Chapter 1786 Divination and Celestial Phenomenon
The Chinese calendar can be traced back to the time of the Yellow Emperor. It is called "Huangdi Calendar".
According to legend, the calendar was formulated by the Yellow Emperor after he defeated Chiyou and unified the world. The original calendar rules have been lost to this day, but we can get a glimpse of it from some ancient books. The "Huangdi Calendar" is a yin and yang calendar. , with the month of Jianzi, that is, the handle of the Big Dipper pointing to the position of Zi, including the month of the winter solstice, it is the beginning of the year.
Don’t underestimate this simple sentence. This is called “observation of images and timing”. The Chinese people’s starting point for “observation of images and timing” was before the discovery of the star map of the Erlitou Culture and the burial of green pine, dragon and tiger. , everyone thinks that it starts with the "Huangdi Calendar".
The main achievement of the Yellow Emperor Calendar is the creation of the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches, expressing the yin and yang and the five elements, and using leap months to determine the four seasons and years. This practice laid the foundation for the traditional Chinese calendar and has been passed down to this day.
The calendar is calculated from the date when the Yellow Emperor ascended the throne, which is based on the "first year and the first day". According to the cooperation of the heavenly stems and the earthly branches, there is a cycle of sixty years, which is the so-called Yijiazi.
It is said that the day when the Yellow Emperor ascended the throne coincided with the above celestial phenomena appearing together. That day coincided with the winter solstice and the first day of the new moon. Therefore, the Yellow Emperor made the calendar and used that day as the starting point of the Taoist calendar, that is: Jiazi month of the Jiazi year. Jiazi day and Jiazi hour.
Because the early calculations of the calendar were not precise, it would lead to deviations. After Zhuanxu succeeded to the throne, he made a large-scale revision of the Huangdi Calendar, which was the Zhuanxu Calendar.
The achievement of this calendar is the introduction of leap years and the adoption of the seven leap years in nineteen years. The first tropical year is 365 and 1/4 days. This division method is a kind of "four-point calendar". Later It also has a profound impact on Chinese legislation.
A synodic month lasts for 29 and 499/940 days, with October as the beginning of the year. The leap month is placed after September, which is called the latter September.
The Zhuanxu calendar was replaced by the Xia calendar during the Xia Dynasty. However, it was restored again in the Qin State. After Qin Shihuang unified the six countries, it was re-promulgated and followed until the early Western Han Dynasty.
In addition to being recorded in history books, the Zhuanxu calendar is also a calendar that has been confirmed by archaeological artifacts. This calendar is recorded in detail in Yinqueshan Han Slips.
After many years, in the Xia Dynasty, the more advanced lunar calendar began to be implemented.
The achievement of the lunar calendar is the adoption of the "fixed lunar day" - taking the lunar day as the first day of each month, dividing the year of return into twenty-four solar terms, and placing leap days in the month when the middle energy is lacking. This reflects that It reflects the influence of the sun's thermal force on the earth, and also reflects the cyclical changes of the resonance of the moon as the main force, coupled with the tidal force of the sun on the earth, integrating the yin, moon, and yang years into one.
This achievement is also remarkable. Until now, all calendars in the world are basically either the lunar or the sun. Only the Chinese calendar is a perfect combination of the lunar and the sun. This is not only an astronomical achievement, but also It has influenced the philosophy and thinking of the Chinese people.
For example, the West prefers "dichotomy", "dual opposition", and "simplistic handling of complex problems"; but the Chinese are keen on "dual fusion", "transformation of contradictions", and "complicated handling of simple problems".
In terms of judging which is better and which is worse, the West will of course think that its own is better, but the East will not think so. It will only think that at different stages of the development of things, the two methods may always have their own differences. There are advantages and disadvantages, it just depends on which one is more suitable for the current development.
This is actually a direct manifestation of the thinking of "complex processing of simple problems".
Next is the Yin calendar. The Yin calendar is also a lunar and solar calendar, but it is more detailed. Each year is divided into spring and autumn, with a big month of thirty days and a small month of twenty-nine days; the leap month is placed at the end of the year. , called 'Thirteenth Month'.
In the Zhou Dynasty, the situation became more complicated. The weekly calendar was not purely the Zhou Dynasty calendar. It was developed on the basis of the quarter calendar and absorbed many achievements of the former. In addition to the different eras, There are more subtleties.
However, the promotion of the weekly calendar was not unified. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, different regions had different choices regarding the use of the Xia, Yin, and Wednesday Zhengs. Therefore, if you want to have a deep understanding of the ancient books of the Pre-Qin Dynasty, you need to first understand the differences between the three orthodoxies in order to grasp the inconsistent timing of the calendar system in the ancient books of the Pre-Qin Dynasty.
For example, "Spring and Autumn" and "Mencius" mostly use the weekly calendar; "Chu Ci" and "Lu's Spring and Autumn" use the lunar calendar; "The Book of Songs" also depends on the specific poems. For example "Xiaoya·April" uses the lunar calendar, and "Binfeng·July" uses both the lunar calendar and the weekly calendar. In "The Book of Songs", any word "July" must refer to the lunar calendar, and any day with "one day" "etc." refers to the weekly calendar.
The projects done before Zhou Zhi originated from oracle bone inscriptions. Oracle bone inscriptions are of course from the Shang Dynasty, but the way of recording time on these things is not entirely Yin calendar. Or to put it another way, because the time span of the Shang Dynasty It was a long time, and the calendar experienced a long period of development during this period. Therefore, the calendar dates are different in the oracle bone inscriptions from different periods of the Shang Dynasty.
The early astronomical research in the Shang Dynasty mainly focused on the observation and recording of the movement patterns of celestial bodies. There was no clear calendar system at this time, but through constant observation and practice, the cycle of the synodic moon and the length of the solar year were gradually mastered, and some important celestial phenomena were recorded and judged.
In the early Shang Dynasty, the earliest calendar calendar appeared, called the "Jiazi Calendar", with Jiazi Day, the first day of the first lunar month, as the starting point of the calendar.
In the middle period, from about 1400 BC to 1200 BC, some relatively systematic calendar preparations began to appear, the most famous of which were the 'Xundai Calendar' and the 'Xia Calendar'.
The ten-day calendar is based on a week of ten days, a month is divided into three ten-days, and a year is divided into thirty-six ten-days. The summer calendar uses the summer solstice as the beginning of the year. , with Xiaoshu Day as the end of the year, the year is divided into twenty-four solar terms, which are used for agricultural production and sacrificial ceremonies.
In the late period, the calendar was mainly based on the synodic month and solar year, which was more accurate and the chronology was more unified. This shows that by the late Shang Dynasty, astronomical research had accumulated observations and records of the sun, moon and stars to a considerable extent, and gradually developed some divination and prediction techniques, laying the foundation for the subsequent development of astronomy and divination.
At this time, there were also some institutions specializing in astronomy and calendar research, such as Taishi Ling, Si Tianjian, etc. Completed the transformation from individuals such as wizards to institutional organizations.
This group of people who observed astronomical phenomena and took records became a group in the Shang Dynasty. They were the historians known as "Zhenren" in oracle bone science.
They not only recorded some phenomena in nature that they observed, such as celestial phenomena and weather, but also recorded all phenomena observed by others.
If the superstitious elements are removed from the oracles, we can see the changes in related natural phenomena at that time.
The first type of important observations are solar and lunar eclipses.
This is an important event that ancient people attached great importance to observing and recording. As early as the Zhongkang period of the Xia Dynasty, there were historical records of solar eclipses.
In the Shang Dynasty, in addition to the observation by historians in the king, the solar and lunar eclipses observed in various places also had to be reported to the king of Shang in a timely manner. For example, an oracle bone divination from Wu Yi's time is: "Guiyouzhen: There is food at day and night, Weiruo? Guiyouzhen: There is food at night and day, Feiruo."
It means: Guiyou day divination question: Is it auspicious to find a solar eclipse at dusk? Still unlucky.
This divination text has a very interesting feature, that is, it was divined twice on the same day and burned into the oracle bones.
This may be a relatively long process, so this record is likely to be a record of a total solar eclipse, because total solar eclipses have a relatively long process.
If we calculate all the times when total solar eclipses occurred in Yindi in history into a timetable, and combine it with the historical time period of Wu Yi’s activities, we can roughly deduce the number of events recorded in this inscription. a critical time point.