1995)-
"... The Rig-Veda is the oldest book in the Sanskritlanguage, indeed in any Indo-European language. More than that, if weare correct, it is the oldest book in the world ... The factthat the Rig-Veda mentions a stellar configuration that correspondsto a date from 6000 B.C. to 7000 B.C. ..."
so that the 64 element I Ching may have been derived from theRig-Veda, whose first sukt has 240 elements, as does the root vectorpolytope of the E8 Lie algebra.
Further, the Rig-Veda (and consequently all the otherDivination systems, including the I Ching) may have been derived froman even older (although transmitted orally rather than in writing)Divination system, African IFA, whose 16x16 = 2^8 = 256 elementscorrespond to the 256-dimensional Cl(8) Clifford algebra from which248-dimensional E8 can be constructed.
Since the 64 element I Ching can be regarded as the Heart ofthe 256 element IFA
( for example, in the E8 Physics model based on the 256 elementsof Cl(8),
Gravity comes from a 15-dimensional Conformal Group related to a64-dimensional Cl(6)
and the Standard Model Group is related to another 64-dimensionalCl(6)
and the Fermion Particles, Fermion AntiParticles, and Kaluza-KleinSpacetime each correspond to 64-dimensional subspaces of E8)
From recent China, I would suggest:
In addition, I would suggest a less-well-known individual:
- see Biographical Memoir at www.nap.edu [ TheNational 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 ofChina ... in 1910 it was little more than a village where Hua'sfather managed a general store with mixed success. The family waspoor throughout Hua's formative years; in addition, he was a frailchild afflicted by a succession of illnesses, culminating in typhoidfever that caused paralysis of his left leg ...
Hua's formal education was brief ... the first degree he wouldreceive was an honorary doctorate from the University of Nancy inFrance in 1980 ...
The Jintan Middle School that opened in 1922 just when he hadcompleted elementary school had a well-qualified and demandingmathematics teacher who recognized Hua's talent and nurtured it. ...Hua learned early on to make up for the lack of books, and later ofscientific literature, by tackling problems directly from firstprinciples ...
Hua gained admission to the Chinese Vocational College inShanghai, and there he distinguished himself by winning a nationalabacus competition ... living costs proved too high for his means andHua was forced to leave a term before graduating. After failing tofind a job in Shanghai, Hua returned home in 1927 to help in hisfather's store. In that same year also, Hua married Xiaoguan Wu; thefollowing year a daughter, Shun, was born and their first son,Jundong, arrived in 1931. ...
[In 1930] ... Hua showed in a short note in ... theShanghai periodical Science ... that a certain 1926 paper claiming tohave solved the quintic was fundamentally flawed. Hua's lucidanalysis caught the eye of a discerning professor at Quing HuaUniversity in Beijing, and in 1931 Hua was invited, despite his lackof formal qualification and not without some reservations on the partof several faculty members, to join the mathematics department there.He began as a clerk in the library, and then moved to become anassistant in mathematics; by September1932 he was an instructor andtwo 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 toCambridge, England, and he arrived in 1936 to spend two fruitfulyears there. ... Hardy assured Hua that he could gain a Ph.D. in twoyears with ease, but Hua could not afford the registration fee anddeclined; of course, he gave quite different reasons for hisdecision. ...
the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 caused him much anxiety. Heleft Cambridge in 1938 to return to his old university, now as a fullprofessor. However, Quing Hua University was no longer in Beijing;with vast portions of China under Japanese occupation, it hadmigrated to Kunming, the capital of the southern province of Yunan,where it combined with several other institutions to form thetemporary Associated University of the South West. There Hua and hisfamily remained through the World War II years ...
Hua spent three months in Russia in the spring of 1946 atVinogradov's invitation. Mathematical interaction apart, he wasimpressed by the organization of scientific activity there ...
In September 1946, shortly after returning from Russia, Hua ...depart[ed] for Princeton ...[where]... C. L. Siegelwas working ... along somewhat similar lines ... bringing with himprojects not only in matrix theory but also in functions of severalcomplex variables and in group theory. At this time civil war wasraging in China and it was not easy to travel; therefore, the Chineseauthorities 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 JohnsHopkins University on his lame leg that much improved his gaitthereafter, to his and his family's delight. Also in 1947 theirdaughter Su was born; two more sons had arrived earlier, Ling andGuang, the latter in 1945 and one more daughter, Mi, was born alittle later. In the spring of 1948 Hua accepted appointment as afull professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign....
on March 16, 1950, he was back in Beijing at his alma mater, QuingHua University ...
In July 1952 the Mathematical Institute of the Academia Sinicacame into being, with Hua as its first director. The following yearhe was one of a 26-member delegation from the Academia Sinica tovisit the Soviet Union in order to establish links with Russianscience ... the Chinese government ... agreed to a proposal by theSoviet government to award Hua a Stalin Prize. Following Stalin'sdeath the prize was discontinued, and Hua missed out ...
Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables inthe Classical Domains came out in 1958 and was translated intoRussian in the same year, followed by an English translation by theAmerican Mathematical Society in 1963. Most of the results of thisimportant monograph are due to Hua, with some overlap with the workof Siegel. The results have applications to representation theory,the theory of homogeneous spaces, and to the theory of automorphicforms. The monograph also includes joint work with K. H. Look on thePoisson 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 theso-called Great Leap Forward ... Despite his eminence and someprotection in high places, Hua had to suffer harassment, publicabuse, and constant surveillance. ... in the 1960s, accompanied by ateam of assistants, [ Hua travelled ] all over China to showworkers of all kinds how to apply their reasoning faculty to thesolution of shopfloor and everyday problems. Whether in ad hocproblemsolving sessions in factories or open-air teachings, hetouched his audiences with the spirit of mathematics to such anextent that he became a national hero and even earned an unsolicitedletter of commendation from Mao ...
In 1966 Mao set in motion ... the Cultural Revolution ... Huaspent many of these years under virtual house arrest. He attributedhis survival to the personal protection of Chou En-lai. Even so, hewas exposed to harassing interrogations, some of his manuscripts (onmathematical economics) were confiscated and are now irretrievablylost ... With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 Hua enteredupon the last period of his life. ... In ... 1985, he reportedthat ... most of his time now was devoted to "non-mathematicalactivities, which are necessary for my country and my people." Hedied of a heart attack at the end of a lecture he gave in Tokyo onJune 12, 1985. ...".
Back in the 1990s, I was at Georgia Tech studying physics. Throughstudents there, I got involved with the Falun Gong (Falun Dafa) of LiHongzhi. At first it seemed to me that Falun Gong was good and thatthe Chinese Government agreed, but later in the 1990s conflicts beganto appear. I was slow to realize what was really happening, and itwas 2003 when I realized that Li Hongzhi was seriouslymisrepresenting himself (for example, saying that he had "...gathered the lives of all of the cosmos's sentient beings and variouselements into his body ..." and that he would "... offer yousalvation and turn you into Gods. ... Since the beginning of time,not a single God had dared to do this, and such a thing had neveroccurred. ..."). Now I realize that actions taken by the ChineseGovernment have been necessary to avoid serious disruption ofHarmonious Order, hence this apology and retraction of my earliercriticism. - Frank Dodd (Tony) Smith, Jr. - 13 April 2009.
The trigger causing Jiang Zemin in July 1999 to ban FalunDafa was the USA/NATO attack on Serbia in March 1999 coupled with theMay 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and thesubsequent expansion of USA/NATO influence through Ukraine and theCaucasus into Central Asia, threatening China and potentially usingFalun Dafa as a vehicle for covert internal splittist activity.