Taixuanjing

Template:Short description The Taixuanjing is a divination guide composed by the Confucian writer Yang Xiong (53 BCETemplate:Snd18 CE) in the decade prior to the fall of the Western Han dynasty. The first draft of this work was completed in 2 BCE; during the Jin dynasty, an otherwise unknown person named Fan Wang (Template:Zhi) salvaged the text and wrote a commentary on it, from which our text survives today.

Content

The Taixuanjing is a divinatory text similar to, and inspired by, the I Ching. The I Ching is based on 64 binary hexagrams—characters composed of six horizontal lines, with each line either broken or unbroken. Meanwhile, the Taixuanjing is based on 81 ternary tetragrams—characters composed of four lines, with each line either unbroken, broken once, or broken twice. Like the I Ching, it may be consulted as an oracle by casting yarrow stalks or a six-faced die to generate numbers which define the lines of the tetragram, which is then looked up in the text.

Template:Explain A tetragram drawn without moving lines refers to the tetragram description, while a tetragram drawn with moving lines refers to the specific lines.

The monograms are:

• the unbroken line (File:TXJ 1.svg ⚊) for heaven (Template:Zhi),
• once broken line (File:TXJ 2.svg ⚋) for earth (Template:Zhi),
• twice broken line (File:TXJ 3.svg 𝌀) for man (Template:Zhi).

Numerically the symbols can be counted as ⚊ = 0, ⚋ = 1, 𝌀 = 2, and grouped into sets of four to count from 0 to 80. This is clearly intentional as this passage from chapter 8 of the Taixuanjing points out the principle of carrying and place value.

Chinese	English
	Push Profound Calculation: First Part: one sets one, two sets two, three sets three. Second Part: one doesn't add, two adds three, three adds six. Third Part: one doesn't add, two adds nine, three adds eighteen. Fourth Part: one doesn't add, two adds twenty-seven, three adds fifty-four.

Translation

An English translation by Michael Nylan was published in 1993.

Unicode

Template:Infobox Unicode block In the Unicode Standard, the Tai Xuan Jing Symbols block is an extension of the I Ching symbols. Their Chinese aliases most accurately reflect their interpretation; for example, the Chinese alias of code point U+1D300 is "rén", which translates into English as man and yet the English alias is "MONOGRAM FOR EARTH".

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Tai Xuan Jing Symbols block:

Version	Final code points	Count	L2 ID	WG2 ID	Document
4.0	U+1D300..1D356	87	L2/02-089	N2416
			L2/02-166R2
			L2/05-267	N2998
			L2/05-260	N2988 (pdf, doc)
			L2/05-281	N2998R
				N2953 (pdf, doc)
			L2/06-088

See also

• Bigram
• Bagua – (I Ching)
• Ternary numeral system

External links

• Template:Sister-inline
• 《太玄經》 - Full text in Chinese
• Canon of Supreme Mystery 《太玄經》 Chinese text with matching English vocabulary