| Chapter 1: | The Transnational Travels of the Yijing 易經 or Classic of Changes |
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difficult to tell which works influenced which scholars and in what particular ways.23
Perhaps the most iconoclastic scholar of Ancient Learning in Japan was Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–1685), who went so far as to create his own version of the Yijing—a dense cosmological work titled Gengen hakkai 原源發機 (Exploring the origins of things and the manifestation of their springs of action), reminiscent of Shao Yong’s Huangji jingshi shu 皇極經世書 (Supreme principles that rule the world). Rather than drawing on the eight trigrams, however, Yamaga invented eight esoteric symbols that resemble fragments of Japan’s indigenously developed kana syllabary—symbols that he used to “convey the essential forms of change in history.”24
Like many Japanese advocates of Ancient Learning, intellectuals who identified themselves with National Learning (Kokugaku 國學) tended to emphasize the superiority of Japanese culture and/or scholarship over that of China albeit not for the same reasons.25 But most early Kokugaku scholars had little interest in the Changes. Motoori Norinaga 本居 宣長 (1730–1801), arguably the most prominent and influential advocate of National Learning, once famously remarked, as part of his attack on the views of Dazai Shundai, that the Yijing had nothing to do with ancient Japan and that it was designed simply “to fool people.”26
But other Tokugawa intellectuals of his time saw more positive links between the Changes and native Japanese traditions. Jiun Sonja 慈雲尊者 (1718–1804), for instance, argued that the images of the Yellow River Chart, which by some accounts provided a model for the eight trigrams, were manifested in the so-called Okitsu-kagami Mirror 八咫鏡, a round bronze object kept at the sacred Ise shrine 伊勢神宮. According to Jiun, the authors of the Changes “copied our ancient divination [methods] of Takam-ga-hara [高天原; a place where the Japanese culture heroes Izanagi and Izanami were thought to reside] in formulating the text and style of the Yijing. The whole book is completely borrowed from us [the Japanese],” he claimed.27 Hirata Atsutane 平田 篤胤 (1776–1843), for his