Some Aspects of the Structure and Content of the Treatise on the Five Phases of the Old Book of Tang

Abstract

The article is devoted to a preliminary review of the structure and content of the Treatise on the Five Phases, which is part of the corpus of normative his­tory The Old Book of Tang. Since the Han era, such treatises have become an inte­gral part of historical collections and contain material related to the interpretation of catastrophic and strange events as omens indicating mistakes in government. The basis for the classification and arrangement of messages in the treatise is the theory of the “five phases” (wu xing), which has its roots in the pre-imperial era and is associated with the ideas of omens in the Han era thanks to the anony­mous author of the treatise Commentary on [section] The Five Phases of the Great Plan and the treatise of Liu Xiang (79 BC – 6 AD), complementing its content. In addition, an important component of the “science of portents” was the idea of the interaction of the “dark” (yin) and “light” (yang) principles, which was also reflected in the Han era in the writings of the canonologist Jing Fang (78–37 BC). The article provides a brief overview of the formation of the theory of omens based on the concepts of the “five phases” and the interaction of the principles of yin and yang, and also shows that the organization of the main part of the trea­tise has its own specifics and the order of enumeration of events does not follow a predetermined pattern. Also, a review of the contents of the treatise shows that, firstly, in the Tang era there were two main procedures for interpreting omens and making decisions, differing in the composition of participants and the nature of the actions taken, and secondly, the idea of who is responsible for catastrophic and strange events has changed and their composition has expanded at the ex­pense of dignitaries.