RENSEP PhD Grant and PhD Project of Ching Liu

RENSEP PhD Grant and PhD Project of Ching Liu

RENSEP has recently given out its very first PhD grant! As a charity with a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it is with great pleasure to introduce you to the PhD student that is on the recipient end of this RENSEP grant: Ching Liu.

Ching, who was born and raised in China, will be working on her PhD project at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg under the supervision of Professor Michael Lackner. Her project about Yijing knowledge and divination, bearing the title Concealment and Secrecy -The Transmission of Yijing knowledge and Divination Practice in Contemporary China, will be a valuable addition to the body of scholarly knowledge on the subject as well as to that of esoteric practices.

In case this has sparked your curiosity, below you can read the outline of her project.

Concealment and Secrecy -The Transmission of Yijing knowledge and Divination Practice in Contemporary China

Outline

Chinese divination and its text-based divination system lend themselves to empirical practices and experiences and, consequently, to transmission from one generation to the next. Changing historical and political contexts altered and contributed to the separation of divinatory practices and the philosophical texts based on them. These texts, the Yijing or Classic of Changes, according to Richard Smith, are extremely ancient, diverse in its origins, unsystematic, and subject to radically different readings and understandings. This unique divinatory system, with its often cryptic utterances, left ample room for interpretation. The art of divination is to interpret the same text for different individuals facing different situations, both in the ancient and modern world.

Working at the theoretical and methodological intersections of history, philosophy, astronomy, and anthropology, this project is the first to describe the exact curriculum of a Chinese diviner who specialized in various Yijing practices, namely Meihua Yishu 梅花易数, Liuyao 六爻, Qimen Dunjia 奇门遁甲, Sizhu 四柱, the latter not being directly based on Yijing texts themselves. By recording and examining how a professional diviner transmits Yijing knowledge and four divination techniques in mainland China, this research will not only compare his utterances and the content of the teaching with other prestigious diviners, manuals, and other written materials for teaching divination (including “do-it-yourself”), but also comments on each part of the curriculum
associated with contemporary and historical literature. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which key elements of texts and divinatory words emerge from empirical practices and how texts have been used as part of the dynamic interaction of text and divinatory experience in modern China.

Bio
Originally from Luoyang, in mainland China, Ching is a daughter of a professional diviner who has been teaching Yijing and various divination techniques for nearly twenty years. Immersing herself for years in the divinatory community, she is an expert on various divination techniques. Ching’s professional and personal background as an academic as well as a practitioner gives her the privileged position of an insider. After receiving her degree is British-trained anthropology from Durham University, Ching is currently pursuing her Ph.D. project under the supervision of Professor Michael Lackner at University of Erlangen–Nuremberg.