It would still be hard to translate what Chen Jiru wrote in this work, even if someone is a native Chinese speaker since he was a 16th-century scholar, and used the classical Chinese for his writing (you need training for it, and auto-translation, even chatGPT struggled without knowing the ancient context, although probably still better than older auto-translation to a degree, it sometimes just made things up, and more dangerous than get it translated awkwardly).
The purpose of the section mentioning Go is that Chen Jiru argued the well-field system has both a “system structure” (局), and a “practice” (勢) that was developed from its era designed/evolved from an even older system, and Go also has this type of “practices” emerged out of seemly simple rules and structures.
People often just see the practices or only think about the abstract rules without knowing that they were born out of necessity at their time, so a person has to put themselves into the background and context of that era to fully understand the reason and how it actually works in those time (Chen Jiru was essentially talking about the foundation of modern experimental archeology/anthropology, but as a speculation way way ahead of his time). I had seen reenactments in recent years to reproduce or at least tried to preserve some oral traditions that could survive for thousands of years in order to understand how and why some of those would work in conditions from those periods.
In short, some studies have observed that some games of the local varieties can simply evolve very quickly with just a few generations (like how they were played by older generations and how they remembered they were taught and their skill level, and how they were played in the following decades and more). And many of them spread out across a vast cultural landscape and linguistic groups had some very similar if not the same principles. One of them is the alignment principle, basically instead of competing and contact fighting, the pieces are working together as alignments instead of any piece alone (its utility function is related to other pieces in spatial configuration), how they are relative to each other, preferably with certain alignment (in Go it is the atari shape thus capturing rules, in games like Fangqi it is the square and space between them that can get disrupted).
We’ve seen agricultural practices even as far as Taiwanese native societies shown to have the concept of combining certain “spirit of the stones” with alignment rituals related to their beliefs. For their agriculture practice - Slash-and-burn cultivations, it literally required “piles of vegetation” harvested on sites to be sorted, and then placed separately with fire-breaker alleyways in between (forming in rows and columns in lines). The collective vegetation piles would be joined together in order to be burned in sequences, and they have to be localized enough to not get out of control during the burning process but extended far enough to burn in batches. (you don’t just set up a fire and wait it out, otherwise, it could spread and burn the whole forest. These practices have very structured customs and rituals for them to work for thousands of years).
Slash-and-burning in progress
Slash-and-burning in alignment patterns with firebreakers
One of the most interesting things is that many of the tribes practicing slash-and-burn cultivations here would put stones in piles dug up during the vegetation harvest preparation phase, and later on spread them in the field, like markers, for purpose seemed only symbolic. The practitioner said she was told by her mother that placing these stones would bring good harvests, and the “shaman” of the tribe talked about spirits and boundaries these stones would need to be (they believe all things had spirits). And it has preparation works in practice that required them to sort of plan the field around the landscapes by consolidating the fields into workable larger fields. But they would invoke spiritual purpose to “mark the boundary” based on different beliefs, like one of the tribes who worship the moon would follow the circular patterns that can still be found through archeology finds dated to thousands of years ago. While others would use squares or other patterns for their own metaphors/legends (usually based on their origin myth). And their fields in the burning would resemble these patterns from the preparation phase. The layout of their fields follows the “plan” made of stone piles, supposedly sent to them by divine spirits and negotiated through shamans with their dreams (it was basically an imaginary game shamans played against spirits, or even with each other, say with the neighboring tribe’s shamans behind the scene?)
So it begs the question, if we accept the hypothesis of Go rose out of some cultivation and cooperation practices and customs (like well-field practices), then what kind of beliefs formed did they have and shaped their practices, and perhaps during the off-seasons, turned into some kind of games?
