邵雍

Believe it or not, my recent bedtime reading is A Pictorial Guide to Meihuayishu (圖解梅花易數) by Tang Hang Yi (湯行易).

For visitors not familiar with Chinese astrology, Meihuayishu - which literally means the plum flower mathematics of change - is a system of divination devised by Shao Yong (邵雍), a philosopher and cosmologist of the Song Dynasty who is often better known by his nickname Shào Kāngjié (邵康節).

Shao was often considered the most learned men of his time, and was the leading expert of studying I Ching (易經). He was best known by using the (at his time) novel image number approach (象數學) to interpret this classical text edited by the King Wen of Zhou (周文王). Meihuayishu is a practical extrapolation of Shao's system.

The best known work of Shao is, of course, The Book of Supreme World Ordering (皇極經世書), which is supposed to be able to predict (no, not only explain) everything under the sun by applying the principles of I Ching. The interesting rumor is Shao was convinced that neither his son nor students could fully understand The Book, and, for that reason, he wrote a less complicated one for them to earn a living.

This very version is The Iron Version of Mathematics (鐵版神數).

Or, Shao himself called it The Mathematics for the Dummies (蠢仔數).