Abstract
Before its segueing into a fully-fledged metaphysical cosmology, feng shui was merely the collective, passed-down of Chinese and other Asian cultures that needed to attend to environmental realities in order to sow, harvest, herd, and build houses, tombs, and villages; and live safely with whatever comfort could be garnered. Traditionally, feng shui practitioners have distinguished good or vital chi (sheng chi) from bad or torpid chi (ssu chi) according to the function the chi is performing, and this function varies in daily and seasonal cycles. There is a certain naturalism in chi cosmology and metaphysics: change and events in the world are to be explained by procedures occurring within the world, not by intervention from outside, not by ‘non-natural’ causes. Each of the thousands of contemporary exponents of feng shui and the hundreds of feng shui schools give their own account of chi. The widespread East Asian chi (qi), and Japanese ki, beliefs and practices have affinity with versions of Hindu yogic understandings. They are components of a chi-based worldview.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The convention in this book will be to use ‘Dao’ instead of ‘Tao’. The former is the modern Pinyin rendering of the ancient Chinese character for ‘way’ or ‘path’; the latter is the older Wade-Giles Romanization of the character. ‘Dao’ is also the formal state-required rendering in mainland China.
- 3.
- 4.
There is some contention as to how much of the standard Book of Burial can be ascribed to the historical Guo Pu (Bennett 1978, p. 9).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
See Angle and Tiwald (2017, Chap. 2), Chan (1963, Chap. 30), Huang (1968, 1999, Chap. 4), Kasoff (1984), Kim (2015), and Wang and Ding (2010). Kai-wing Chow (1993) provides an elaboration of his moral theory and its relation to the practice of ritual, something so embedded in Confucian, and more generally Chinese, culture.
- 8.
The term ‘neo-Confucian’ is loosely used to refer to the renaissance of Confucian writing that emerged in the Song dynasty (960–1270) and continued to the end of the Qing dynasty (1912). On the terminology, and the differences with modern ‘New Confucianism’, see the Introductions to Angle and Tiwald (2017) and Makeham (2010).
- 9.
Western science was developed by devout Christian believers – Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, and Wallace – who had a Christian worldview but whose ontology and epistemology was naturalistic, and in Priestley’s case was materialistic. And leading contemporary scientists include religious believers of all kinds.
- 10.
Angle and Tiwald comment that ‘For subsequent Neo-Confucians, Zhang’s use of vital stuff [chi] as a central category becomes common property’ (Angle and Tiwald 2017, p. 29).
- 11.
There is a sense of Deism about Zhang’s system, but Deists have a role for Creation that Zhang does not countenance. For an account of ten dominant and popular cosmologies, see Bunge (2001, Chap. 2).
- 12.
The metaphysical question of whether there was an original void in which chi materialized, or whether chi was a part of the original void, is a lively question among some Chinese metaphysicians (Liu and Berger 2014).
- 13.
Hence Bertolt Brecht’s retelling in his ‘Turandot’ of the story about the Buddhist congress of scholars called together in the Mi Sang monastery on the banks of the Yellow River to settle the question of whether the world was real. Unfortunately, a huge flood occurred and drowned all the scholars before they could agree on an answer and so philosophers lamented that ‘The proof that things exist externally to us, self-sufficiently, independently of us was not furnished’ (Suchting 1986, p. 53).
- 14.
Mainland publications on Zhang up to the Cultural Revolution are listed in Chan (1967, pp. 38, 190–193).
- 15.
The ‘six yang’ and ‘six yin’ are the lines in the Qian and Kun hexagrams of the I Chin.
- 16.
They say their device is ‘Basically an amperometer employing a DC voltage of 12 V with output current of 0–200 uA’ (Tsai et al. 2017, p. 254).
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Details of these papers in Chinese philosophy and physics journals are given in Liu JeeLoo (2015).
- 24.
- 25.
On Vivekananda’s efforts to give a scientific rendering of ancient Hindu practices, see Nanda (2016, Chap. 3).
- 26.
For examples and discussion of these options, see at least Dupree (1986).
- 27.
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Matthews, M.R. (2019). Feng Shui and Chi. In: Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience. Science: Philosophy, History and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18822-1_3
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