Experiment

9-fold Magic Square Pattern of Tao Te Ching Insights (Part #3)

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This following very simple experiment associates the titles (as translated by Walters in one or two words) of the 81 insights of the T'ai Hsüan Ching to the single-phrase presentation of the Tao Te Ching -- in the tabular form explored previously. A choice was however made to convert the terms chosen by Walters into gerund form (of a synonym, if necessary), where this was not already the case. For example, Walters has #1 as The Center, converted here to Centering; he has #2 as Surrounding, not converted here, etc. The reason for this is an interest here in the dynamic associated with the insight rather than reinforcing any static sense of a description. This adaptation may indeed be misleading given that the version presented by Walters typically offers only a metaphoric allusion to the sense of the insight.

Note that, following Walters, Michael Nylan (The Canon of Supreme Mystery by Yang Hsiung. 1993) produced a new translation of the T'ai Hsüan Ching using other English title variants in some cases. The representation of the Tai Xuan Jing tetragram symbols according to the web Unicode 5.0 standard (range 1D300-1D35F) uses another set of titles but specifically notes that these are not correct translations of the usual Chinese terminology.

The question raised by this experiment is whether the titles (from the T'ai Hsüan Ching) and the phrase (from the Tao Te Ching) then have any relationship -- whether inherently meaningful, intuitive, or aesthetically suggestive -- despite the complex pathways through which the English texts were derived, and the criticism that could be validly made of this approach. Minimally however it permits an inspection of the juxtaposed elements from quite different sources. It is possible that any relationship that may exist is necessarily to be understood as a paradoxical challenge to comprehension like a Zen koan (gong-àn in Chinese).

The configurations of insights in the following tables point to the possibility that, like stringed instruments, they in all probability each require a form of semantic or memetic "tuning" to be able to communicate the interplay of insights whose totality is named by the author as "mystery". To what extent do the interlocking numbers in any magic square patterning enable such comprehension?

The magic square configuration, of significance at that time, may help to determine whether the relatiuonship between the insights of the Tao Te Ching and the T'ai Hsüan Ching is very significant or fortuitous at best.

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