Astrology

Along with the gradual spread of Buddhism in the centuries following the collapse of the Han dynasty, efforts were made by Buddhist writers during the Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties period (220–589 C.E.) to integrate Indian Buddhist cosmological and astrological concepts and to reconcile incommensurate numerological categories—for example, matching the Buddhist mahābhūtas (four elements) with the Chinese five phases. Subsequently, attempts were made to establish even more complex correspondences between Chinese and Indian astrological sets such as the twenty-eight lunar mansions with the twelve Indian zodiacal signs derived from Hellenistic astrology, the nine planets of Indian astronomy with the seven astral deities of the Northern Dipper, and so on. During the Six Dynasties era and the early Tang dynasty (618–906) in particular, China's most influential translators of Buddhist astrological works and compilers of astrological treatises were Indians such as Qutan Xida (Gautama Siddhārta, fl. 718), author of the Kaiyuan zhanjing (Kaiyuan reign-period treatise on astrology), the greatest compendium of ancient and medieval Chinese astrological fragments. On the whole, however, these efforts at syncretism exerted surprisingly little influence on long-established Chinese astrological theory, especially given the drastic decline of Buddhism following the Tang dynasty proscriptions in the mid-ninth century and the subsequent resurgence of Neo-Confucianism. Assimilation was also hindered by the difficulty of rendering the foreign concepts and terminology into Chinese, which was often accomplished by means of bizarre or idiosyncratic transliterations.

At the popular level Chinese astrology continued to absorb influences (Iranian, Islamic, Sogdian) via the Central Asian trade routes, and although certain Western numerological categories (such as the seven-day week) are represented in the enormously popular and widely circulated lishu or almanacs (documented from the ninth century), and individualized horoscopic astrology appears in later horoscopes (from the fourteenth century), Hellenistic concepts apparently had little discernible impact on the practice of astrology at the imperial court. Until modern times the most common popular forms of divination employed ancient prognostication techniques connected with lucky and unlucky denary and duodenary cyclical characters (paired to generate the sequence of sixty unique designations used to enumerate the days since at least the Shang dynasty), fate-calculation based on the eight characters bazi designating the exact time of birth, and so forth.

During the Song dynasty (960–1279) astrology entered a period of routinization and gradual decline, in part as a result of overexploitation by sycophants and careerists as a means of enhancing their status or prospects at court, and in part because of the resurgence of Neo-Confucianism and a return to a more anthropocentric outlook. Along with an increasing emphasis on human affairs and moral self-cultivation, which was philosophically antithetical to superstition, the archaic belief in an interventionist Heaven that communicated by means of signs in the heavens faded into the background, and tianwen or "sky-pattern reading" shifted focus from the ever-precarious genre of prediction to a safer and more manageable interpretive mode. As a consequence, the objective status of natural phenomena declined, and the practice of astrology by imperial officials on the whole reverted to routine observing and recording of observations, focusing on the anomalous.

Henceforth, the interpretation of "sky-patterns" was Confucianized—one might even say domesticated—and only isolated instances of inductive generalization from observation are to be found, rather than interpretation more or less tendentiously based on historical precedent. Given its subservience to the state ideology, Chinese astrology was incapable of growing into an independent body of learning or science of the heavens, but remained throughout imperial history the handmaiden of politics when not dismissed as mere superstition, which humble status is confirmed by the traditionally low rank of the post of court astrologer.