It is customary to begin a book about divination with an apology. To devote time and effort to the study of something that persists like an unwelcome guest or an ignored beggar at the fringes of religion and outside the bounds of science, it seems, requires justification. The “introduction by apology” is often edifying, and it typically points to the varieties of divination, the contributions of divination and “divinatory rationalities” to scientific, proto-scientific, and religious thought patterns, divination’s ubiquity across cultures and across periods, and divination’s persistence in modern industrialized societies. Given that such an apology has become obligatory, it is no surprise that scholars for whom divination’s value as an object of study is taken as a given might push back at this convention and its undertones of self-flagellation. The main question in this context, then, is whether the pushback will be a correction in the form of bombastic overstatement of the significance of divination, or whether it will be something more measured.
The nature of this correction depends to some degree on how one answers the questions, What does the study of divination contribute to the study of religion? and What does the history of the transmission of this tradition across cultures contribute to the study of processes of transfer more generally? We mainly address such questions by way of examining details in our case studies of various dice divination texts, but we also reflect on some more general themes relating to games and gods and with respect to order and chaos. Readers can decide for themselves the extent to which this recommends divination as a worthy topic of study. Here, we would like to extend our thanks to those who have contributed to our collaborative project.
Every divination starts with a problem or an issue (shi 事), and our book likewise started with a problem. This problem was taking shape in Erlangen in the summer of 2017 when the authors were all members of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities with the theme “Fate, Freedom, and Prognostication: Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe” based at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Brandon Dotson had been studying a form of Tibetan dice divination preserved in about two dozen excavated early Tibetan manuscripts (8th–10th century CE) from the Silk Road sites of Dunhuang, Turfan, and Mazār Tāgh, and he became interested in a very similar text, also from Dunhuang, but in Chinese. The text, called the Divination of Maheśvara (Moxishouluo bu 摩醯首羅卜), had been noticed before by Sinologists, but most had assumed it to be a Chinese tradition, and did not connect it to the Tibetan texts, or to the Sanskrit texts from which these Tibetan texts apparently derived. The problem that the Divination of Maheśvara presented, in the most naïve terms, was “What is this?” or, more specifically, “Where does this fit in the context of Dunhuang, China, and the Silk Roads?”
Over the course of many coffees, meals, and Franconian beers, this question—along with the fascination of the text itself—came to captivate the attentions of Connie Cook and Zhao Lu. Having just co-authored a book on a 4th-century BCE Chinese stalk divination text, the Stalk Divination (Shifa 筮法), they were well positioned to see both how the Divination of Maheśvara did and did not fit within Chinese divination traditions. Venturing deeper into the initial question, many further questions came to supplant it: How does this divination system work? Who are the gods and spirits it invokes and what do they tell us? From these followed larger, more unwieldy questions: What is the relationship between the gods or spirits and the mantic figures such as numerical trigrams to which they are somehow connected? What, if anything, unifies this tradition across the Sanskrit, Tibetan, Turkish, and Chinese texts in which it is found? This sense of doubling back and revisiting the initial problem also mirrored the divination process itself, which in the Divination of Maheśvara’s case allows one to divine three times on a given matter, and thus receive three different perspectives on one’s question.
Beyond the three perspectives of the three authors, this book is also informed by conversations with friends and colleagues in Asian Studies and Religious Studies. Just as every text-based divination is a collaborative event, with client and diviner, as well as an assembled audience or “divinatory congregation” interpreting a randomly selected oracular response to arrive together at meanings, our conversations with colleagues have helped us to make sense of the texts and traditions we study. Our process of writing this book has not been randomly generated by the fall of the dice, but it has been similarly collaborative, with discussions of different interpretations sometimes before audiences of our peers in Asian Studies and Religious Studies. This constituted itself formally at conferences and workshops, and informally in a variety of conversations. The most consequential of these workshops was a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Collaborative Reading Workshop devoted to the Divination of Maheśvara held at Georgetown University in June 2019. In addition to the authors, this workshop included Megan Bryson, Allan (Yi) Ding, Imre Galambos, Ai Nishida, Stephen Teiser, and Michelle C. Wang. We are deeply thankful to all of these scholars for their perceptive comments and suggestions and for their active participation in this workshop and in follow-up conversations since.
During the germination of this book many others have shaped the conversation, and we take this opportunity to acknowledge their input and to express our gratitude. This includes Andrea Bréard, Charles Burnett, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, Marta Hanson, Matthias Hayek, Stephan Heilen, Tze-ki Hon, Marc Kalinowski, Stephan Kory, Martin Kroher, Michael Lüdke, Fabian Schäfer, Rolf Scheuermann, Kelsey Seymour, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Alexander K. Smith, Jan-Ulrich Sobisch, Carsten Storm, and Bee Yun.
For financial and academic support we thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the ACLS Programs in China Studies for a Henry Luce Foundation/ ACLS Program in China Studies Collaborative Reading Workshop Grant. Brandon Dotson also thanks Georgetown University’s Global Engagement Program for an International Collaborative Grant, the Georgetown Buddhist and Silk Road Studies Initiative, and Georgetown College’s Humanities Initiative for supporting the summer reading workshop in June 2019. C.A. Cook in addition thanks the Hetty Goldman Scholars program at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ for support.
We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Michael Lackner, the director of the Consortium, without whose foresight these conversations would have never taken place. We are also grateful to Fabrizio Predagio and to the anonymous reviewer of our manuscript, as well as to Albert Hoffstadt and Patricia Radder at Brill for their roles in shepherding this book to publication.
This book is offered not as an end to these conversations, but as an invitation for others to join.