In ancient times the holy sages made the Book of Changes thus:
Their purpose was to follow the order of their nature and of fate. Therefore they determined the tao of heaven and called it the dar and the light. They determined the tao of the earth and called it the yielding and the firm. They determined the tao of man and called it love and rectitude. They combined these three fundamental powers and doubled them; therefore in the Book of Changes a sign is always formed by six lines.
The places are divided into the dark and the light. The yielding and the firm occupy these by turns. Therefore the Book of Changes has six places, which constitute the linear figures. ~ Shuo Kua
I remember reading this passage for the first time, many years ago, and zeroed in, with high interest, on the TAO OF MAN.
Because you know…heaven and earth looks like this:
And Man.
Well, Man looks like this!
So of course, given the choices of heaven, earth, or a hot guy, I’d be crazy not to be more interested in finding out more about the tao of a guy. This is certainly far more interesting than some old dried written material from a book that existed thousands of years ago!
Unfortunately, this is not the man that Shuo Kua meant. (sad)
In his antiquated fashion, Richard Wilhelm meant to say humankind, but couldn’t get his brains wrapped around the idea that women counted as being worthy enough to be included within the realm of the tao. Only guys got that privilege.
How banal.
In any case, Richard Wilhelm, in his translation of the Shuo Kua, did have something interesting to say about this.
In correspondence with these two basic powers in heaven and on earth, there exist in man the polarities of love and rectitude–love being related to the light principle and rectitude to the dark. These human attributes, because they belong to the category of the subjective, not of the objective, are not represented specifically in the places and lines of the hexagrams.
So, according to Richard and his sources, the Tao of Man didn’t even exist even though the Shuo Kua had mentioned it in the same passage as the taos belonging to Heaven and Earth. There are two things wrong here.
The first thing that is not quite right is the constant mention of some guy, instead of calling it what it really is…humankind. It should be rewritten as the Tao of Humankind. We have to re-read this passage as:
They determined the tao of humankind and called it love and rectitude…In correspondence with these two basic powers in heaven and on earth, there exist in humankind the polarities of love and rectitude–love being related to the light principle and rectitude to the dark. These human attributes, because they belong to the category of the subjective, not of the objective, are not represented specifically in the places and lines of the hexagrams.
Now that sounds much better. And that brings me to the second thing that’s wrong with this passage. He said the Tao of Humankind was not represented specifically in the places and lines of the hexagrams.
I say: Why not?
Heaven is not subject to being subjective. There is such a thing as space and all the matter within space that we call the Heavens. Earth is surely not subjective. I am stomping on the face of Earth even as we speak.
Humankind is, for certain, not subjective. Here I am. There you are. We are as real as Heaven and Earth. We exist. We take up space. We think, we breathe, we cause changes to ourselves and our environments. Even the attributes of love and rectitude that we bring about through our thoughts and actions are real. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and state with clarity that Love is, quite possibly, the only thing real around here.
(…jumps off limb, climbs off soapbox)
To be perfectly clear, I’ve known about the veracity of the Tao of Man (Humankind) for quite some time now, and I can unequivocally assure you that there is such a thing as a represented tao of man, specifically in the places and lines of the hexagram.
At the time of Richard Wilhelm’s translation, it had not yet surfaced, so he had nothing to reference this strange mention of the tao of man within the ancient Shuo Kua. We now have the bagua to fill in the missing linear figures. In one of my previous posts, I Ching: Made in Vietnam (Part 2), I detailed the origins and subsequent resurfacing of the Tao of Man.
The Three Baguas:
As a quick reminder, these are the three baguas.
The first and the last are well-known by everyone who owns an ancient Chinese history book. The Bagua to the left was created by Fuxi, called Higher Heaven Bagua. It was left to the Han Chinese to the north.
The Bagua to the right is the one that was entrusted to the Korean people, and that was what flew on their flag.
The middle one, the one with the bright red square around it, nobody’s ever heard of. That’s because that one was kept within the living memories and consciousness of the Vietnamese people. It was hidden in the Vietnamese mythology of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân, during the chaotic times when the Han Chinese overthrew the ruling Viet King and took over the reigns.
Most of Viet culture and civilization was lost during that thousand-year bloody era, but the Tao of Man, the same one that was mentioned in the Shuo Kua, was one of the few key pieces of Viet legacy which had been cleverly hidden away until fairly recently. The missing Bagua of man should now be placed where it rightfully belongs
Bear up with me. This will be important later in this post.
The Three Places:
These three principles are differentiated as subject (man), object having form (earth), and content (heaven). The lowest place in the trigram is that of earth; the middle place belongs to man and the top place to heaven.
In correspondence with the principle of duality in the universe, the original three-line signs are doubled; thus in the hexagrams there are two places each for earth, for man, and for heaven.
The two lowest places are those of the earth, the third and fourth are those of man, and the two at the top are those of heaven. ~ Shuo Kua [1]
The Shuo Kua states that each of these baguas have a specific PLACE where they are slotted into, spaces that were created specifically for them.
Years ago, when I read this, I was young and blonde and not very much into Taoism other than the thought that it seemed cool to call myself one. Everything I knew about Taoism, I learned from a book called The Tao of Pooh. Needless to say, this PLACEMENT reference flew over my head and I didn’t think much about it. Now I have a much clearer idea of what the Shuo Kua was talking about.
Since everything vibrates (resonates) with a unique frequency, if we measure the vibrational frequency, we can determine the placement of the frequencies for everything from entire galaxies, down to the quarks that make up quantal bits of matter.
The premise is this. If the universe was a randomly evolved entity, there would be no relationship of any sort between any of the entities that happen to coexist within the boundaries of that specific universe. The resonance frequency, if measured and placed on a chart, would be all over the place. However, if there was an organized structure to the Universe, some form of organization or relationship would be apparent.
The relationship, as it turns out, is very apparent. Here is the chart. [2]
The graph below shows the Scaling Law for all organized matter. It is fairly simple to grasp.
The frequency, or rate of vibration is represented by the Y scale on the left side of the graph, going from highest at the top to lowest at the bottom. The radius of the object being measured is at the bottom of the graph, from smallest to largest.
This graph plots out the frequency measurements of various entities, as detailed in the paper, A Scaling Law for Organized Matter.
The human cell resonates at the frequency of about 10^11 Hz cycles (vibrations) per second. This places us smack dab in the middle, between the largest organized thing in the Universe (which is the Universe itself) and the smallest thing we can possibly measure (a Planck constant) is the place where the tao of man exists.
It points to our placement in the Universe, perched at the event horizon, where all information is stored (more on this later).
Humans, therefore, would seem to be the interface between the micro and the macro. The Tao of Man is the central point between the Tao of Heaven and of Earth. Since we are the living (non-subjective) event horizon, this brings me yet again to black holes.
I knew I would never get away from this subject, so to appease the gods within, my next post is going to have to delve into black holes.
…
[1] Shuo Kua
Taobabe 