Thousand Character Writings - The Earth, the Xuanhuang, the Universe, the Flood

The first line of the Thousand Character Classic is "Heaven and Earth, the Universe, the Flood".

Note: "The heavens and the earth, the metaphysical yellow, the universal flood"

The phrase "the heavens and the earth, the metaphysical yellow" is from the I Ching. The I Ching says "Tian Xuan Di Huang", here in order to rhyme as "Heaven and Earth Xuan Huang" this does not change the ancient text of the citation, for the Ming quote. The phrase "the flood of the universe" comes from "Huainanzi" and "Taixuanjing". In "Huainanzi", it is said that "the four directions up and down are called Yu, and the past and present are called Zeus". Yang Xiong of the Western Han Dynasty made the Taixuanjing, in which he spoke of "the age of the flood". The words of the two sutras together are "the universe is inundated", and this way of quoting the sutras is called implicit quoting, which is why both of these words are classics. If we take these two words literally, they mean that the color of the sky is black and the color of the earth is yellow. Isn't this a nonsensical statement? Can they be passed down as classics for thousands of years? Then what is the deeper meaning of these two sentences? I can only try to solve it, so let us follow the text into the view and see where we can realize it. The words "heaven and earth" have multiple meanings in the ancient Chinese language, including many concepts, and the familiar heaven of space and the earth is only one of them. To understand the meaning of the words heaven and earth, one must read the I Ching. The I Ching is the first of the five sutras, which is about the way of heaven and earth and the change of yin and yang, the traditional Chinese culture, what is the "four books", the hundred schools, all from the "I Ching" on the root of the development of the study of Chinese culture is not to read the "I Ching" is to put the cart before the horse. The I Ching says: "Metaphysics is called Tao, and metaphysics is called instrument". Heaven and earth before the universe is not born, is a chaotic state, modern physics called the big bang before the super-density infinite collapse of the particles, the Chinese culture is called taiji. 15 billion years ago, the super-density of the particles instantly produced a big bang, the formation of the current material universe, in which the tangible material condensed into the stars, is the ground; invisible space to expand to the formation of the space, is the sky. The I Ching says: the light and the clear ascend to the sky, and the cloudy descend to the earth. Isn't it both figurative and concrete? But this is the physical heaven and earth, the heaven and earth of the material world. In the culture of the I Ching, it belongs to the metaphysical "world of vessels," that is, the material world. The metaphysical world is the immaterial world of the Tao, which is beyond our intellectual capacity to discuss, so Confucius said, "There is nothing beyond the Six Harmonies". To "exist" means to recognize that it does exist, and to "ignore" means not to discuss it for the time being, because we are not wise enough to argue about it, so why bother? To speak the truth to those with high wisdom, metaphysics is heaven and metaphysics is earth. To those who are not wise enough, we can only speak shallow words: space is heaven and earth is earth. The same two words are both heaven and earth, but deep people have a deeper understanding and shallow people have a shallower way of saying them, each in his own way. Xuan, in terms of color, refers to the deep blue near black color called Xuan. In the sense of meaning, it refers to the lofty and unfathomable, called Xuan. The color of the sky visible to the naked eye is blue, how can it be said to be black? Blue is the color of water, the color of the ocean, daylight shines on the surface of the ocean, the light goes back up, and the sky we see is blue. But nowadays astronauts go into space to take a look, the darkness, only stars radiating a little bit of shimmering light, it is indeed black, so from the color of Tianxuan is right. In addition, the Tao of Heaven is far-reaching, and as Lao Zi said, the metaphysical Tao of Heaven's rational body is mysterious and unfathomable, which cannot be understood by our existing wisdom. It is the metaphysical Tao of Heaven that is high and unfathomable, hence the name Tianxuan. Di Huang also has a twofold meaning. Our Chinese culture, especially the traditional culture, precisely refers to the culture before the pre-Qin Dynasty, that is, the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties, especially the Zhou Dynasty. In the ancient times, the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties established their states and capitals in the Yellow River Basin, so the traditional culture of China, if narrowed down further, should be said to be the culture of the Yellow River Basin. The Yellow River is the mother river, originating from the Kunlun Mountains (Yogu Zonglei Basin), converging in the Xingxiuhai Sea, crossing the Ishi Mountain, flowing down from the Northwest Plateau through nine curves and eighteen bends, and at the same time, bringing down the loess to form the impact plains. The color of that water is yellow, the color of the earth is also yellow, and the crops millet and jasmine are yellow, so it is said that the earth is yellow. Another meaning, the universe of celestial bodies, including the Earth, are the product of the Big Bang, in the initial state are hot material. The earth then condenses its temperature within the magma of the earth's core, and is constantly replenished by the sun. The presence of temperature makes the phenomenon of life possible. In chromatographic analysis, the color basalt is cold and yellow is warm. The yellow color of the earth also praises the warmth of the earth for its nurturing and feeding effect, so the Chinese also honor the earth as "mother". As the heavenly way is high and the earthly way is deep, yellow also represents the depth of the earth's way. Superstitious people say: "After death, people return to the Yellow Springs, after the bridge is the Yellow Springs Road. Although the words are not believable, the meaning of the words is that another profound world is not known to the living. It can be seen that it is not easy to understand the four words "heaven and earth". The Universe and the Flood, Huai Nan Zi, said that the upper and lower quadrants are called Yu. Up and down the four directions is also called the six, so Yu is the concept of space. Ancient past and present is called zu, is the succession of history, is the concept of time. The universe is space and time, representing the concept of "space-time" in modern science. The word "universe" we use today is only the physical space, which is equivalent to what the ancients called "Yu", without the concept of Zeus. Why? Because time is not an objective existence, is the subjective feeling. The continuation of the state of space is time, separated from the space, there is no time, space is not the same, time is not the same. Space is not the same, time is not the same. Space is expanded with the extension of time, in turn, space is reduced with the shortening of time. There is an ancient story about "Wang Qi's Chess Game". When Wang Qi of the Jin Dynasty went into the mountains to cut firewood, he saw two children playing chess under a pine tree, so he stopped and watched a game of chess. After the game, the handle of his axe was rotten. When he returned home, all his contemporaries had passed away. You can see that space is not the same and time is not the same. Today we feel that we don't have enough time, and that a day seems very short compared to a day when we were children. This is natural because space has shortened. Tang Dynasty's Xuanzang to India to get the scriptures to go three years, now take the plane a few small on the way, the convenience of transportation to shrink the space, naturally, we feel shorter in time. In addition, time and the speed of movement of objects have a direct relationship. According to Einstein's theory: mass, energy and speed in the universe can be transformed into each other. The speed limit of the universe is the speed of light, i.e., 300,000 kilometers per second, and when the speed of motion reaches the speed of light, time tends to zero. When moving beyond the speed of light, time is reversed, which is the "time tunnel" depicted in science fiction movies. To reach this point, human beings can only say "evolution", otherwise it is always the study of the monkey into a man, man into a monkey, there is no novelty. But the problem is that zero is also a form of existence, not non-existence. Even if we enter the time tunnel, it is only a countdown, and we still have not transcended the boundaries of time and space. The Diamond Sutra and Laozi are the two great sages of the East and the West who taught us to break through time and space, and have long since transcended the boundaries of religion, the so-called "there are sages in the East and sages in the West, the heart is the same, the reason is the same". There was no ancient scholar who did not read these two scriptures, but today we reject them as religious writings, which is a blessing that we modern people cannot enjoy. The Flood refers to the early state after the formation of the earth, five billion years ago (the formation of the solar system), when the earth's crust was thin and the temperature was extremely high. The mountain building movement triggered the flood, and the original meaning of the word flood is great water, referring to the early floods on earth. There have been at least three floods on Earth, and the one by Dayu was the most recent, about 4,000 years ago. Dayu pacified the floods and settled the nine states, which is the earliest example of the transformation of nature that has appeared in the history of mankind. The original meaning of the word "wilderness" is the ignorance of grass and trees, which refers to the ancient period before the emergence of human beings, at least 5 million years ago, when the earth was still in a state of confusion and ignorance. In China, there is the story of Pangu's opening of heaven and earth. Long ago, when heaven and earth were not yet separated, there was a man who slept like a fetus in an egg-shell-like heaven and earth, and he slept for 18,000 years. No one knew how old he was, so he was called Pangu. When he woke up from his sleep, he felt dark and stuffy, so he split this eggshell into two halves with an axe. The lighter one rose to become the sky, and the turbid one descended to become the earth. In order to fix the heaven and earth, he grew one zhang in height every day, and after 18,000 years, the heaven and earth were finally fixed, and Pangu was also transformed into a part of the heaven and earth. This is a myth, but with the Big Bang said there is a little similarity.