Reflective Ontology and Intuitive Credibility in Chinese Six Lines Prediction

Abstract

Any form of divination can be intuitively compelling without the need for ontological elaboration, but practices like Chinese six lines prediction involve complex ontological accounts, raising the question of what effect this has on divination’s authority and persuasiveness. The explicit ontology of six lines prediction appears to make it especially persuasive, because it provides a coherent model of epistemology and causation that is readily comparable to scientific observation and description based on constant principles. Meanwhile, six lines prediction’s mathematical character adds to its intuitive authority. By relying on a predetermined system of correlates, it creates the impression that the diviner is not the source of the divinatory result or its interpretation. This likely allows six lines prediction to flourish in an environment in which it is officially classified as ‘superstition’.

Reduction, Generation, and Truth

“…Whilst such works represent contemporary syntheses of techniques, and are explicitly connected to aspects of contemporary life and modern scientific knowledge, they do not fundamentally differ in interpretive methods from earlier techniques. The account presented here is based on my work with a diviner, Master Tao, and his students and clients in Hangzhou (Matthews 2016;2017b;n.d.). Contemporary six lines practitioners like him position themselves in a technical tradition going back to the work of Jing Fang, a 1 st century BCE Han scholar who married the Yijing's trigrams to the cosmology of qi and five phases, creating the 'attached stem' (najia) system of divination.…”

“…9 This approach is anathema to Willis and Curry, who contrast 'scientific' astrology with what they see as its true 'divinatory' character. This is significant, because as the example of six lines prediction above shows, the reductive mode of divination exhibits an unavoidably calculatory quality based on the specific application of universal constant principles; this, combined with the origin story of the hexagrams as derived from natural observation (another similarity to astrology), facilitates the ready creation of close parallels between it and physics (Matthews 2017b;2017a, 183-87). 10 It is unrealistic to contend, as Willis and Curry argue is the case for 'true' divination (e.g.…”