Beijing - Day 4 - Forbidden City Class
Master Sang put together this class for his students to study the Feng Shui of the Forbidden city. He invited the highest scholar on the Forbidden City, Dr. Han Zenglu to speak to us. His talk was entitled “Zhouyi and Beijing City”. Zhou yi is also known as yi jing. His intent was to give us an understanding of how the culture of Zhou Yi influenced the design and architecture of the Forbidden City.
It was an amazing class. It filled in so much history and detail that we miss taking the classes in America. I would love to share this information, but it was a seven hour class and there is no way to boil it down into a couple paragraphs. I will share this from the preface to his class:
“The highest Chinese cultural ideal is to advocate and pursue harmony. This pursuit of harmony has cultural connotations, and is expressed in several ways in regards to planning and design for structures built in ancient times in China:
Direction and bearing
Shape and form
Image
Color
Number
Chinese characters
These characteristics are displayed in the construction plans and design of the Forbidden City (now called Beijing GuGong: Ancient Palace). If you don’t understand the principles and culture of the yi jing, you cannot understand the way in which structures such as the Forbidden City were built.”
What an amazing class. Although held in Mandarin, our translator Cynthia did a great job of capturing all that Dr. Han was saying. Master Sang added to it, but tying things together with our existing knowledge.
After the class, we started to pack up. Master Sang then told us that we should sit down as he had another special guest speaker for us, Professor Li Ding. Professor Li is an expert on the yi jing and he provided a short 1 hour lecture on how the Chinese perceive the yi jing and its four dimensional perspective. That class blew everyone away. It was a combination of a whole different perspective on how to look at the trigrams, elements, and numbers, looking from the inside out. I can’t even begin to explain it here, but I am confident that there is nobody in the world outside of China that teaches this.
After Professor Li’s lesson, we left, amazed and in awe. We took a rest, although nobody was probably resting after that day! Off to dinner and finally to bed for some much needed rest. Tomorrow is the special guided tour of the Forbidden City with Dr. Han.
