The Yin Fu Ching (With Active Table of Contents)

THIS treatise is one of the most interesting and important in the Taoist canon. Tradition ascribes its authorship to the mythical Emperor Huang Ti, or one of his six Ministers; but although it of course appeared at a considerably later date than this, all scholars agree in attributing it to a very remote antiquity. The earliest Commentator who published an edition of the work is said to have been Chiang Tsze-ya, otherwise known as T‘ai Kung, the famous Minister of Hsi Po, and a reputed descendant of the Yellow Emperor; so, if this were true, we should be able to trace its existence at least as far back as the Shang dynasty, or say twelve hundred years before Christ.
The aim of this ancient compilation, to quote the authority of Mr. Wylie, is to "reconcile the decrees of Heaven with the current of mundane affairs." It is supposed to contain the very root and essence of Taoism, and its entire freedom from all allusions to the later and baser developments of that philosophy appears to constitute a strong argument in favour of its distant origin. Our translation of the title, Yin Fu, is of course merely approximative, and may be criticised accordingly. Fu means a seal, divided into two parts. On one half of this seal we have the visible phenomena of the world around us; this we can all see, but, the diagram being incomplete, we require the other half of the seal, that bearing the of Heaven or the Unseen World, before we can understand the why and the wherefore of the existing order of things. In this book the two halves of the seal are professedly brought together, and we are thus enabled to perceive the hidden harmony which runs through all things where before we could see nothing but discord, and are presented with an explanation of all the mysteries of the world, the secret coincidences between the Seen and the Unseen, of which in our unenlightened state we are profoundly ignorant. The idea is a remarkably beautiful one, and the representation of such a 'Clue to the Unseen' by a divided seal, strikes us as singularly forcible and apt. The edition now translated bears the name of Chang Shih-ch‘un as editor, a scholar of Honan who lived in the reign of Ts‘ung Cheng, last Emperor of the Mings.