On Shao Yong’s Method for Observing Things Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters

: Shao Yong’s “Inner Chapters on Observing Things” develops a method for understanding the unity of heaven and man, tracing the decline of civilization from antiquity, and determining how the present can return to the ideal socio-political order of antiquity. Shao’s method is based on dividing any topic into fours aspects (for example, four Classics, four seasons, four kinds of rulers, etc.) and generating the systematic relations between these four member sets. Although Shao’s method was unusual at the time, the questions he was addressing were shared with mid-eleventh statecraft thinkers.

Yin Dun, a disciple of the Chengs, once commented that although his contemporaries saw Shao as contributing to Change studies what he basically offered was "learning for ordering the world." 2 This observation corresponds to Shao's title. Shao Bowen's description of the original text refers to a work in twelve chapters devoted to establishing numerical correspondences between cycles of time and human events, between the numbers of yin and yang and music and the myriad things. 3 The work that we now have that is accepted as being from Shao Yong's own hand is the Guanwu neipian 觀物內篇 ("Inner Chapters on Observing Things"). It is included in the current text of the Huangji jingshi and perhaps corresponds to the original last two chapters, which Shao Bowen described as being about how the book was done. In any case this relatively succinct text is a well-organized and methodologically consistent treatise. Rather than trying to give a synthetic account of Shao's philosophy or contributions to Daoxue, I shall use this work alone as the basis for reaching conclusions about what Shao was trying to accomplish.
"epistemology of the heart-and-mind" (Haiming Wen, "Continuity of Heart-mind and Thingsevents: A Systematic Reconstruction of Neo-Confucian Epistemology," Asian Philosophy 21, no. Shao's "method" involves the use of polarities and four-member sets, which he correlates, multiplies, and integrates. These sets are derived from the bipolarity of heaven-andearth as found in the Change. Shao deploys a limited number of polarities: heaven and earth, the yang 陽 and yin 陰 of heaven, the gang 剛 and rou 柔 (firm and yielding) of earth, dong 動 and jing 靜 (active and tranquil), the classes of dong 動 and zhi 植 (moving and growing) things, ti 體 and yong 用 (structure and function), bian 變 and hua 化 (change and transformation), gan 感 and ying 應 (stimulus and response), and ge 革 and yin 因 (change and continuity).
The justification for sets with four members is based on treating the basic pairing of yinyang and gang-rou as cycles with major (rising) and minor (falling) phases. Each set of four interact among themselves and thereby all possible stimuli and responses of the two grand classes of things ("moving" and "growing") are realized.
Shao can now establish the set of possible interactions among these parallel elements of heaven and of earth. To discover this he has the elements interact with each other, giving each result in narrative form. The point is not that they refer things that exist in the phenomenal world but that the possibilities for the phenomenal world are being generated systematically, by multiplying, so to speak, members of each set against each other. I will take this in two steps.
First, Shao's rules allow him to join rows to columns and columns to rows. Thus Nature subdivides into four (Walkers of Nature, Flyers of Nature, etc.) but Walkers also divide into four so that "Nature that transforms in response to rain is the nature of walkers," "Emotion that is transformed in response to wind is emotion of flyers," and so on. Granting that Shao has a method, but to what end? There are various ways to contextualize and interpret the "Inner Chapters on Observing Things." Here, drawing on my general acquaintance with mid-eleventh century intellectual culture, I will read the twelve section of the piece as answers to a related series of questions, beginning from the problem of the status of the human being and ending with the possibility of transforming the world through government. These were also problems for the reform thinkers of his day. What sets Shao apart is his conviction that answers can be found by understanding the systematic processes of heaven-and-earth. This summary will ignore most of the elaborate mechanical operations Shao performs with his quadripartite sets in support of his assertions. 4 1. What makes the human being different from all the other myriad things, given that in fact man is one of the things brought into being by heaven-and-earth? In contrast to all the other things, each of which has been apportioned some part of the set of possible allotments and abilities, man is capable of being stimulated by everything and responsive to everything. He is without limits while all other things are limited.
2. What makes the sage different from other men, given that men are also things and sages are also men? Just as man is able to employ at will the four senses to perceive everything and is the most perfect of things, the sage is the most perfect of men and is able to perceive everything that all humanity perceives. With one mind he observes the myriad minds; with one body, with one thing, with one age he observes all bodies, things, and ages. And thus the sage can speak and act for heaven.
The sage is thus firmly embedded within heaven-and-earth and his abilities are simply the perfection of abilities that all men have and that the myriad things (when taken as a whole) possess. If there is an alternative heaven-and-earth and myriad things, Shao asserts, the sage would not be able to know about it and for him to speak of such would be ungrounded. To act on the basis of ungrounded claims would be wrong.
Presumably this attacks Buddhism and Daoism, both of which posited realms of existence beyond the single realm of heaven-and-earth as evident to direct perception.
3. Why is the sage able to fully realize the potentials of humanity? Because he understands that humanity is the summa of heaven-and-earth and the myriad things.
The sage operates relative to man just as heaven operates relative to things. Heaven has the four seasons to bring things to completion; the sage has the four classics/constants to bring things to completion, as in "Spring is the storehouse for who "fathomed it fully in their minds" (jin zhi yu xin 盡之於心 ).
8. Will the ruler be able to do this? Yes, if he opens the "path of life" (sheng lu 生路) he will make it possible for others to give their all. But, Shao notes, some ask how one can know the Way that those in power follow is the right one? Will not any group that is ascendant make this claim? The Way is not relative, Shao responds, it is correct or not. It demands that each person fulfill the duties of his or her position and that the moral relationship between positions be maintained. show that the highest order things are whole while the lower order things are ever smaller parts of the whole: the flyer-flyer things are one of one (unity of unity), but plant-plant things are 1000-1000 (one-thousandth of one-thousandth), which means that a 1/1 flyer is equal to 1,000,000 (but a 1/10 only to 100,000). So too then are the 1/1 shi equal to 1,000,000 others while the 1000-1000 merchant is equal to a single person. So the greatest thing and the greatest person can only be the 1/1 kind. We should become this kind of shi and have the broadest and most inclusive view, this is to be "perfectly marvelous (shen 神), perfectly sage." And we can learn to do that if we learn to "observe things" not with the eyes, not even with the mind, but with coherence (li 理) and thus have true knowledge. The key to this is to practice "reverse observation" which means to observe things in terms of each other, not from the perspective of the self (and one's own interests). So I know, Shao concludes, that I am a man like others and that we are all "things," and thus I can use the eyes, ears, mouth, and mind of all under heaven to see, hear, speak, and plan. Then what I know will be complete, this is what it means to be "perfectly marvelous (shen), perfectly sage." Shao's "Inner Chapters on Observing Things" is both an illustration of "using things to observe things" and a treatise that reaches definitive conclusions with that method. It is a mechanical system, yet if it pigeon-holes almost everything it also supposes that it is possible to change states. Indeed, it tells the reader exactly what is required in in every possible state. Those readers are the literati and it is the literati as the group in society that has transformative power according to Shao's system. Moreover, it is an example of a startling possibility: that the discovery of a coherent system makes it possible to discard tradition -such as the Five Classics and Five Phases. But it is also an attempt to envision the material world as complete and sufficient, a world that contains within itself the guides to its own self-transformation. This world is the physical concrete world of heaven-and-earth and, in contrast to the reform thinkers, Shao sees the Change as evidence that Confucius used an understanding of heaven-and-earth process to sort out human history through the Four Classics. 5 Shao is generally seen as a numerologist, but in his own scheme of things in this text "number" (shu 數) as such is not fundamental. A better understanding of the mathematical quality of the "Inner Chapters" would be to say they illustrate an interest in the "generation of systematic relationships between members of finite sets."