Principle and Place: Complementary Concepts in Confucian Yijing Commentary

Abstract

Aristotle’s thematic discussion of place in his Physics gives it a prominence in the later Western tradition that it never possessed in China. This is not to say that the concept of place is absent from Chinese thought, but it must be excavated from discussions of other topics. One of the components of Aristotle’s theory, later fleshed out and given a name by the Neoplatonists, is relational placement ( syntopōsis) , the positioning of things within the cosmos in relation to each other. The Chinese concept of the “constant principle” ( changli 常理), as employed in Confucian commentaries on the Yijing , constitutes the laws by which things in their natural or proper places are related to each other. The Confucian commentators do not simply spell out the laws that are implicit in the classical Western theory, but apply them to the state as well as to the cosmos. The many references to specific parts of the state in these commentaries reveal that the constant principle applies to the state and cosmos in significantly different ways.