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"Secret Echoes and Complementary Correspondences"— A Chinese Theory of Reading

Reading a Chinese Poem

When we open a book and read its words, phrases, and sentences, other books — from antiquity, from the recent past, or even in foreign languages — will be opened simultaneously, and words, phrases, or sentences from these will at once appear in our consciousness along with those in front of our eyes, trembling, ready to speak to us. As a voice leaps out from the black type and white spaces to speak to us, other voices answer — as echoes from the distance, or as a quiet prompting, or as a loud protest — moving us beyond here and now into other spaces and other times. By so doubling, these other voices bring about changes, like a huge symphony playing inaudibly to our inner ear, converging into a confluent, dense music.

This reading experience is also the experience of the poet, who must, in the process of writing, become his own reader and listen inwardly to his own voices, now externalized, over and over again. Let us take, for example, the first poem, "Masculine Whole," of Ssu-k'ung T'u's (837–908) Ars Poetica, The Twenty-four Orders of Poetry :^[1]

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Take the first phrase "Great use." Immediately, Chuang-tzu (ca. 399–295 B.C. ) the Taoist speaks from antiquity:

There are hawthorns, pear trees, orange trees, pomelo trees, gourds, and others. The fruits are knocked down when they are ripe, and the trees are abused. The large branches are broken, and the smaller ones torn away. The life of these plants is suffering, because of their productive ability. They, therefore, cannot complete their natural term of existence, but come to a premature end in the middle of their time, and bring upon themselves destructive treatment from society. It is so with all things. For a long time I learned to be useless. There were several occasions on which I was nearly destroyed. Now I succeed in being useless, which is of the greatest use to me.^[2]

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What does the last phrase "being useless, which is of the greatest use" mean, and how is it related to "Great use changes outside" in the poem?

When Chuang-tzu used a word or a phrase, each of the words or phrases arose in his consciousness only after they were linked to certain experiences, some of which came to him through other words or phrases. Or we can say that each word already carried in itself the "meanings" of other "worlds," "things," or "texts." What is the relationship, we may ask, between "being useless . . . is of the greatest use" and the famous Taoist pairs wu-wei/wei (

, nonaction/ action) and wu-chih/ta-chih (, no knowledge/great knowledge)? Ssu-k'ung T'u's phrase "Great use" is lifted from Chuang-tzu's chapter "The Human World," in which a central theme is "to receive the myriad things with a void bosom" through "the Fast of the Mind," where "bright light" comes through "an empty room," where one's mind "can gallop abroad while one's body remains sitting."^[3] In Ssu-k'ung T'u's poem, we find an easy echo: "Return to the void into the Undifferentiated Whole." Thus, clearly, "being useless" and "emptiness or void" must be related. As a matter of fact, "being useless is of the greatest use" cannot and should not be understood in terms of the normal moral or value judgment; it escapes all ready-made conceptions. More importantly, it cannot be extended to mean "poetry is useless." This kind of black and white demarcation, according to the Taoists, is the beginning of dissolution and fragmentation.

And yet, in spite of this reasoning, we cannot stop the negativity of this phrase from making itself felt. Interestingly, as if long anticipated, Chuang-tzu hid in another chapter an answer to this challenging voice:

Chuang-tzu was walking on a mountain, when he saw a large tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A woodcutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it. When he was asked about the reason, he said that it was good for nothing. Then Chuang-tzu said: "This tree, because of its uselessness, is able to complete its natural term of existence." Having left the mountain, Chuang-tzu lodged in the house of his friend. The friend was glad and ordered his waiting lad to kill a goose and boil it. The lad said: "One of our geese can cackle, and the other cannot; which of them shall I kill?" The host said: "Kill the one that cannot cackle." Next day, his disciple asked Chuang-tzu, saying: "Yesterday we saw the mountain tree that can complete its natural term of existence because of its uselessness. Now for

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the same reason, our host's goose died. Which of these positions would you, master, prefer to be in? Chuang-tzu laughed and said: "I would prefer to be in a position which is between the useful and the useless. This seems to be the right position, but is really not so. Therefore, it would not put me beyond trouble. But he who makes excursion in Tao and Te is not exposed to any trouble. He is above the reach of both praise and detraction, now like a dragon, now like a snake. He changes with time and has no insistence. He is now high and now low, taking harmony as the measure. He enjoys himself at ease with the author of things. He treats things as things, and is not being treated as a thing by them. What can involve him in trouble?"^[4]

Things are different (each possessing its own nature, occupying its own place) and yet undifferentiated (when we stop imposing upon them the distinction between subject and object, right and wrong). "Great use" (or "small use"), "usefulness," and "uselessness" are not to be determined by one predetermined yardstick.

Hui-tzu said to Chuang-tzu: "The king of Wei sent me some calabash seeds. I planted them and they bore a fruit as big as a five-bushel measure. I used it as a vessel for holding water, but it was not solid enough to hold it. I cut the calabash in two for ladles, but each of them was too shallow to hold anything. Because of this uselessness, I knocked them to pieces." "Sir," said Chuang-tzu, "it was rather you did not know how to use large things. . . . Why did you not make of it a large bottle-gourd, by means of which you could float in rivers and lakes?"^[5]

Everything has its own natural endowment, its own natural inclination, its own suitability. If we leave each thing to perform its own natural inclination, then everything can be free in its own development and movement. The conceptions of "great use" and "small use" are born from an accentual system that denies each thing the possibility of remaining the way it is according to its natural measure. Chuang-tzu, to deframe the fetters inherent in an accentual system, therefore, begins by diffusing viewpoints; he asks that we do not discriminate that and this as opposites so as to open up a middle ground, a huan-chung (ring/center), whereby we can respond to the endless changes:

The possible is possible; the impossible is impossible. Tao evolves and sequences follow. Things have names and are what they are. What are they? They are what they are. What are they

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not? They are not what they are not. Everything is what it is, and does what it can do. There is nothing that is not something. There is nothing that cannot do something. Therefore, a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness, beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction. Construction is the same as destruction. But all things, without regard to their construction and destruction, may again be united into one. . . . Therefore, the sages harmonize the systems of right and wrong, and rest in the evolution of nature. This is called following two courses at once.^[6]

As we can now see, in Ssu-k'ung T'u's poem the phrases like "ring/ center," "ten thousand / things in the world," and "come/it/no/end" (or, "What comes this way comes without end") are not independent at all, and they cannot be isolated to assume autonomous circles of meanings. From the beginning, they brought along with them echoes from other texts. Similarly, the word hun (

, "Undifferentiated Whole") must be read together with the Taoist notions of "void/ empty," of "Not to discriminate that and this as opposites," and of "following two courses at once." The appearance of this word, like the appearance of any other word, is already infiltrated or invaded by words and phrases from other texts. It is this interillumination and intercorrespondence between these words and phrases, including the stories and parables that gave rise to them, that has helped to weave the continually changing and developing "meanings" of the word hun .

Echoes come not only from Chuang-tzu but from other writers as well. When the word "void" occurs, we hear Chuang-tzu's voice and, simultaneously, the voices of Lu Chi (261–303) and Liu Hsieh (ca. 465–520):

Erected in the center-domain (center of the ring) . . . suspend vision, bring back hearing, become lost in contemplation to reach out for contact — there spirit gallops into millions of miles of space.

Trying the Void to demand Being; knocking upon Profound Silence for Sound.^[7]
Lu Chi, "Wen Fu"

The perceptual activity travels far in spirit. Completely stilled, contemplation centered, it reaches out to a thousand years . . . The principle of perceptual activity is miraculous when the

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spirit consorts with the eternal world . . . to develop one's perceptual activity, the most important thing is emptiness and quiescence.^[8]
Liu Hsieh, The Dragon-Carving of the Literary Mind

With these echoes, then, the phrases in Ssu-k'ung T'u's poem, "All phenomena now contained / it stretches proudly across space" (possess / get-ready / ten thousand / things in the world; lie across / exhaustively / primary / space), now receive much larger symphonic play from different levels of overlay. Indeed, even more voices and echoes, from all directions, came to dominate the poet's consciousness (and, in turn, ours) — voices from essays on poetry and painting written before Ssu-k'ung T'u's time. And — at least for readers such as us — this would be true not only of those written before but also those written afterwards. The many works modeled after The Twenty-four Orders of Poetry , such as Yang T'ing-tzu's Explaining the Twenty-four Orders of Poetry (1815) and Tseng Chi-tse's (1839–1890) To Develop Twenty-four Orders of Poetry , offer us emulative and commenting voices. And if these anachronistic voices help to disclose certain hidden "meanings" in Ssu-k'ung T'u's text, then we feel that we cannot be so sure such voices did not at one point possess the poet's compositional consciousness under certain guises. Words and phrases may have, and at the same time may not have, definite meanings. There is a strange neutrality in the words; meanings flow in and out of them.

In a sense, none of the words appearing in a text can claim to be totally new and independent. The appearance of any word entails double, triple, and even multiple associations. When I say, "This is black," you will automatically and simultaneously think of "white" to make the concept "black" possible, even though the statement points to black, and black alone. If the object of my reference is not an absolute black — there is no such thing as an absolute black in nature — you will think of other shades of color aside from white. The moment you hesitate, saying "Is this truly black?", many other contending voices will instantaneously emerge in your consciousness.

The situation of doubling, tripling, and multiplying associations in a literary text is even more complicated; the spaces and times into which a text might lead are far and wide. What we have rehearsed here is only a small part of the entire echoing phenomenon.

Let us first finish going through Ssu-k'ung Tu's poem. In Hsiunghun (

, masculine whole), Hsiung immediately evokes echoes from the I Ching . In line 4, Ssu-k'ung T'u says, "Amass power (Chien ,

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) to become masculine," (Hsiung , ), which echoes, and (appropriately) is echoed by this line from the first hexagram, Ch'ien (): "Heaven moves with power (Chien , ); the superior man strengthens himself tirelessly." With this added echo, the tenor of "stretching proudly across Space" is even clearer. Our first impression of "True Body" () is that it is Buddhist, as indeed it can be, in the way that it was used by Prince Hsiao T'ung of Liang (501–531) in his exegesis of the meaning of "Two-Sacca"^[9] as "not separated from True Body." But because of the echo of "Heaven moves with power," another clear voice emerges. It is the voice of art critic, monk Yen Tsung (ca. 627–649), of the T'ang Dynasty: "Chiang Chi's brush work is strong and powerful, his flair and spirit crisp. When he depicts mountains and rivers, he brings out their true bodies." This voice, in turn, closely echoes another poem from The Twenty-four Orders of Poetry titled "Strong and Powerful" ():

Spirit moves like the vast space.
Breath moves like a rainbow.
The Wu Gorges, deep, thousands of feet.
Clouds run, bringing along winds.
Sip the true, nourish the strong;
Store the plain, keep to the inside.
This, like the movement of power,
Is called preserving the masculine.
Sky and earth merge with it.
Spirit and change function in it.
Take it to actualize.
Master it to complete.
                                       Poem No. 8

This poem within the series seems to be the best supplementary footnote to the word chien (

, power). Interestingly, the idea of "true" or "real" in this echo points us directly back to the Taoist Laotzu's notion of P'u (, Uncarved Block) and "the empty within"; this, in turn, means that the idea of "power," which comes from the I Ching , now also has the parameters of the Taoists — in particular, the dependence on "achieving masculinity" by "guarding femininity" (). This interdependence, no doubt, resounds with the "nondiscrimination of opposites" to arrive at the center of the ring and the natural balance achieved by traveling two courses simultaneously. The echoes and correspondences come full circle and continue to expand — doubling, tripling — as they permutate into patterns of meanings.

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"Masculine whole" is the first order in the twenty-four orders of poetry. In this, we find a distinctive echo of the fact that the hexagram Ch'ien , the first of the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching , leads the other sixty-three hexagrams. Likewise, "Masculine Whole" leads the other twenty-three orders of poetry. As will become clear in subsequent pages, the structural activity of The Twenty-four Orders of Poetry in many ways resembles that of the hexagrams of the I Ching .

I will next talk about internal correspondence. By external correspondence, we normally mean voices occurring outside the text, but here I want it to mean voices of other people evoked by the text and to reserve the term "internal correspondence" to mean echoes within the author's own corpus of works, either (1) within a specific text, or group of texts, or (2) in the author's other writings. The correspondence of the poem "Strong and Powerful" to the phrase "True Body" of the first poem is a clear example of the first type. The phrase "Hsiang-wai " (

, beyond form or shape) no doubt echoes the different levels of the meaning of form in the word "hexagram" (in Chinese the word "Hsiang ," , is often attached to the word "Kua," , translated now as hexagram) and also echoes Liang Wu-ti's (464–549) use of the term in the lines: "Open the auspicious trace in the heavens; flash the spiritual meaning from beyond the visible form"^[10] (a term used in connection with the discussion of things Buddhist). But more relevant is the internal echo from Ssu-k'ung T'u's own prose:

Tai Jung-chou said, "The scene of poets, like 'the warm sun in the blue fields,' and 'smoke engendered from pearls,' is visible but not placeable before the eyes." Form beyond form, scene beyond scene : it is not speakable.^[11]

In another place, Ssu-k'ung T'u compares the ability to write good poetry to that of distinguishing extremely subtle differences in tastes and flavors, and only with this ability can one arrive at what he calls "taste beyond taste " and "the finest reach beyond rhythm ."^[12]

The internal echoes and correspondences can be seen as the birthing and branching activities of a main growth — one gives rise to two, two to four, four to eight, and so forth. They form a kind of back-and-forth talk about an idea, an aside, or an extension of an idea. In the I Ching , not only can the first hexagram give rise to other hexagrams, but other hexagrams can give rise to each other; indeed, all hexagrams are interconnected and interrelated. We will examine the full working of this system in the second and third parts of this essay.

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The internal echoes in The Twenty-four Orders of Poetry work in many ways, like those in the I Ching . For example, "Return to void" in the poem gives rise to the second poem in the series, "Thinning Out," and "What comes this way comes without end" is picked up by the tenth poem, "Naturalness." Indeed, a careful examination of the twenty-four poems will reveal a surprising branching and connecting web at work, as has been cogently argued by Yang Ting-tzu.^[13]

Part of the reason for my proposing the activities of "secret echoes and complementary correspondences" as central to our understanding of the making and unmaking of a text is to point out the fact that Chinese literary theory and criticism from the very beginning has always been inclined to favor the total activity that occurs outside the word and phrases of a text. What we read is not one poem but a fabric of many poems, the concerto and symphony comprised of many other poems and voices. The mode of interlinear commentary so widely practiced in classical Chinese text editing is not a kind of mechanical source-hunting exercise, as it has generally been viewed, but an effort to re-create the symphony of voices, images, and poetic forms that the editor-reader of the texts heard and noted outside the text or believed must have originally occurred in the wide horizon of the author's consciousness. Let me use this mode of interlinear commentary to orchestrate an apparently simple poem on departure by Li Po (701–762) of the T'ang Dynasty:

          Taking Leave of a Friend

Green mountains lie across the north wall.
White water winds the east city .

from  The Songs of the South
     Up the mountains, down the rivers,
     See friends home.

Li Ling (B.C. ?–74): "Parting from Su Wu"
     Hand in hand up the bridge over the river.

Ying Yang (died 236): "Farewell"
     Wide and far the water of the long river
     Nine turns toward the northeast. . . .
     Faraway into the road of a million miles.
     No means to return.

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Lu Chi (261–303): "Parting"
     Riding out to the east city,
     I see you off to the brim of the winding river.

Yin Chung-wen (?–407): "Parting"
     Before the water about to see you off.

Here once we part
Lone tumbleweed, a million miles to travel .

from Nineteen Old Poems
     Tumbleweed, cut off from roots,
     Blown about, fearful of long winds.

Ts'ao Chih (192–232): "Woe indeed!"
     Tumbleweed, cut off from roots,
     Blown up and down scurrying with long winds.

Ssu-ma Piao (?–306): "Parting"
     Autumn tumbleweed; alone, who would pity?
     Blown up and down, turning with winds. . . .
     Into the distance, no means to return.

Pao Chao (421–465): "Rhymeprose on Wu-cheng"
     A lone tumbleweed trembles all alone,
     Startled sands fly from their seats.

Wu Yün (469–520): "Parting"
     Flow and turn, let loose like a flying tumbleweed.

Wang Pao (513?–76?): "Parting"
     Blown sand is like a canopy,
     Rolling tumbleweed, a turning wheel.

Floating clouds, a wanderer's mood.
Setting sun, an old friend's feelings.
We wave hands, you go away from here.
Neigh, neigh goes the horse at parting .

From Nineteen Old Poems
     Walk on again walk on.
     From you, separated alive.
     Between us, a million odd miles,
     Each at one end of the sky
     The roads are difficult and long.
      .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

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     To meet: where, how, and when?
     Floating clouds veil the white sun.
     The wanderer: no thought of return.
     Thinking of you makes me old
     Months, years: all of a sudden: dusk.

Li Ling: "For Su Wu"
     Oh, the thought of you!
     Sun dusks, but I will not lower the blind. . . .
     Hesitating and not to return —
     Floating clouds, a thousand miles a day
     Who knows my heart is sad? . . .

Li Ling: "Another Poem for Su Wu"
     Looking up to see floating clouds speed.
     Almost instantly, we crossed each other . . .
     and each of us at separate ends of the sky.

Hsü Kan (171–218): "Parting"
     Floating clouds, how vast, how vast!
     Would that through them I could see my tidings
     They drift and drift, and none can be sent.
     And it is vain to linger here and pine.
     Others part but reunite:
     Only for you there is no date of return . . .

Liu Shuo (431–453): "Restrain Tears to Go on the Road"
     Sad winds blow up floating clouds.
     Bleak! a million miles of separation!

Shen Yo (441–513): "Parting from a Friend"
     Floating clouds, one south, one north . . .
     Stars of Ts'an  and Shang  never to meet

Chiang Yen (444–505): "After Ancient Miscellaneous Poem
     Yellow clouds covering a thousand miles
     Wanderer: when will you return?

Hsiao Shen (479–529): "Parting"
     Setting sun: we hold the reins
     And make separation at the river-bank.

So much for the echo of motifs and images, now an echo in form and stylistic accent:

Yü Hsin (513–581): "Parting from Chou Hung-cheng"
     North of Fu feng, at the Stone Bridge.

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Before Han-ku, the ancient Pass.
Once we part here,
To meet again? How many years?
Yellow geese look back, flying.
They linger, heart-smitten, dejected.
I know no end to sorrow.
In vain, to abate the strings of the lute.

The interlinear commentator is, of course, still limited in recreating the voices that originally occur within the wide field of the poet's consciousness. In the case of Li Po's "Taking Leave of a Friend," more than a thousand poems must have traversed the poet's consciousness. But, even with this limited array of possible voices, we can still see that, when a classical Chinese poet writes a poem, he wants to talk, with these voices, to his friend (clearly, a friend who also knows most of the sources of these voices) and to invite him to move together into the spaces and the times in which these voices occurred. In this way, he can more fully communicate to him what he feels, which is not a simple form of sadness but the total sum of the different accents of sadness other poets have experienced and expressed. To write a poem is not simply to leave a note: "I am leaving. Please don't forget me!" Words and phrases in the poem are springboards into larger spaces and deeper times. A poem is never locked within a text but is a conversation across historical space and time.

Some Chinese readers might notice that my interlinear commentary has made considerable use of the Chinese lei-shu (

, a kind of topical encyclopedia). The intention of both the interlinear commentary and the lei-shu is precisely to help us re-create the complex conversational moment described above. When a poet writes down a line, he is already active in historical space. When we speak a word, we have already disclosed our historical roots. But we also know that the words or phrases of a poem are not closures of meanings but are an activity of meanings as old and new voices blend and weave, double and change, playing themselves out in an open "field" outside the text — a complex, multivocalic, thick-textured musical composition.

Liu Hsieh and the I Ching

The first theorist who discoursed on the aesthetic activity of "secret echoes and complementary correspondences" was Liu Hsieh of the fifth century. His model is the I Ching . In a chapter entitled "The

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Hidden and the Manifest" in his The Dragon-Carving of the Literary Mind , he says:

The movement of the mind's craft is distant indeed! And profound is the change of literature's pulsations. With deep sources to feed the tributaries and strong roots to support lush leaves, the growth of literature has both the manifest and hidden levels. What is meant by "the hidden" is its doubling of motifs; what is meant by "the manifest" is the prominently unique in a piece of writing. The hidden excel in incremental "senses"; the manifest show skillfulness in being matchless. . . . The body of "the hidden" actualizes itself in having meanings growing outside of the text, with secret echoes and complementary correspondences, with latent colors emerging from the deep, the way the change of lines in the hexagrams gives rise to nuclear trigrams. . . . Therefore, nuclear trigrams and line changes to complete the transformations of four forms.

This passage, which has been taken as expressing the seminal theory of the Chinese aesthetic concept of han-hsü (

, implication, suggestiveness, holding back or containing more than it appears), is clear and needs no further elaboration. The notions of "meanings growing outside the text" and "secret echoes and complementary correspondences" are also self-explanatory after the exposition in the first part of this essay. Since the phrase "secret echoes and complementary correspondences" was deeply implicated within the working dynamics of the I Ching , it is necessary to trace the exact sources and meanings of "complementary correspondences" (, p'ang-t'ung ) and those of two other terms, "line changes [in the hexagram] and nuclear trigrams" (, hu-t'i yao-pien ) and "four forms" (, ssu-hsiang ).

The first two are topics that were current in Han Dynasty (206 B.C. –A.D. 220) studies of the I Ching ; the latter is first found in the Appended Judgments (

, Hsi-tz'u ). A critic active in the Six Dynasties, Liu Hsieh easily made use of topics current in the recent past. In this case, one may ask, what kind of structural activity and aesthetic implications did Liu Hsieh derive from the system of the I Ching that lent support to the morphology of a text? I will review these topics briefly before examining the roles they play in the total system.

P'ang-t'ung , "complementary correspondences," began with Yü Fan (

, 170–239) of the Han Dynasty. According to Yü, for every

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hexagram there is always a complementary or corresponding hexagram implied by the inherent possibility of changing yang lines to yin lines, or vice versa. For example, Pi (

, Holding Together [Union]) complements/corresponds to Ta Yu (, Possession in Great Measure) , and Fu (, Return [The Turning Point]) complements/corresponds to Kou (, Coming to Meet) . Even in this simplified description, we can see that no object exists independently and in isolation, because its appearance always calls up or leads to another one closely related to it. This can also be said of the situation in regard to words or phrases in a text.

Hu-t'i yao-pien (nuclear trigrams and change of lines): The term hu-t'i (interrelated trigrams or nuclear trigrams) began with Ching Fang (

, 77–37 B.C. ) of the Han Dynasty. It means that within one hexagram there are four trigrams: the upper trigram, lower trigram, inner nuclear trigram, and outer nuclear trigram. In the hexagram Wu Wang (, Innocent [the Unexpected]) , for example, the upper trigram is Ch'ien (, the creative) ; the lower trigram is Chen (, the Arousing) ; the inner nuclear trigram — that is, lines 2 to 4 from bottom—is Ken (, Keeping Still) ; and the outer nuclear trigram—lines 3 to 5 from bottom—is Sun (, the Gentle) . When Yü Fan took over the idea, he mixed these divisions with the principle of hexagram change (developed from suggestions in ancient writings in Kuo-yü and Tso-chüan )^[14] and counted in also the first and the sixth lines as well as half lines, giving rise to countless hexagram changes. What is significant for us here is that each hexagram already contains inherent nuclear trigrams as well as numerous hexagram change possibilities. Thus, "secret echoes and complementary correspondences," as Liu Hsieh uses it, refers to the simultaneous responses, opposites, complementarities, and changes inherently occurring in each word or phrase, in much the same way as in each hexagram. Take the hexagram T'ai (, Peace) as an example:

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From this chart, we can see that one hexagram (in fact, any hexagram) always simultaneously points toward, evokes, or contains other hexagrams, which, in turn, help to define and modify the hexagram in question. Through complementary correspondences, line changes, and nuclear trigrams, all the hexagrams become interconnected, a structuring activity with interpointing, interdefining, and interresponding as its dynamics. In looking back on The Twenty-four Orders of Poetry , we find these same dynamics at work both in the act of creation and in the act of reading.

Ssu-hsiang (Four Forms): According to the Appended Judgments , Part I, it is said that "The I (Change) began with the Primeval One, which gives rise to the Parent Two, which, in turn gives rise to the Four Forms." This is based upon the combination and permutation of Yin and Yang , which continue on to produce the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams (Fig. 3). The process of tributary or branching changes from One, to Two, to Four Forms, to eight trigrams, and, by doubling the eight trigrams, to sixty-four hexagrams, is the beginning of the Chinese numerological philosophy that became a sophis-

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Figure 3
Formative process of hexagrams

ticated mathematical system in itself. When Liu Hsieh uses the term ssu-hsiang , he is clearly comparing this geometric progression and growth as represented by this term to a similar activity in a text. Other explanations have been advanced for this term. These include (1) seeing it as representing four of the five cosmic forces — metal, wood, water, fire — with the fifth, earth, occupying the center; or (2) to stand for Yang, Yin , strong, soft; or (3), in a much later stage of development, to mean old Yang , young Yang , old Yin , young Yin . All these associated meanings have no doubt affected conceptions of structure in Chinese literature. The term has also been taken to mean the real, the false or substitute, the ideational, and the functional. For example, for the hexagram Ch'ien (the Creative), the real is sky, its extension (thus false or substitute) is father, the ideational is the commentary "Ch'ien is powerful," and the functional is the four virtues: Primal, Unblocked, Advantageous, Just. This last explanation greatly conditioned the Chinese system of symbolic and semiotic activity. But these four explanations are not our concern here; they need to be treated separately within the context of hermeneutic philosophy. What is clear is the fact that the birthing and branching activity contained in the term ssu-hsiang again corresponds to the working dynamics of the text as proposed by Liu Hsieh.

I must hasten to add that, while the analogy between the activity of the text/s and that of the hexagram/s is clear, we must not see this concept of structuring activity as originating first from a set of arbitrary mathematical formulas or abstract semiotic systems and procedures that were then imposed upon constantly changing existential experiences. On the contrary, the whole hexagrammatic system was originally modeled after nature.

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The Hexagrams and the Permutations of Nature

The Book of Change (I ,

) has also been called the Book of the Easy-Simple-Plain (I , ), in spite of the fact that a good percentage of this ancient text is difficult to decipher. We need not go too far to notice the hexagrammatic principles at work. Let us begin with the easy, simple, and plain experiences.

Take, for example, the following natural phenomenon. On one side of a terrain is a windblown, pounding ocean beside which is a mountain reaching to the sky. We notice that much rain might fall along the coastal area, and, upon the slopes of the mountain, lush and dense vegetation might be stunted and bent by constant strong winds. But because the mountain serves as a buffer, we might find a desert with few or no trees on the other side of this imposing mountain. Occasionally, because of the change of air currents, some storms might come and vegetation might emerge, but the desert never quite becomes lush. Instead, the dry, sandy mountainside might be sculpted into a variety of strange forms. And, if there is underground water, an oasis might be formed. Suddenly, however, this oasis might also disappear because the inhabitants have overdrawn its water, or because the water source was disrupted by geological change, or because of human destruction brought about by mining. Thus, the coming together and separation of the elements in nature play out incessantly before us in countless phenomena. The formation of each phenomenon depends upon certain chance elements. We also notice that each phenomenon that we see as formed is actually constantly changing ; every minute there are new elements coming into and going out of the formed phenomenon before us, making it impossible for that given phenomenon to remain unchanged, though the change might be incrementally slow and, indeed, almost indiscernable at any one moment. We also notice the following characteristics of this process: the position of a natural phenomenon is quite often stationary (such as a tree or a mountain), but the change-causing elements are often active (such as the change of climate). Change has regularity (such as the recurrent seasonal changes) but also irregularity (such as certain unexpected, natural catastrophes). No natural phenomenon can in a strict sense become what it is independently; it needs assistance or stimulation from other phenomena (such as trees needing sunshine, water, and soil). Location is important for a natural object to become what it is (water weeds cannot be grown on land, for example), as is time and season (e.g., many vegetables cannot be grown in winter; fertile soil is totally helpless in this case).

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All growth is brought about by the relative push and pull of movement and stillness and the interaction of different natural elements, in which we find regularities and irregularities. Regularity is measure; irregularity is chance. This easy, simple, and plain working of nature is the very essence of the I Ching , the process of change.

Turning to the I Ching , we can say that after long observation of the cooperation, correspondence, and opposition between and among natural elements, the ancient Chinese came up with sixty-four major situations, represented by the sixty-four combinations of the eight trigrams:

It was the convergence and divergence of different potentials inherent in each element or phenomenon that gave rise to the sixty-four natural situations (the patterning of which also points toward human situations). Before we trace the possible ways in which the hexagrams developed from the simple yang lines and yin lines, it is important to examine the structuring implications of hexagrams.

Hexagrams, as we have already explained, are formed from the coupling of two trigrams. But this formation must not be understood as combination (i.e., something static and closed) but permutation (i.e., something continually changing and open). This is to say that there are more than sixty-four situations, cosmic or human. Within each permutation, the possibility of change is continuous and never terminal; there is change occurring every moment within each given hexagram. This, in a way, is why each hexagram is given to continuous line change that leads to newer permutational possibilities. It is important to remember the continuously changing nature inherent in the word permutation , particularly in connection with the Chinese concept of structuralism. The Chinese form of structuralism is not only binary (yin-yang ) but also both contrastive and complementary, oppositional and cooperative; it is not closed but open for constant change and revision, for it at once contains regularities (measure) and irregularities (chance).

As for the formation of the primary eight trigrams, it is said that they were developed from the yang (—) and yin (--) lines. The process begins with undifferentiated oneness, leads to the primeval pair (—, --), to the four forms (

), and to the primary eight trigrams (). Legend has it that the yang and yin lines were based

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upon real experiences. One theory postulates that in our observation of things in the world, we easily notice odd and even numbers in almost all forms of life, hence —, --. Another theory asserts that they actually represent male and female, with the explanation that the most prominent sexual symbol for male is — and that for the female is --. Advocates of the second theory often cite, for their support, the statement that the marriage of yin and yang gives rise to the million things. (Thus, it is said that Ch'ien is father, K'un , mother.) The history of how certain lines came to represent what they represent is very complex. We have no absolute certainty about the ways in which the embryonic form of the I Ching derived from divination through cracked lines upon burned tortoise shells. It has been speculated that a few trigrams might have come directly from the cracked lines. But one thing seems to be clear; these line representations were most probably modeled after nature and were not purely abstract inventions. This can be seen from the trigram K'an

, which is exactly the same as the pictogram of the character for water found in oracle bone inscriptions.^[15] We can safely say, therefore, that the sixty-four hexagrams are not abstract, mathematical permutations but are permutations from the interactions between eight primary "real phenomena," verifiable from our experiences. Thus, each linear hexagram in the I Ching is also spoken of in terms of real phenomena. Here are some examples:

We must observe that in the juxtaposition of two natural phenomena, the inventor/s of the hexagrams did not determine linear or

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causal explanations of how one phenomenon affects or conditions the other (how in the case of meng , for instance, the mountain is to be, or has been, affected by water), for there is more than one kind of interactive possibility. Thus, to explain meng as a condition of instability because of water under the mountain and, by extension, translating it as "youthful folly" (as the English translator has opted to do) is to decide on only one possible meaning at the exclusion of many others. The possibility of other kinds of interaction must be kept open. On this level, the structure of the hexagrams is like the structure of Chinese characters. For example, the Chinese character for time, shih (

), discussed in chapter 2, is a composite of two visual events juxtaposed, not an abstraction. The awareness of time in ancient China was of an activity consisting of real objects, phenomena, or events, a full ambience in which human beings could move about and participate. Similarly, what appears to be abstract, mathematical formations in the hexagrams turns out to be real phenomena in active interaction, disclosing themselves in concrete situations. Their meanings are not linear-causal but multiple-variable. In philosophy, this refusal to be tied down to one interpretation has been designated aporia (a word consisting of apo , to derive from, and horos , margin or brim), a condition that we might call trembling at the edge of discourse without committing oneself to determinable interpretation. The mode of presentation in the I Ching is congruent with that of poetic discourse defying the abstracting and unraveling procedures of prose. This realization is significant in our reading of the I Ching .

In the I Ching , the hexagrams, the judgments, and the expositions of individual lines are the urtext, and the "Ten Wings" are explanatory notes added at a later stage by scholars of the feudal Chou Dynasty and possibly by scholars with a Confucian orientation. A comparison between the two portions will reveal that the former disclose themselves with the poetic activity of indeterminacy, or aporia , while the latter is characterized by a clear-cut value-abstracting, judicial discursiveness. Let us take the first portion of the hexagram Ch'ien as an example:

Ch'ien , primal, unblocked, advantageous, just.
Nine* in the first place:
    Hidden dragon. No function or don't function.
Nine in the second place:
    Dragon appears in the field: advantageous to
              meet the Great One.

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Nine in the third place:
    Superior man creatively active whole day.
    Sundown: still vigilant as ever.
    Precarious — no blame.
Nine in the fourth place:
    Perhaps leaping from the deep. No blame.
Nine in the fifth place:
    Flying dragons in the sky: advantageous to meet
              the Great One.
Nine at the top place:
    Dragons exceeding limits — cause to repent.
The use of all nines:
    All dragons, no one to lead — auspicious.

*Nine is the number for yang  lines, and six is for yin  lines.

From its inception as divination, through its second stage as philosophical system, to its later numerological development, the I Ching discloses permutations of activities that can apply equally to both natural phenomena and human situations. This in part explains why the term "four forms" has been invested with the meanings of the real, the substitute, the ideational, and the functional. Between the real and the substitute, however, is not a simple relationship in which the signifier equals the signified but a morphological process with multiple-variable possibilities of correspondences. In the present instance, the dragon image is used, not only because it symbolizes "power" derived from "heaven (sky)" and "sun" (the etymological roots of Ch'ien being "sun's rays") but, more important, because of its suggestive logical possibilities in terms of time (i.e., timeliness), position, condition, and influence.

At the risk of oversimplification, let us dwell on the six stages involved in the morphological process of the represented image. The six stages are "hidden," "appearance in the field," "hesitation" (as revealed in the word "vigilant"), "leaping," "flying," and "exceeding limits." The time, position, condition, and influence of each of the six stages refer not only to the phenomenon in the sky (sunup to sundown) but also to the animal, the vegetable, and human worlds. "Hidden dragon. No function or don't function": Before an animal is born, before a plant sprouts, when a baby is in the embryonic stage, or before a practical matter matures from its initial conception, the limits of timeliness, position, condition ("hidden"), and influence (not ready to "function," although the influence is potentially there) are

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already set. If we ignore these four spheres and function ahead of time, regardless of the limits of position and condition, and tap the potential influence of each of the above-outlined situations, we are bound to fail and meet danger. Hence, "No function or don't function." Similarly, "Dragon exceeding limits — cause to repent" is also morphologically true of animals, plants, humans, as well as human affairs.

What the hexagrams and images signify is therefore not an abstracted meaning but morphological traces, or wen (

, a word now used to denote literature), traces that have correspondences simultaneously with all levels of phenomena. The inventors of the hexagrams, images, and lines modeled them after real objects or phenomena in their changing morphological situations and achieved a concept of structure that preserves the multiple, radiating indeterminacy of the moment and allows one to stand at the boundary, aporia , not knowing what meaning to choose but at the same time becoming fully aware of the multiple meanings in action. This is, of course, nothing less than the activity of poetry itself.

Returning to Liu Hsieh's adoption of "complementary correspondences," "line changes and nuclear trigrams," and "four forms" from the I Ching to explain the activity of the text, it must be clear by now that he was not referring to abstract and arbitrary mathematical permutations but to morphological permutations of real phenomena and their interpointing, interdefining, and intermodifying activities. The following explanation of "nuclear trigrams" by a recent I Ching scholar, Kao Huai-min, is instructive:

The so-called hexagrams are nothing but a few linear signs
designed to subsume all the affairs, all the things, all the
patterns, visible and invisible affairs, visible and invisible
things, visible and invisible patterns in the cosmos. It is natural
that in the subsequent years of studies on the  I Ching , people
have come up, in time, with finer and finer extensions of earlier
conceptions. The invention of nuclear trigrams is nothing but
disclosing the fact that within each visible hexagram there are
hidden hexagrams, to inform us that the hexagrams are not
surface forms easily exhaustible, but built in within them cubist
doubling-tripling through which one can detect hexagrams
within hexagrams, from one to multiple.^[16]

This can be seen, quite literally, as a footnote to Liu Hsieh's theory of "Secret Echoes and Complementary Correspondences."

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At the end of the first section of this essay, I said that words or phrases of a poem constitute an activity of meanings, as old and new voices blend and weave, double and change, playing themselves out in an open field outside the text. When writing a poem a poet wants to disclose to the reader the mental image of an experience the poet has had, but in fact the total existential dimensions and activities of this image cannot be enclosed in words. This is comparable to the workings of the hexagrams. Each hexagram evolves into a series of permutations through complementary correspondences, line changes, and nuclear trigrams, implying that the permutations in the heavens, on earth, and among human beings are the major permutations observable from real phenomena (the manifest measures), within which there are still countless continuously changing permutations (the hidden chances), which are already contained in the manifest hexagrams. That each hexagram can do this depends upon the inter-modifying, intersuggesting activities between real phenomena and upon preserving the aporia — that is, not arbitrarily determining one line of explanation. Thus, in the Appended Judgments we find such phrases as "The alternation between closing and opening, they call change. The going forward and backward without ceasing, they called penetration," and "Writing cannot express words completely. Words cannot express meanings completely." It is interesting that this last statement is in perfect harmony with those of the Taoist Lao-tzu, as in such statements as "The Tao, told, is not the Constant Tao," and "He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak." The Taoists and the Confucians in the I Ching can echo each other so closely because central to their concern over the question of whether language can authenticate the activities of phenomena is their recognition of the enclosing nature of language itself. This recognition led to the priority they gave to the entire activity outside language and text. "Meanings growing outside the text" (

), "When you get the meanings, you are to forget the words" (), "Text has no fixed (closed) meanings" (). All these statements view the text as a door that opens toward symphonic activities reaching through the vast reaches of space and time.

Other Voices

Julia Kristeva

Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is

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generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the "literary word" as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context. . . . In Bakhtin's work, these two axes [horizontal axis — subject/addressee — and vertical axis—text, context], which he calls dialogue and ambivalence , are not clearly distinguished. Yet, what appears as a lack of rigor is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double .^[17]

Roland Barthes

I read the text . The statement . . . is not always true. The more plural the text, the less it is written before I read it; I do not make it undergo a predicative operation, consequent upon its being, an operation known as reading, and "I" is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. The "I" which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). . . . The meanings I find are established not by "me" or by others, but by their systematic mark: there is no other proof of reading than the quality and endurance of its systematics; in other words, than its functioning. . . . To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further meaning: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes; it is a nomination in the course of becoming.

Alongside each utterance, one might say that off stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is "lost" in the vast perspective of the already-written ) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the odes) becomes writing , a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect: the Voice of Empirics (the proairetisms), the Voice of the Person (the semes), the Voice of Science (the cultural codes), the Voice of Truth (the hermeneutics), the Voice of Symbol.^[18]

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M. M. Bakhtin

Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist — or, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.^[19]

Harold Bloom

Poems are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on into the densely over-populated world of literary language. Any poem is an interpoem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading.^[20]

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