Shao Yung

Shao Yong (1011–1077), courtesy name Yaofu, was a prominent Chinese cosmologist, historian, philosopher, and poet. He played a crucial role in the development of Neo-Confucianism during the Song dynasty, despite choosing to forgo governmental positions throughout his life. His intellectual contributions were substantial, including his influential treatise on cosmogony, the Huangji Jingshi (Book of Supreme World Ordering Principles). Born in Hengzhang county (now Anyang, Henan) to Shao Gu and Lady Li, Shao's early life was influenced by his devout Buddhist mother and his father, a scholar of philology. He studied the Six Confucian classics diligently. Around 1020, his family moved to Gongcheng county. A significant encounter in his life was meeting Li Zhicai, a former pupil of Mu Xiu, who had extensively studied the I Ching. Shao Yong was part of a group of thinkers in Luoyang aiming to align their philosophies with Confucianism and differentiate them from Buddhism and Taoism. Unlike his contemporaries who followed the "principle study" approach to the I Ching, Shao exclusively used the "image-number study" approach, focusing on iconographic and cosmological concepts. His method of ordering the Hexagrams of the I Ching into a binary sequence, possibly influenced by the Taixuanjing's base-3 number system, is thought to have impacted Leibniz's work on binary arithmetic and, subsequently, the foundation of modern computer languages. Shao Yong also left a legacy in poetry, known for his works related to the game of Go.