ABSTRACT

Among all early civilizations, ancient Chinese appeared to have placed a great emphasis on development of a systematic view of the universe as well as the meaning and value of life. Comparing with many other schools of thoughts over the world, mainstream schools of Chinese philosophy value highly the application side of abstract thoughts rather than theoretical derivations. To a certain degree, this might have led to a culture which values more overall general understanding rather than rigorous analysis for individual parts. On the other hand, it also encourages expression of the philosophical thoughts by concrete examples, as can be shown later by application of eight characters in fortune telling.