The Problem of Language and Reality in the Xici and Plato’s Cratylus

As a text organized on a system of signs, the Yijing is one of the earliest Chinese sources of semiotic ideas. This is seen not only from the use of hexagrams in the earliest part of the book but also in the rich meta-discourse on signs and language in the classical commentaries (Ten Wings). This chapter investigates the issue of how language relates to reality in a cross-cultural study focusing on the Xici commentary and early Greek philosophy, with particular focus on Plato’s Cratylus. While taking language as a point of departure, it goes beyond a narrow linguistic focus to explore the worldviews of Plato and the Xici authors respectively. In particular, it aims to clarify what implications the respective ontological assumptions in these texts have for their way of dealing with the question of how language relates to reality. In regard to the Xici, this study argues that the text may be understood as rooted in this issue, and that the semiotic system of trigrams and hexagrams are invented to solve this fundamental problem, and make up for the inability of language to describe the profound nature of reality.