I’ve been obsessed with Da Yeh, the Great Enterprise, ever since I translated Dazhuan. I see it as a way to put individual and cultural change together without becoming another hero or guru, launching another army or throwing another bomb – and I’ve had quite enough of those in my life.
The idea of Da Yeh originated with the Sages and Diviners of the Warring States period, a truly “yi” time when everyone was lamenting the obvious loss of the Way and trying to find it again, not just for themselves but for a world that had fallen apart. You have to remember what China was like in those days – massive civil wars, parts of the country turned into wastelands, a continual ebb and flow of the various warlords – a lot like us. In fact, I call this period our Distant Mirror. It’s when they invented the idea of the individual, too, and struggled with it. They were asking how an individual person can help the world to find its Way again.
The first thing these Warring States Sages did was to take the old Zhouyi and turn it into a portable altar, a kind of engine of transformation. They used its xiang or symbols to “reflect the Sage Mind and the shen or spirits in and through our persons.” The old Shamans (Wu) did precisely this, they said, when they “drummed and danced” to bring down the spirits into their body. This is the first step, they said. Now, what would happen if we all used it, if we all had access to the old magic of its words and symbols?
Then they noticed a particular line from Zhouyi (14.6) woven through its texts as a magic allusion to the time when the leaders of the Zhou Dynasty received the blessing or Mandate from Heaven to “renew the time” (Ge Tian Ming). They set this up as a link to the powers of the old mythic world, the blessings of the Ancestors and the virtue of the Zhou kings, and attempted to bring them into the new age. To do this, they re-invented the idea of the Junzi, the ‘Realizing Person’, turning it into something like what Jung talked about in that story he got from Wilhelm about the Rainmaker, the little old man who brought rain to a drought-stricken village by letting himself be “infected” with the people’s insanity and confusion, then putting himself back in Dao.
So, this is what we are engaged with in the Great Enterprise - the work of trying to raise this force, this power of Change, into awareness and making it available to help people change their world without being taken over by the malice of all those ‘Jealous Gods’ running around today. It is what the Sages were teaching. It is how we bring the rain. It links the Realizing Person to the Great Enterprise of moving Change into the world, a non-heroic cultural counterpart to the individual process of transformation.