Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
all I can say is that the resulting hexagram is the future hexagram for 100 out of 100 Chinese interpreters. All the rest is Western imagination.
For example, let's see one ancient record about a divination, in the Shang dinasty (1):
"It will rain/it will not rain. The King said: it will rain"
Glad you noticed that....
Is Yi only the Zhou Yi? Best
Isn't that a little like saying that James Clerk Maxwell didn't know how to use an oscilloscope?
(Underline is mine)I was just assuming that nothing of the Yi existed in the Shang.
I thought Jesed was being facetious or sarcastic, making a case for using Yi for future predictions and such, agreeing with how the oracle was used in early times. Maybe I misunderstood.
Right, as usual
but about understanding the second hex as future, as Lindsay pointed
Best
5000 years?--- i think i should start studying yi's history again.
BTW.. when the controversial issue about the interpretation of the second answer started? Not in Zhou times.
"You shouldn't phrase the question including 2 sides or options"
They didn't, they asked "it will rain" and then they asked "it will not rain", including a 'maybe' in the one they did not like. In order not to give the gods any wrong ideas, like needing rain badly and telling them it will not rain.
LiSe
Hi Bradford
Isn't the Zhou Yi a Zhou adaptation of former similar Shang's works? (Gui zang, for example) Aren't the oracle bones useful to understand Zhou Yi? Best
That's a REALLY good question. But it's not close to answerable yet.
My own sense of it is "not so much." I think there's more discontinuity than is generally assumed. I suspect that a lot of the Shang tradition was deliberately scrapped in an attempt to start over with the new Tian Ming (Mandate of Heaven). But - it would have been scrapped by diviners who were familiar with the Shang traditions. Given that, a lot of the "mantic sayings" and omen texts likely survived, but in a new light or with a much deeper and less superstitious understanding. Also, the written language was evolving extremely quickly during this transition, so that using Shang lingo to understand the Zhou terminology has some real drawbacks.
Therefore, extremely primitive flatworms have been using the I Ching for hundreds of millions of years, stringing all of their journeys together out of a series of left and right (yin and yang) turns. At one point I just thought it ended with monkeys using yin and yang pant hoots to divine the location of fruit trees, but Chris has demonstrated that the I Ching began with neural tissue itself. So now I don't know what the hell to call the Book of Changes, since that name is already taken.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).