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scholars to have been the time of the conquest. Section I of the book, “The Mandate of
Heaven”, frames this basic argument and buttresses it with clever readings from other
hexagram texts.
Section II, “Further Mysteries of the Changes”, continues the same line of reasoning
by seeking in other hexagrams historical references to events of the conquest. For example,
hexagram 36 U, “Ming Yi” (HI), has always baffled scholars. Ming, an ideograph
composed of the pictographs for the sun and the moon, usually means “bright” or “light”.
Yi is the pictograph of an arrow with a cord tied around the shaft and means “to wound,
injure”. Since many of the lines in the hexagram clearly picture a bird being hunted,
modern scholars have speculated that mingyi is the forgotten name of a bird, specifically
the “calling pheasant”. Marshall does not completely refute this interpretation, but he
believes the literal meaning of wounding or “darkening” the light refers also to the
phenomenon of the eclipse. To bolster his reading he makes another brilliant deduction,
this time in reference to an ancient Chinese myth. The earliest variant of a popular
myth asks literally “why did the Great Archer shoot the sun” and, after having done so,
“why did the crow lose its feathers” (my translation). The standard answer, verified in
later variants of the myth, is because there were ten suns in the sky whose intensity was
scorching the earth. Feathers scattered because the ten suns were in reality ten sunravens
who roosted in the east before one normally took flight every morning of the
ten-day week. Marshall believes the later versions of the myth were accretions meant to
explain an occurrence whose purpose had been totally forgotten, namely, that the mythical
archer shot at the black bird who had eaten the sun, thus killing it and releasing the sun
from the eclipse.
Section III of the book is a collection of five appendices that clarifies such things as
“genealogical matters” (the family tree of King Wen), the “sexagenary cycle” (the sixtyterm
numbering system of the ancient Chinese), and the “sinological maze of Wilhelm-
Baynes” (the puzzling format of the most popular English translation of the Yijing, that
by Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes). Following this last section are over fifty pages
of notes, an extensive bibliography of Western language works on the Yijing and related
subjects, and a comprehensive index.
S J Marshall’s intriguing work will be read with great interest by Yijing aficionados,
and it will also attract the attention of contemporary scholars. The former will be
immensely grateful for the clarity that Marshall brings to such an enigmatic text. The
latter will initially scoff at the absence of Chinese language sources and point out a
contradiction here or an anachronism there before grudgingly admitting that the thesis
is basically sound. Everyone who reads The Mandate of Heaven will return to the Book of
Changes with a renewed historical perspective.
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