New joint publication by Constance A. Cook and A. Bréard
Together with Constance A. Cook, Andrea Bréard published a chapter entitled “Stalk and Other Divination Traditions Prior to the Changes Canon: Views from Newly-Discovered Texts“. It focuses on the earliest graphic inscriptions of groups of numbers found on a variety of media over the course of a millennium and demonstrates that, contrary to the later assumption, the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes probably emerged from a world of diverse but related practices that fundamentally shaped it. To understand this, the authors examine the graphic divination results, generically called gua 卦, from two perspectives: archaeological and statistical. By using for the first time a quantitative approach to gua, numerical sequences found on ancient artifacts and manuscripts (12th-4th cent. BCE) and testing statistically various models, the authors’ research reveals the sophisticated calculation and dicing techniques used in ancient East Asian heartland to generate and confirm knowledge. It is the biggest step since thirteenth century Chinese scholars attempted to work out the science behind the hexagrams of the world’s most famous book of divination and occult philosophy, the Book of Changes. Twentieth century scholars attempted but failed to connect the numbers that appeared on archaeological objects to a 1st century BCE procedure explained in the thirteenth century. This chapter represents a daring and major advance, one not tied to proving an ancient provenance for the Book of Changes, yet at the same time revealing the early history of sortilege techniques involving yarrow stalks and various kinds of recently excavated dice. The chapter is included in Tze-ki Hon’s edited volume The Other Yijing. The Book of Changes in Chinese History, Politics, and Everyday Life (Brill 2021).