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Overview
Key data
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author | Yang Xiong (53 BCE–18 CE) |
| Completed | Late Western Han |
| Structure | One mystery, three directions, nine regions, twenty-seven divisions, eighty-one families |
| Calendrical arrangement | Eighty-one heads to the year, nine praises to a head, 729 praises |
A structure modelled on the Changes
The work follows the eight trigrams and sixty-four lines of the Book of Changes with a scheme of its own:
one mystery divides into three directions, nine regions, twenty-seven divisions and eighty-one families.
Each family has one head, eighty-one in all; each head nine praises, 729 in all.
Its calendrical arrangement
Yang Xiong assigned the eighty-one heads to the year and so distributed the days.
Two praises went to a day, so that 729 praises cover 364 and a half days,
with two further praises, “qi” and “ying,” making up the days of the year.
This is an arrangement of the calendar running alongside the quarter-remainder calendar;
never adopted in practice, it is a specimen of the union of calendrical learning and philosophy in the Han.
Value
The Taixuan is the most systematic of works modelled on a classic.
Its calendrical arrangement shows the Han effort to bring calendrical numbers into a philosophical frame,
and can be read against the grand-epoch doctrine of the Santong calendar as two faces of the temper of the age.
Full text
Simplified Chinese (TXT) ｜ Traditional Chinese (TXT)
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The title, date, summary and index structure compiled here are offered under CC BY 4.0 (attribution: Chujia Kuang · kuangchujia.com).
The full electronic text (about 67,648 characters) is taken from the Chinese Wikisource text of Taixuan jing; that part is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0 (attribution — share alike); source: zh.wikisource.org.
The electronic text has not been collated by us; please check the original before citing.
Compiled and arranged by Chujia Kuang.