Duh, Bua-Ruei. "The Meaning of
Knowledge on Wang-Bih's Ideology on the Book of Changes." (Conference Paper-
International Conference on Creativity and Process: East-West Dialogue
2007).
Abstract
This paper is about the
epistemological significance Wang-Bih's doctrine of Yi, pointing out
that Wang's commentary of Yi was only a rendition of the style of Zhou
Yi , with neither creativity in methodology nor any imposition of his
own values of Neo-Taoism. His commentary of Yi shared merely
a few philosophical features with his Neo-Taoism in making people and
circumstances the themes of trigrams and taking Confucian principles as
the foundation of his commentary. Theoretically, the
sixty-four trigrams of Zhou Yi were assumed to be the situations of
people's changes rather than a scheme of cosmology. Most
contemporary scholars assume that Wang-Bih's commentary of Yi applied
Lao Zi's doctrine to Zhou Yi. Such an opinion is the subject
of this paper, where we claim: the doctrine of Yi was the source of
both Confucianism and Lao Zi's doctrine; it is fair to say that the
text of Zhou Yi was further developed in Lao Zi's doctrine rather than
Wang-Bih imposing the latter on his commentary of Zhou Yi . As for
Wang's ontological thinking in his interpretaion of Lao Zi's doctrine,
it was actually an ontological question about abstract speculation, not
directly relevant to Wang's methodology of interpreting the doctrine of
Yi. Wang-Bih was addressing the style of Zhou Yi, while
contemporary scholars are confused in the fundamental question of
philosophy. Wang-Bish's commentary of Lao Zi was indeed about
an ontological question, while the style of Zhou Yi was another
question of commentary that doesn't have to be confused with the
ontological thinking in Wang's commentary of Lao Zi.