Hongfan

The Great Plan is a section of the Book of Documents that connects divination to the ordering of the kingdom. In the translator’s account, its scheme was revealed on the back of a tortoise emerging from the River Luo to Great Yu as he drained the floodwaters; it became a mystical model for government and a witness to the early practice of consulting tortoise-shells and stalks to examine doubts.

A Scheme for Government

The translator describes the Great Plan as a document of the Book of Documents and relates its origin to a tortoise that emerged from the River Luo while Great Yu was engaged in draining the floodwaters. The scheme on the tortoise’s back was of the same general character as the River Map, and its accepted representation was presented in the surrounding discussion. The passage links a sign from the natural world to a program of political order: the document was understood not merely as a device for divination but as a model for governing the kingdom.

The translator invokes Gaubil’s description of the Great Plan as a treatise encompassing physics, astrology, divination, morals, politics, and religion. That breadth helps explain why the scheme matters in the book’s account: it joins questions about how to read signs with questions about how a realm should be administered. Its mystical reputation and its political scope are presented together, rather than as separate functions.

Divination and the Examination of Doubts

The Great Plan is also cited as evidence that divination by tortoise-shell and stalks belonged to an early Chinese tradition. The translator points to its section on examining doubts, which describes the use of those two media, and places this practice alongside an earlier reference to divining stalks in the Counsels of Great Yu. Together, these allusions locate divination within inherited institutions rather than treating it as a later innovation of the I Ching.

The associated practice had a defined purpose. Divination was not, in the translator’s account, a means of discovering future events absolutely; it was used to judge whether a contemplated plan or set of circumstances would turn out fortunate or unfortunate. He notes that the stalks were treated in the relevant appendix as spirit-like objects endowed by Heaven with a subtle virtue suited to divination. This is the appendix writer’s belief as he presents it, distinct from the translator’s account of what divination was meant to determine.

From Signs to the I Ching

The translator sets this tradition beside the I Ching’s stalk procedure. Forty-nine stalks were used, with three manipulations for each line and eighteen in all to produce a hexagram. Odd and even numbers yielded strong, undivided lines or weak, divided lines; numbers associated with the River Map, including the emblematic values nine, eight, seven, and six, helped form the figure. The result was then interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements. In this account, numbers served the practical work of generating the hexagram, not as independent principles that caused the material existence of things.

The Great Plan thus belongs to a larger history of divinatory media and interpretation. Its tortoise scheme and the I Ching’s stalk operations are related by their concern with examining uncertainty, but the translator distinguishes the procedure from claims that divination could reveal every future occurrence. The text’s significance lies both in its account of a practice and in the political horizon attached to it: divining signs is set beside the task of devising a model for the government of the kingdom.