Coping with the Future: Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia

Editor:
Michael Lackner

Publication Date:
December 2017

Publisher:
Brill

Abstract:

Coping with the Future: Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia offers insights into various techniques of divination, their evolution, and their assessment. The contributions cover the period from the earliest documents on East Asian mantic arts to their appearance in the present time. The volume reflects the pervasive manifestations of divination in literature, religious and political life, and their relevance for society and individuals. Special emphasis is placed on cross-cultural influences and attempts to find theoretical foundations for divinatory practices. This edited volume is an initiative to study the phenomena of divination across East Asian cultures and beyond. It is also one of the first attempts to theorize divinatory practices through East Asian traditions.

Table of Contents:


Introduction
Michael Lackner

Part 1: Divination and Literature: Excavated and Extant

1 A Recently Published Shanghai Museum Bamboo Manuscript on Divination
Marco Caboara

2 Hexagrams and Prognostication in the Weishu 緯書 Literature: The Thirty-Two-Year Cycle of the Qian zuo du 乾鑿度
Bent Nielsen

3 The Representation of Mantic Arts in the High Culture of Medieval China
Paul W. Kroll

4 Divination, Fate Manipulation, and Protective Knowledge in and around The Wedding of the Duke of Zhou and Peach Blossom Girl, a Popular Myth of Late Imperial China
Vincent Durand-Dastès

Part 2: Divination and Religions

5 A List of Magic and Mantic Practices in the Buddhist Canon
Esther-Maria Guggenmos

6 The Allegorical Cosmos: The Shi 式 Board in Medieval Taoist and Buddhist Sources
Dominic Steavu

7 Divining Hail: Deities, Energies, and Tantra on the Tibetan Plateau
Anne C. Klein

Part 3: Divination and Politics

8 Early Chinese Divination and Its Rhetoric
Martin Kern

9 Choosing Auspicious Dates and Sites for Royal Ceremonies in Eighteenth-century Korea
Park Kwon Soo

Part 4: Divination and Individual

10 Exploring the Mandates of Heaven: Wen Tianxiang’s Concepts of Fate and Mantic Knowledge
Liao Hsien-huei

11 Chŏng Yak-yong on Yijing Divination
Kim Yung Sik

12 From Jianghu to Liumang: Working Conditions and Cultural Identity of Wandering Fortune-Tellers in Contemporary China
Stéphanie Homola

13 Women and Divination in Contemporary Korea
Jennifer Jung-Kim

Part 5: Mantic Arts: When East Meets West

14 Translation and Adaption: The Continuous Interplay between Chinese Astrology and Foreign Culture
Che-chia Chang 張哲嘉

15 Against Prognostication: Ferdinand Verbiest’s Criticisms of Chinese Mantic Arts
Chu Pingyi 祝平一

16 Contradictory Forms of Knowledge? Divination and Western Knowledge in Late Qing and Early Republican China
Li Fan and Michael Lackner

17 Western Horoscopic Astrology in Korea
Jun Yong Hoon

Part 6: Reflections on Mantic Arts

18 How to quantify the Value of Domino Combinations? Divination and Shifting Rationalities in Late Imperial China
Andrea Bréard

19 Correlating Time Within One’s Hand: The Use of Temporal Variables in Early Modern Japanese “Chronomancy” Techniques
Matthias Hayek

20 The Physical Shape Theory of Fengshui in China and Korea
Oh Sanghak