Here is a question that is easy to ask and, as far as I can tell, has never actually been asked: does the content of Enneagram Type One look anything like the content of the Taixuanjing‘s first quarter? Type Six like the sixth? And so on down the line.
You have to lift both sets of material out of their native contexts to do it. A personality type is not a divinatory station, an ego-fixation is not a phase of qi, and I’m going to assume you already know that rather than spend three sections proving it. The question isn’t whether the two systems are the same kind of object. They obviously aren’t. The question is whether, when you set the content side by side, anything rhymes.
Something does. Four of the nine match strongly, a fifth is respectable, and — more interesting than either — the places where it fails are not random.
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