ABSTRACT
By contrast with the enterprising hopefulness of the former, and the daydreaming hopelessness of the latter, there is also, perhaps, the possibility of indifference. Of course, Chinese cosmology is a very particular type of cultural-historical artefact, as is the more general ‘numerical orientation’—in many respects very highly elaborated—within Chinese culture and thought. By contrast, learning the patterns of the universe seems a trickier business. Few people in the countryside, let alone children, would claim to be experts in calculating fate. Written characters are made of brush-strokes that are counted and indeed most dictionaries are organised in a stroke-count order. An extension of this is that every person’s written name has numbers attached to it. In one popular type of fortune-telling, known as ‘calculating the brushstrokes’, the number of strokes in an individual’s written name, when related to the ‘eight characters’ of their date and time of birth, are said to hold vital clues to their fate.
