“Images”, Limits and Heart/Mind (Xin 心): The Cognitive Boundaries of “Image” and Its Path of Transcendence in the Study of Yijing

This study examines the cognitive limits of “image” (xiang 象) in the Yijing and the path of human transcendence that emerges from the recognition of these limits. The concept of “image” has been widely discussed by scholars in different fields, but there is not yet sufficient and satisfactory systematic work on the cognitive limits of “image” as a unified philosophical and religious concern. Building upon the Yijing text, later commentaries, and conceptual analysis, this study argues that the Yijing’s discourse on “image” articulates three perspectives. Firstly, “observing ‘images’” (guan xiang 觀象) reveals that cognitive incompleteness is not a human failing but a real expression of the cosmos’s open, dynamic, and incomplete nature, based on the cosmological principle of “the inscrutability and unfathomability”. Second, “establishing ‘images’ to fully express and exhaust meaning” opens a positive path of understanding within finitude through the analogical openness of “image”. Unlike fixed conceptual definitions, it operates through resonance and contextual adaptation, allowing for the constant incorporation of new meanings. Third, in “attaining meaning and forgetting ‘images’” and the realization of the heart/mind (xin 心), human beings can transcend cognitive limits in an existential unity with the dao of Heaven: a state that is described as “virtue in harmony and match with Heaven and Earth” in the Wenyan 文言. The study concludes that the “image” of the Yijing is not simply a cognitive instrument, but the very medium through which human finitude is both acknowledged and transcended. It thus offers a unique philosophical outlook, in which the recognition of limitation is the very condition for the possibility of transcendence.