ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the use of the Changes by the Jesuits in eighteenth-century China, like the “accommodation strategy” of the Society of Jesus more generally, should be viewed in broad historical and comparative perspective. What I seek to show is that the Jesuit effort to emphasize affinities between the Bible and the Yijing in Qing dynasty China was part of a much larger process by which the Changes came to be transmitted to other cultures, and that this process of transmission and transformation, sometimes described as “globalization,” 1 sheds useful light on questions of cross-cultural contact and cross-cultural understanding. Although the Jesuit hermeneutical strategy described as “Figurism” 2 was severely condemned by the other Catholic orders, eventually proscribed by the Church, and maligned even within the Jesuit establishment itself, this interpretive approach was part of a long tradition of Yijing exegesis and textual transmission—one that not only predated the Jesuits by several centuries but also proved remarkably tenacious well after the Society of Jesus had been disbanded. Indeed, evidence of its tenacity can still be found today, both East and West.
