The Game of Go - Speculations on its Origins and Symbolism in Ancient China by Peter Shotwell (2002).pdf

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The Game of Go:
Speculations on its Origins and
Symbolism in Ancient China
By Peter Shotwell
© 2002
This is an unexpurgated, clarified and corrected version of
‘Speculations on the Origin of Go’ in Bozulich (ed.);
The Go Player’s
Almanac 2001;
Kiseido; 2001, which itself was a revision and update of the
original article ‘The Earth, the Dead and the Darkness’ in
Go World
No. 70;
1994.
Just as new evidence has turned up in recent years which has helped
strengthen the original theses, future scholarship and excavations of the
multitude of China’s archeological sites that remain underground will
undoubtedly influence future thought. The author welcomes
communications regarding new data or comments. He can be reached
through the American Go Association at www.usgo.org.
Relevant Dates
Huang Di (The Yellow Emperor)*
c. 2600 BC
Yao, Shun and Dan Ju*
c. 2100 BC
Xia Dynasty*
c. 2100-c. 1575 BC
Shang Dynasty
c. 1575-1046 (or 1027) BC
Zhou Dynasty
1046 (or 1027)-771 (or 256) BC
Spring and Autumn Period
c. 710-476 BC
Warring States Period
476-221 BC
Qin Dynasty
221-207 BC
Han Dynasty
206 BC-220 AD
Tang Dynasty
618-907 AD
Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty
1271-1368 AD
Ming Dynasty
1368-1644 AD
Qing (Manchu) Dynasty
1636-1911 AD
* Legendary, mythical or semi-historical
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Table of Contents
Introduction:
Modern Theories of the Origins and Symbolism of Go
A Thematic Overview of this Essay
I. Han Historical Revisions, Structuralism and the Yao Myths
Yao, Shun and Dan Ju
History and Chinese Myth
Structuralism and Chinese Myth
Go and the Rivalry Between the Confucian and
Daoist Schools of Strategy
Go and the Yao Myths
II. Sky-Oriented and Divination Theories of Go’s Origins
The Zhou-Han Star-Oriented Cultures
The
Shi
Board Divination Theory
Astral Symbolism and Go
A Calendar Theory of Go’s Origins
III. An Earth-Oriented Theory of Go’s Origins and Symbolism
Earth-Oriented
Feng Shui
and the Symbolism of Go
The Go Board as Sacred Space
IV. The Age of Go
The Archeological Record
The Origins of Go?
V. Divination, Shamanism, the Cultural Matrix of the
Yao Myth and Go
Go and Divination
Go and Shamanism
Rationality and Games
Irrationality and Go
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Introduction
Modern Theories of the Origins and Symbolism of Go
Extolled by those who play it as a game unlike all others, go is
thought to be the oldest board game of mental skill in the world that is still
being played. Its simple rules draw the player into a complexity that baffles
definitive analysis, and to play demands both art and skill. Since facts are
few, fragmentary, and elusive, pursuit of its origins and history as a cultural
artifact also requires both art and skill. (1)
With a few exceptions, serious academic studies do not exist. This is
unfortunate since many interesting questions arise when apparently
credible hypotheses about the game’s history and early symbolism are
critically examined.
The presentation of the literary history of go in popular books usually
begins with the myth of King Yao teaching his eldest son Dan Ju to play the
game c. 2100 BC. First appearing (with no mention of its source) in written
form in the
Shi Ben,
a lost book of the Warring States period, the story
surfaces in Han dynasty commentaries and was recorded by Du Yu in his
Tong Dian,
around the 8
th
century AD. There were comments made that
Dan Ju became a very good player, or even the best.
Beginning in the Han Dynasty, some writers noted there were
variations on who originated the game. In one, Shun, Yao’s chief minister,
invented it on Yao’s instructions for the benefit of Dan Ju. Another had
Shun, after his ascent to the throne following Yao’s abdication, inventing it
for his own eldest son. A third variant told of a later king, Qiao, (c. 1800
BC), doing the same for his first-born. The sons in all these versions
rebelled and died fighting their father or whoever replaced their father on
the throne.
On the other hand, several versions of the Yao cycle made no
mention of the game at all and there are other versions that began with
Huang Di, the mystical Yellow Emperor. This led some historians to
theorize that go-playing Han writers inserted the game into their accounts
to endow it with an age and prestige greater than it possessed. This was
done, it was proposed, because the Han scribes were promoting Yao and
other kings of the Golden Age – the semi-mythical Xia Dynasty (c. 2100-
1575 BC) – as exemplars of an idealized virtue.
To buttress the argument that go is not as ancient as those early
histories portray, it is usually pointed out that the oldest known go boards
and stones were found only at Han-age burial sites, and the earliest board
known to have been played on dates only from c. 2-300 AD.
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In addition to the lack of archaeological evidence of a great age for
the game, there are the relatively late dates of historical references. The
first written (and plausible) reference to go appears in 91 BC, chronicling an
event of 681 BC. An event in 547 BC in the Spring and Autumn period,
which has been generally accepted as relating to go, was written in 434
BC.
Assuming that the game was played before this time, most modern
writers conclude that it first appeared during the Zhou or early Spring and
Autumn period, c. 1000-700 BC. Some think likely to have originated as a
game of chance played between rival diviners on a board that mirrored the
night skies and might have harbored a moveable compass. In thinking this,
they followed the lead of Joseph Needham, who linked together the origins
of chess, go, magnetism, astrology and divination in his monumental
Science and Civilization in China.
An alternative thesis could be made for the idea that it could have
been the children of diviners who might have made up a game using their
parents’ tools, as sometimes happened in North America.
There are some stories that add more to the idea that there were
early shamanistic connections. One tells of a musician-sorcerer who
suddenly sprouted insect wings and flew up to a mountain peak to play with
Huang Di, the semi-mystical Yellow Emperor. Another story has the Yellow
Emperor inventing go to develop strategies for fighting a semi-mythical
creature, playing it with a fairy, and then transmitting the game through a
dream to Yao, who then taught Dan Ju with the same results – that the
lessons and his prowess at the game did him no good.
The idea that astral symbolism underlies the development of go
seems to accord with another suggested line of thought – that the board
was used to measure time as an early calendar. These theories followed
on ideas first implied in Han commentaries and later presented fully in
Zhang Ni’s
The Classic of Go,
published between 1049 and 1054 AD:
The three hundred and sixty intersections correspond to the number
of days in a year. Divided into four corners like the four seasons, they have
ninety intersections each, like the number of days in a season. There are
seventy-two intersections on the sides, like the number of five-day weeks in
a year.
(2)
In sum, the prevailing thoughts of the modern go community and
interested scholars have been:
1) That the game is unlikely to be as old as the myths of Yao suggest,
and its presence in these tales reflects the caprices and biases of Han
historians.
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2) That its actual invention occurred at some point during the
star-worshiping Zhou period or soon thereafter, leading to the board and
stones’ association with both the ‘Sky’ and ‘Time.’
3) From this, it has generally been thought, especially in the West,
that there has always been a ‘spiritual aura’ surrounding the game because
playing it seems to bring about moral and mental development as the
players are brought into harmony with the forces of
yin
and
yang
in the
universe. (3)
A Thematic Overview of this Essay
There are several problems with the standard theories of the history
of go, beginning with the evidence presented by Needham. Basing some of
his work on the ideas of chess historian H.J.R. Murray, he wrote at a time
(1962) when the literary and archeological evidence for the early age of
Chinese board games was not available or was being misinterpreted.
Because, like the earliest go boards, the first examples of the use of
throwing stones down on ‘sky boards’ (shi
ban)
dated only from the Han
period, he found it easy to assume that Sky divination practices led directly
to the invention of board games, and that therefore, Chinese board games
did not predate the Han period.
Since then, such things as a Zhou period
liu bo
dice game board
have been found and the literary evidence was examined more closely.
Additionally, the idea of chess and its representational pieces was
disentangled from the surrounding principles of go, with the effect that, in
what little there is of scholarly writing on the game, the origins were
generally pushed back to the Spring and Autumn or Zhou periods, c. 700-
1000 BC.
However, many lozenge-shaped pottery pieces dating as old as c.
5000 BC have recently been found near ancient homes in Anyang. Small
piles of game-like stones painted in two groups of colors were also found at
later sites in Shang tombs (c. 1575-1046/27 BC). At a 4,000 year old
Siberian site, small mounds of ‘checker-like’ stones shaped like Chinese go
stones with one side convex and the other flat, were dug up. Chinese
archeologists say that these were ‘probably’ game-stones.
Thus, one can theorize that games played on perishable cloth or dirt
boards, especially one as simple as go (which basically has only two rules),
could have preceded Sky divination.
One plausible beginning might be that, as in numerous games around
the world, stones were put down on a board to keep track of the results of
dice throws. However, as in North America, the use of dice does not
necessarily imply divining. In regard to Sky divination, one must also pay
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