kaos

Heaven’s Mandate
The Mandate of Heaven: Hidden History in the Book of Changes by S J Marshall
(London: Curzon Press; New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)
reviewed by Prof Stephen L Field
(Professor and Chair of Modern Languages & Literatures, Trinity University, San Antonio, tx usa)
The Yijing, or Book of Changes, is to the Chinese people as the Bible is to Western
peoples. It is a sacred text whose words come not from God but from the sagely founders
of the dynasty—culture heroes elevated almost to the status of gods by Confucius and
his school. According to tradition, the earliest layers of the text were written by Chang,
crowned posthumously as Wen, first king of the Zhou dynasty, in the 11 th century bc.
This attribution was not seriously questioned until the introduction of the critical
apparatus of scientific methodology into China in the 20 th century. Questions of origin
were first raised by such scholars as Gu Jiegang and Li Jingchi in the 1930s, and since
then the academic world has considered the sagely authorship of the Yijing to be the
stuff of myth and legend. In the book under review, S J Marshall attempts to overturn
this “complete disavowal of tradition” (p 7) by uncovering historical references to the
founding fathers that have remained hidden in the cryptic text for thousands of years.
The book’s ultimate argument hinges on the author’s interpretation of the text of
hexagram 55 H, “Feng” (]). Two lines in the hexagram depict the Big Dipper
constellation appearing in the middle of the day, which is only possible during a total
eclipse of the sun, according to some. Marshall’s brilliant insight is to identify the word
feng in the same lines not as the common word for “abundance”, which is the standard
interpretation, but as the name of the capital city of Zhou, a feudal state at the western
periphery of the ancient kingdom of Shang. Chang, Chief of the West, had begun to
consolidate his power and move his sphere of influence toward the east at this time, but
died unexpectedly soon after founding his new capital at Feng. Marshall deduces that
Chang’s son, Fa, saw the eclipse as a sign or “mandate” from Heaven that he was chosen
to lead the rebellion against the evil Shou, last king of Shang. A check by Marshall of
modern research verifies the occurrence of a total eclipse in northern China around
noon on June 20, 1070 bc, a year that was also calculated by 4 th century bc calendrical
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