Thanks for watching and thank you for everyone coming to my talk and also to those who are

attending online.

Today I am going to talk about the Iguan-Dao eschatology and the responding practices.

And here is the outline of today.

First of all, I will discuss Kapa Jie and the apocalypse Mo Jie.

The two terms and the idea of coming of the doomsday have been quite widespread in Chinese

religions, especially the Chinese popular religions, Mingjian Zongjiao since the 19th

century in China.

And the aggregation of the three teachings, the three teachings, is well integrated in

Chinese popular religions.

And Iguan-Dao, the topic today, Iguan-Dao is one of them.

And it was also one of the fast developing movements in mainland China during the early

republican period.

And I also would like to introduce Shaoyong's theory.

The Iguan-Dao accepted Shaoyong's cosmogony theory to establish the eschatology.

And I will show you several spirit writing passages regarding the eschatology, following

by the discussion, the last session of the responding practices.

Let's see the Kapa.

And the Kapa is a term that originated from the ancient Hindu culture.

So in Hinduism and Buddhism, Kapa refers to a very long time, very long period of time,

formation, continuous destruction, and final non-existence of a world.

Therefore, it's a perspective on time.

And in Taoism, the duration of the material world is also limited.

So a universe would literally go its cycle from creation, vigorousness, to destruction.

In this concept, when a new period of time of the universe begins, the way, or in Taoism

called the Tao, would be delivered from the highest entity.

In Taoism, the highest entity usually refers to the primeval lord of heaven, you can see here.

元使天尊

So the Tao is delivered from the highest entity to rescue people before the destruction of the world.

This is called the 開劫渡人.

So in Taoism, the beginning of the world is peaceful and virtuous,

and disasters are created from moral, social disorder, which lead the world to destruction.

Therefore, when Buddhism was first introduced, Chinese scholars used the term 劫,

開劫渡人的劫, to translate the concept of kalpa.

And Chinese popular religions further integrated notions of Buddhism,

Buddhist kalpa, and the Taoist 開劫渡人 to form the eschatology.

So you can see the 劫 and the 末劫.

And the 末劫, the apocalypse in Chinese popular religions,

indicates the period of time before the non-existence, the most devastating times.

So this is the 末劫 here, also I think it's also the final station of the kalpa.

And then let's see the theory, sorry, I forgot to...

The theory of the eschatology is from Shaoyong.

During the Song dynasty, there are two main approaches in the Yijing studies.

The majority of scholars took the principal study approach,

which was basically based on the literary meanings and the moral concept.

But the other approach taken by Shaoyong alone was the image number study.

We call it 像數學, the image number study approach,

which was based much more on the iconography and the cosmogony concept.

So Shaoyong studies Yijing and established the Yijing definition.

He demonstrated this in his book,