SPACE, TIME and NUMBER as a holistic unity in the Yijing

Abstract

The holistic view (or systematic thinking) of the Yijing (here Yijing refers to the original text in the ancient Chinese Daoist work The Book of Changes) is representative of the philosophical worldview in ancient China, which can reveal the interactive relationship between space, time and number. This study attempts to analyze and summarize human spatial, temporal and numeral processing from the aspects of the linguistic and cultural quantitative system for the three domains, contributing an original cognitive linguistic perspective on the holistic thinking typifying the worldview in ancient China and laying a foundation for further research. It argues that SPACE, TIME and NUMBER are not separated, but a holistic unity (or wholeness), they can be considered as one single domain. In ancient Chinese culture, the three domains cannot be separate, they should be integrated into the “growth of life experience”, which is based on the MOTION metaphor and LIFE metaphor of the Yijing. The results of the corpus study of the Yijing text indicate that in this particular context of the Yijing, concepts in the domains of SPACE, TIME and NUMBER are schematized on the basis of further metaphorical extensions of concepts from the source of LIFE and MOTION.

Keywords

• space
• time
• number
• Yijing
• holistic unity