Coping with the Future: Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia ed. by Michael Lackner (review)

This volume brings together twenty papers generated from conferences, workshops, lectures, and reading seminars at the International Center for Research in the Humanities¹ from 2009 to 2014. It seeks to complicate previous approaches to divination—those that characterize it as rational or irrational, or view it with credulity or skepticism—and instead situate it “in-between” such polarities, in a state of persistent ambivalence. As Michael Lackner notes, Chinese scholars gave different weight to divination in their public and private lives, criticizing divination when engaging with erudite audiences of elites, but showing an insatiable desire for its revelatory capacity in the world of their daily experience.

The volume covers a broad range of approaches, time periods, and literary genres, providing “snapshots” of divinatory practices rather than an overview or history of mantic arts in East Asia, which they plan to address in the second phase of their research project. The six sections of the book discuss how mantic practices were presented in textual and literary traditions, incorporated into religious and political life, understood in people’s daily experience, interrelated with European and Indian knowledge, and theorized as rational and systematic. This review focuses especially on chapters pertaining to Chinese divinatory practices that are most likely to interest readers of this journal.

The section on excavated and extant texts includes Marco Caboara’s discussion and annotated translation of the Bu shu 卜書 (fourth-century BCE), which contains the earliest known treatment of turtle-shell divination and crack interpretation, Ben Nielsen’s analysis of the Qian zuo du 乾鑿度 [Chiseling Open the Regularities of the Hexagram Qian] (first-century CE), one of eight texts known collectively as the Yiwei ba zhong 易緯八種 [The Eight Apocrypha of the Changes], and Vincent Durand-Dastès’ hypothesis about why a late imperial Chinese vernacular novel about the wedding of Peach Blossom Girl opens with a preface from a medical treatise—namely because of the protective and therapeutic powers associated with fate manipulation. Paul Kroll examines mantic arts that remained respected among literate elites despite the overall diminished regard for divination in medieval China: turtle-shell divination or “cheloniomancy,” to follow Kalinowski’s term for bu 卜, milfoil sortilege (shi 筮) tied to the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing 易經, and manipulation of the cosmic-board (shi 式).

The section on religious traditions discusses Buddhist canonical views of divination, the cosmic-board in medieval Taoist and Buddhist sources, and Tibetan hailprotection practices. Esther-Maria Guggenmos seeks to contextualize the passage that lists mantic arts one should abstain from, which appears prominently in the Brahmajāla-Sūtra and Samaññaphala-Sutta, by comparing all extant parallels from Buddhist canonical texts. Although the original list included all kinds of mantic arts and magic spells, later Chinese translations excluded many incantations and spells, or criticized them only when conducted with evil intentions. Dominic Steavu offers an explanation for why certain Buddhist and Taoist traditions appropriated and reformulated the shi 式 board in their mantic practices, despite their having little to do with their original use of hemerology—the determination of auspicious and inauspicious times, days, or periods. Anne Klein analyzes various aspects of Tibetan hail protection, in which practitioners protect crops from hail by performing tantric rituals, reciting mantras, burning offerings, empowering ritual objects and pills to interfere with hailbearing beings, and visualizing themselves as wrathful deities whose flames might destroy hail clouds. Klein examines its underlying logic that connects bodies, minds, and landscapes, and the way it represents both a social and meditative practice.

In the section on politics, Martin Kern argues that early Chinese literature obscures or elides widespread mantic practices while simultaneously rhetorically invoking divination as politically significant. In the section on divination and the individual, Hsien-huei Liao examines the case of the Song dynasty scholar Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 (1282–1236), who believed that Heaven determined an individual’s fate, but also practiced mantic arts...