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interpretation, or rather a method of exploration, of the connectivities and topography of the text as a whole.
As a result of this deliberate methodological choice of approach to this classic, one is better able to visualize the multiple domains of designed modules integrating ingeniously as a comprehensive structural model of an entire cultural universe, including significant successes in modeling social experience in an archaic culture, or the trajectory of an individual through the age groups successively traversed in the lifetime of any member. By isolating the social forms of an individual life, against the background of the archaic cosmology, as the structural preconditions for each randomized divination, this analysis succeeds in illuminating dimensions of early Zhou life that one otherwise cannot access through treatment of other historical or archaeological materials of the time. This provides a penetrating anthropological view into the conditions of thought in an archaic society to a degree previously unavailable. Indeed, the Classic of Changes is a bold and powerful attempt at modeling an ancient culture in a way never before conceived sociologically, a profound autoethnography that teaches about the philosophical anthropology of its makers and prepares the way for further understanding of later classical texts that in all likelihood were modeled on very similar matrix principles. One must acknowledge an astonishing level of sophistication in the structuring of this text and draw insights from it concerning the ways a divination culture classifies and comes to terms with the fluctuating, omen-bearing historical material of individual human experience.
Map for Reading
Readers of this book are going to confront in some detail an archaic text presenting unusual problems of interpretation because of its unique composition and clever design. Each chapter here takes a focused approach to the classical text and provides a background for performing the sort of analysis that would produce such a focused outcome. To bring the Zhou yi’s compass to a new focus in each of the chapters entails some repetition relative to other chapters, but from the rhythm of this redundancy,