Should I Be Worried? Worry in Dunhuang Divination

Abstract The emotional aspect of divination has rarely been systematically addressed in the history of Chinese divination. Focusing on divination manuals from Dunhuang 敦煌 , this article examines the interaction between emotions, especially worry, and divination in medieval China. It explores, on the one hand, how worry in the medieval context drove individuals to seek divinatory practices. On the other hand, it examines how the divination manuals used worry and other emotive words as part of their technical language to measure uncertainty. Surveying different usages of the terms for worry in these manuals, the article argues that the language of worry was part of the terminology of Dunhuang divination, serving as a heuristic to help the inquirers sense the level of auspiciousness and uncertainty of future scenarios. The article will also show that emotional words form a unique layer of terminology that conveys to inquirers a specific sense of auspiciousness.