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explores ways this structural device was expressed in connection with symbolism of mountains.
Chapter 9 takes a detailed look at the line “Piglets, Fishes” in Hexagram #61 and shows that this line indicates connections along an entire series of text loci. In other words, it is like a summary of the preceding system, or better, like a legend that both codes a message in the text and also decodes other text regions. There is an enormous effort in archaic thought to capture modeling properties of relations such as those of container to content, and symbols expressing these relations are found throughout the series isolated in this chapter as a subsystem. Increasingly, it is seen that the Classic of Changes was designed in a modular fashion. Various modular components merge in a nearly seamless way, suggesting perfect mathematical order, stimulating millennia of efforts at finding the algorithm supposed to generate such a sequence. Instead, the present book argues for comprehending the modular style (Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things) of the design as one of its most brilliant features, related to divination projects.
The next two chapters are briefer, summarizing pieces, examining other important text design factors. Chapter 10, “The Four Seasons,” aims at the textual modeling of the yearly round. The text is intended to be taken as a whole, with holistic modeling of seasonal cycles coded in as a whole package. These results are new and unlike traditional accounts of seasonal symbolism; they show structural analysis can discover new aspects of organization by exploratory investigation into its objects. Chapter 11, “Burning Water,” briefly outlines the way materiality, the concrete symbols such as those pertaining to fire and water, provided affordances framing the text’s overall design. These material accompaniments of human lives are also modes of thinking, providing features for organizing various configurations of texts and narratives about those lives, ready to and present at hand for human cultural projects. Examining the transformational matrix generated out of changes of the final two hexagrams goes some way toward understanding the formal structure of the King Wen sequence of hexagrams, in a way suitable to the ethnomathematical context in Bronze Age China.