William Matthews - Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination

Asian Anthropologies

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Dolores Martinez, SOAS, University of London

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Volume 13

Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology through Chinese Divination

William Matthews

Volume 12

Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture

Magnus Fiskesj

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Aspirations of Young Adults in Urban Asia: Values, Family and Identity

Edited by Mariske Westendorp, Dsire Remmert and Kenneth Finis

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Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia

Courtney Work

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Fate Calculation Experts: Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China

Geng Li

Volume 8

Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand: Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China

Friederike Fleischer

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Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village

Donald C. Wood

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Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within

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Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia

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COSMIC COHERENCE

A Cognitive Anthropology through Chinese Divination

William Matthews

First published in 2022 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2022 William Matthews

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Matthews, William, 1988- author.

Title: Cosmic coherence : a cognitive anthropology through Chinese divination / William Matthews.

Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn, 2022. | Series: Asian anthropologies ; volume 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021028786 (print) | LCCN 2021028787 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800732681 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800732698 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cosmology, Chinese. | DivinationChinaHistory. | Yi jing. | Cognition and cultureChinaHistory.

Classification: LCC B127.C68 M38 2022 (print) | LCC B127.C68 (ebook) | DDC 113dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028786

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028787

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-268-1 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-269-8 ebook

This book is dedicated to the memory of Master Tao Songhe, teacher and friend, without whom it would not have been possible.

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Searching for a suitable site to conduct my PhD fieldwork in summer 2013, I spent several days in the Hunanese capital, Changsha. My original proposal had been to investigate the relationship between cosmological ideas and practices of nourishing life (yangsheng) in the context of a reviving teahouse culture. But this changed when my partner and I went to visit one of Changshas main temples, and impulsively decided to consult one of the diviners operating in the street nearby.

Prior to this, I had not given Chinese divination much thought, though I was vaguely aware of the eight characters (bazi), referring to the year, month, date and two-hour period of ones birth, which could be used to derive a broad picture of ones fate. And having studied Chinese history and culture over several years, I was aware of the Yijing and its significance. Looking back, that day in Changsha sparked a deeper interest that would ultimately lead me to abandon my teahouse project and focus instead on cosmology and divinatory reasoning. My real interest, even with the tea project, was cosmology, and how individuals develop cosmological theories and then apply them to understand the world; divination promised a more intriguing way in.

The diviners shop was fairly small, and he sat at a desk to the right of the entrance, the wall behind him covered in cosmological charts and a list of prices. Knowing little of what to expect, I asked for the cheapest consultation, which turned out to be based on bazi. Once I had told the diviner my date of birth, he spent some time carefully annotating my bazi and drawing up a picture of my fate divided into ten-year periods, replete with cosmological terms I barely understood.

At the time, I lacked the knowledge of correlative cosmology necessary to understand much of the underlying logic of the diviners diagnosis. What he told me, though, was very positive. I would be rich and successful. Beyond that, I remember few of the specifics, save that my forecasted future financial windfalls prompted the diviner to insist I pay him several times the original consultation fee, as in time I would easily be able to afford it. Thus, in this first encounter with divination I was also exposed to one of the most common points of (contested) criticism that it attracts from non-diviners that it is fundamentally about swindling people (pianren).

Nonetheless, I was drawn in by the clear complexity and sophistication of the divination system, and in particular by its reliance on the intricate relationships between successive layers of correlated cosmological principles (this much was evident from the consultation, even if I did not understand what the principles were). This marked it out distinctly from previous encounters I had had with the mantic arts, generally in the form of newspaper horoscopes and tarot cards methods which, while clearly psychologically useful as decision-making aids, appeared to me to rely very much on reading ones own meaning into them. My curiosity was piqued further through a long conversation with a friend in Chengdu, who confirmed to me what I had already intuitively decided: that researching divination would prove considerably more interesting than researching teahouses, at least to me.

The city I eventually decided on for fieldwork, based primarily on its fame for the production, sale and consumption of longjing green tea, and not at all for its general scenic beauty, delicious cuisine and accessibility, was Hangzhou, the capital of east Chinas prosperous Zhejiang province. I returned to Hangzhou in September that same year to commence fieldwork, fully intending to turn my tea project into something much more about fate and the cosmos. I began by familiarising myself with the main Buddhist and Daoist temples in the city, though it was my flatmates offer to take me to a large but less well-known Buddhist temple by the Grand Canal that proved decisive. There, I got to know several volunteers whom I would subsequently visit most Wednesday mornings, when we would discuss fate, divination and belief, primarily from their Buddhist perspective. After one of our earlier meetings I took a walk along the canal, down a pedestrian street where I noticed a diviner sitting at the roadside.