| Chapter 1: | The Transnational Travels of the Yijing 易經 or Classic of Changes |
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part, went so far as to assert that the ancient Chinese culture hero Fuxi 伏羲, putative inventor of the trigrams, was actually a Shinto deity. In this way, the Yijing became a Japanese creation.28
The Yijing in Korea
In Korea, as in Japan, the Yijing occupied a prominent place in all elite discourses, and it had wide application at every level of society, extending into the realms of language, philosophy, religion, art, music, literature, science, medicine, and social customs. It also played a major role in the geomantic traditions of Korea, as it did to a somewhat lesser degree in all other areas of East Asia.29 The Yijing found its way to Korea no later than the fourth century CE (some argue a few centuries earlier), but it was not until the second half of the Chosŏn period that its influence began to spread dramatically. During most of this time, the Korean government solidly supported an orthodox Zhu Xi–style Neo-Confucianism based roughly on the Chinese model. But from circa 1500 onward, as in Japan, Korean scholars embraced all of the philosophical options that had developed in China from the Song through the Qing dynasties. Moreover, they developed distinctive interpretations of their own.30
The same was naturally true in the realm of Yijing scholarship.31 The writings of Sŏ Kyŏngdŏk 徐敬德 (a.k.a. Hwadam 花潭) (1489–1546), inspired in part by the cosmological speculations of Shao Yong and others, have been viewed by some scholars as the foundation of Korean “Changes Studies.” Like many Yijing scholars of his time and place, he was an exponent of the School of Images and Numbers, and devoted a great deal of attention to numerological works such as the Yellow River Chart and the Luo River Writing. Hwadam was an early exponent of the idea that “material force” (qi in Chinese; ki in Japanese and Korean), generated in the form of yin and yang by the Supreme Ultimate (太極), initiates creation and is “guided” by principle.32
Differing opinions regarding the relationship between principle and material force led to a sixteenth-century development in Korea known as