About me
Title:
Resonance thought and theories of sagely attunement in Early China
Abstract:
Much ink has been spilled describing the Five Phases cosmological system and its underlying ganying theory of resonance in Chinese thought and science. The theorist Zou Yan is considered to have proposed Five Phases thought in the 3rd c. BCE, and it rose to dominance as an all-encompassing explanation of human relationship to the cosmos during the Han. I push this timeline earlier, however, and show that resonance thought – as a logic or way of thinking about the causal relationships between objects – can be apprehended long before Zou Yan. Resonance thought, along with a “sagely attunement” model that might be understood as a specific sub-category of it, began to emerge sometime in the 4th century BCE, around the time that naturalistic cosmologies were articulated to rival competing versions of theistic, or deity-based cosmologies.
This talk examines two such models of sagely attunement: a more Confucian model outlined in the excavated Guodian manuscript, “Five Conducts,” and a Daoist model found in the “Heng Xian” (“The Primordial State of Constancy”) bamboo manuscript. I show how these varying models actually share a fundamentally similar stance that encourages sagely bodies to activate underlying resonant harmonies and responses in the world.
