ABSTRACT
As excellent mathematician-missionaries, the Jesuit Figurists indeed took advantage of the greatest common denominator, which is the numbers in the Yijing, to link Christianity with the Dao and Confucianism. The Figurists used Classical and vernacular Chinese languages, as well as intralingual translation, and argued that the Prisca Theologia also lies in the numbers of the Yijing; the divine keys were discovered and located by these speakers of God, the Jesuit Figurists. In their view, numbers were one of the important passageways to fully understanding God’s messages and the history of Christianity, and they effected their ideas by linking with the Dao and the school of images and numbers. The variety of charts, triangles, and re-interpretations in the Chinese manuscripts indeed captured the attention of the Kangxi Emperor and the Chinese literati. In the end, however, the Jesuit Figurists’ divinization of numbers was not enough to persuade the Kangxi Emperor to believe in Christianity; rather, their charts may have further inspired the emperor’s secular claim that such arithmetic had originated in China.
