Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Numbers

81

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1908 to 1965

Eighty-one is nine squared and three to the fourth power. The received Tao Te Ching is divided into eighty-one chapters, thirty-seven in the Dao section and forty-four in the De. That division is editorial rather than authorial: the Mawangdui silk manuscripts of 168 BCE put the De section first, and one of the two copies has no chapter divisions at all. The nine-by-nine reading of the eighty-one is a later rationalisation. The Taixuanjing of Yang Xiong, composed around the turn of the first millennium, is built on eighty-one tetragrams as a deliberate counterpart to the I Ching's sixty-four hexagrams. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 9.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Origin Period
The system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Place of Origin
The Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Place of Origin
The United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Attributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Attributed Author / Compiler
Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Origin of the Name
Pythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 8 + 1 = 9. Whatever the system says of 81 it therefore says of 9, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The received text of the Tao Te Ching is divided into eighty-one short chapters, nine nines. The division belongs to the transmitted arrangement rather than to any original composition. 3Tradition: Chinese classical philosophy
Learn More
The Eighty-One Chapters

The received text of the Tao Te Ching is divided into eighty-one chapters: thirty-seven in the Dao section and forty-four in the De. Because eighty-one is nine squared, and nine carries considerable weight in Chinese numerical thought, the division is often presented as significant in itself. The manuscript evidence indicates that it is not.

The Mawangdui silk manuscripts, recovered from a tomb sealed in 168 BCE, are the oldest substantially complete copies. They reverse the order of the two halves, placing the De section first, so that the work would properly be called the De Dao Jing. One of the two copies has no chapter divisions at all; where divisions appear they are unnumbered and untitled.

The Guodian bamboo slips, from a tomb of around 300 BCE, are older still and contain only a partial selection of the material, in a different arrangement, amounting to roughly a third of the received text.

The eighty-one chapter division is associated with the Heshang Gong recension and is standard by the Han period. It is therefore an editorial arrangement imposed on a text that circulated for centuries without it, and the nine-by-nine reading is a rationalisation of the division rather than its cause.

This matters for how the book is read. Chapter boundaries determine where an argument is taken to begin and end, and several of the received chapters combine material that the earlier manuscripts do not present together. Treating the eighty-one as authorial, as evidence that Laozi, whose historical existence is itself uncertain, structured the work numerologically, attributes to an author a decision made by later editors.

Eighty-One Elsewhere

Yang Xiong, writing around the turn of the first millennium, composed the Taixuanjing, the Canon of Supreme Mystery, as a deliberate counterpart to the I Ching. Where the I Ching uses six-line figures of two possible states, giving sixty-four, Yang Xiong used four-line figures of three possible states, solid, once broken, twice broken, giving three to the fourth power, eighty-one tetragrams. The work was an intellectual construction in the fullest sense: a complete alternative divinatory system built by one man on a different arithmetic base, and it is one of the more remarkable exercises in systematic thought to survive from the Han.

The eighty-one tetragrams map onto the year in units of roughly four and a half days each, since 81 x 4.5 is 364.5, close to a solar year, and the system was designed with that fit in mind.

Elsewhere eighty-one has narrower uses. Journey to the West has the pilgrims undergo eighty-one ordeals, a number chosen to complete a set of nine nines. Chinese calendrical folk practice counts the nine nines of winter, eighty-one days from the winter solstice to the return of warm weather, marked by counting charts.

Mathematically eighty-one is three to the fourth power, nine squared, and the fourth power of the first odd prime; its square root is nine and its digits sum to nine, which is a property of every multiple of nine and not of eighty-one in particular. That last point is worth making, because writing about this number frequently presents the digit sum as a special property when it is a consequence of the base.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Numerology, Disciplines

The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. Tao Te Ching
Laozi (attributed)View the Source
Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the Laozi
Laozi (attributed), Ballantine Books, 1989The silk manuscripts
Quote, The silk manuscripts
The eighty-one-chapter division of the Tao Te Ching is editorial; one Mawangdui copy has no divisions at all.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.