Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

views, I have been engrossed in the study of the Yijing. I have discovered ideas undiscovered by former Confucians and elaborated ideas not yet fully elaborated.”⁷² In fact, however, there was little new in Lê’s views, virtually all of which had been anticipated by scholars in China, Japan, and Korea.

Like a number of Changes-oriented intellectuals in East Asia at the turn of the century, Lê believed that the Yijing could be used to interpret various Western-inspired ideas, from science and technology to politics and theology. Accordingly, he used concepts from the Yijing to explain Western-style astronomy, geography, physics, and chemistry, claiming, however, that the wonders of the Changes were “ten thousand times more amazing than the Western principles of cannon, ships, cars, and electricity.” Similarly, in the realm of politics, Lê asserted that newly introduced ideas such as democracy, equality, and freedom could be evaluated by reference to the Yijing.⁷³

Concluding Remarks

What I hope to have shown in this chapter, in addition to the extraordinary range of commentarial approaches to the Yijing, is that although there was undeniably a shared culture in premodern East Asia—one that justifies treating the area as a coherent whole—this shared culture can only be seen clearly from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. Moreover, although many elements of this shared culture originated in the area we now refer to as “China,” these elements were seen by intellectuals in premodern East Asia as, in a certain sense, universal markers of civilization or, as expressed in literary Sinitic, “florescence” (華), not necessarily particular to China. To put the matter another way, one of the most important byproducts of classical scholarship in the Sinosphere was a shared sense of cultural refinement and mutual respect among the individual participants.⁷⁴