Significance of the CAO Nan-ming's Yi-ology by the ten diagrams made by him

As a contemporary Korean scholar with LI Tui-xi, CAO Nan-ming constructed a special system based upon CHENG Yi and ZHU Xi's image-number ideas, revealing his distinctive understanding to the Duo (Way) of heaven and that of human. For the Dao of heaven was concerned, through the illustration of the 10 diagrams, he sketched a prospect from the cosmic evolution to the cosmic structure, to the pursuit of ontology, to the inherent law (including the cause, inevitability, and tendency of changes and motions), and to the relationship between heaven and human, making the idea of the Dao of heaven adequately manifested. For the idea of the Dao of human, he actualized the idea of Taiji and the transformations of the Dao of Qian (hexagram 1, symbolizing creative, heaven, and so on) in the course of correcting the nature and life of the myriad things, accumulating goodness to perfect the nature, by which the sincerity would be established, and therefore he vividly found an ontologi-cal basis for human morals and virtues and compensated the defects of then Korean philosophical studies only stressing philosophical connotations but neglecting the image-number Yi-ology.