Divination (I) (Mystery)

Two friends of mine recently have tried divination respectively. One is indecisive if she should retire; the other wants to know if her husband should go to China for a career change.

A couple of weeks ago I read about how divination占卜(zhan bu3) and worship of ancestors had taken most of the time of China’s emperors in Shang Dynasty (1600 BC–1046 BC). With a gap of some three thousand years and Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, funny that divination is still with us. I’m not saying this judgmentally. I’m more of curious about this.

On a summer day of 1899¹, author and scholar 劉鶚(liu2 e4) went to a Chinese herbal medicine pharmacy in Beijing to get something for his friend Wang suffering from malaria. When the pharmacist was pounding the medicine, 龍骨(long2 gu3), dragon’s bones, which refers to fossils of mammals, such as elephants, rhinos, cattle, etc., Liu saw a certain script similar to Chinese characters on the bone.

Later Liu and Wang went around Beijing’s pharmacies and bought all the “dragon’s bones.” 1058 strange old characters, older than anything that had been known, were found on these bones.

Liu made public his discovery in 1903 with the book 鐵雲藏龜 (tie3 yun2 cang2 gui). Those characters found on the bones are called 甲骨文(jia3 gu3 wen2), Oracle bone script.

  (from Wikipedia)

For years (from 500 A.D.) farmers had dug out from a big mound in 小屯(xiao3 tun2), 河南(he2 nan2) “dragon’s bones” to sell to the pharmacies in town. Nobody had paid much attention to the script on them.

After a large-scale of digging, around 170 thousand bones have been found and some 5000 of them are with script on them. About 4500 characters have been labeled as甲骨文, one third of which were recognized and confirmed the meanings.

The bones, whatever beasts or turtles they’re from, are called 甲骨. The Shang Emperors believed that their ancestors’ souls were around the gods in heaven. Whenever they wanted to communicate with them, they use the bones to divine. They asked about wars, crops, dreams, the weather, . . . or presented their wishes to the ancestors by doing the ritual.

First they polished a bone from the cattle or a shell from the turtle, and carved concaved lines on it. They asked their questions loudly to the ancestors and put a burning hot branch into the concaved lines. The high temperature would crackle the shell making a sizzling sound, which was considered the “talk” of the bone.

Answers to the questions were found from the crackles the heat had made. The questions and answers were often inscribed on the bones or shells and stored.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Note ¹ : The following description on 甲骨文is based on the book Tecknens Rike (China: Empire of Living Symbols) “漢字的故事” by Cecilia Lindqvist.

劉鶚=刘鹗

龍骨=龙骨