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21st Century Go As we have said, Go Seigen's explanations are highly nebulous. What he does clearly stress, though, is that his theories are based on  - the Six-fold Unity (Jp. rikugo,
Ch. liu he).The locus classicus of this term is Confucius's Golden Mean, but it also crops up in Daoism (Zhuang Zi) and in the writings of the Yin Yang School. They all agree that it means Heaven, Earth, North, South, East, West - or above, below and the four cardinal directions. It is a variety of holism. |
Go is referring to whole-board thinking, of course, but not (we believe) in the way it is usually understood. While he does not explain himself, we believe that what he is referring to is a special way of looking at the board very, very early in the fuseki. He is drawing attention to areas of the board that are overlooked in the broad sweep of the traditional mantra: corner, sides centre. It seems to us that we need to look in more detail at the bits in between.
In particular, control of the square-marked (blue) portions can have a tremendous influence on the game, giving rise to what we called Chernobyl areas at the seminar. An example is given later.
We did not raise the circle-marked (yellow) areas at the seminar, but our own further studies suggest to us that control of (or access to) these areas should also be moved up the scale of priorities in 21st century go.