TheTaixuanjing is adivination guide composed by the Confucian writerYang Xiong (53 BCE – 18 CE) in the decade prior to the fall of theWestern Han dynasty. The first draft of this work was completed in 2 BCE; during theJin dynasty, an otherwise unknown person named Fan Wang (范望) salvaged the text and wrote a commentary on it, from which our text survives today.

TheTaixuanjing is a divinatory text similar to, and inspired by, theI Ching. TheI Ching is based on 64 binary hexagrams—characters composed of six horizontal lines, with each line either broken or unbroken. Meanwhile, theTaixuanjing is based on 81 ternary tetragrams—characters composed of four lines, with each line either unbroken, broken once, or broken twice.^[1] Like theI Ching, it may be consulted as an oracle by casting yarrow stalks or a six-faced die to generate numbers which define the lines of the tetragram, which is then looked up in the text.^{[further explanation needed]}A tetragram drawn without moving lines refers to the tetragram description, while a tetragram drawn with moving lines refers to the specific lines.

The monograms are:

• the unbroken line ( ⚊) for heaven (天;tiān),
• once broken line ( ⚋) for earth (地;dì),
• twice broken line ( 𝌀) for man (人;rén).

Numerically the symbols can be counted as ⚊ = 0, ⚋ = 1, 𝌀 = 2, and grouped into sets of four to count from 0 to 80. This is clearly intentional as this passage from chapter 8 of theTaixuanjing points out the principle of carrying and place value.

An English translation by Michael Nylan was published in 1993.

• Nylan, Michael (1993).The Canon of Supreme Mystery: A Translation with Commentary of the T'AI HSÜAN CHING. SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.ISBN 0-7914-1395-0.

Wikimedia Commons has media related toTai Xuan Jing Symbols.

In the Unicode Standard, theTai Xuan Jing Symbolsblock is an extension of the I Ching symbols. Their Chinese aliases most accurately reflect their interpretation; for example, the Chinese alias of code point U+1D300 is "rén", which translates into English asman and yet the English alias is "MONOGRAM FOR EARTH".^[2]

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Tai Xuan Jing Symbols block:

• Bigram
• Bagua – (I Ching)
• Ternary numeral system

EnglishWikisource has original text related to this article:

Tai Xuan Jing

• The dictionary definition ofTaixuanjing at Wiktionary
• 《太玄經》 - Full text in Chinese
• Canon of Supreme Mystery 《太玄經》 Chinese text with matching English vocabulary

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