Clarity,
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You'll explain why, right?
The army sets out according to pitch-pipes.
To detect the nature of the group-ch'i of an army, a kind of musical shaman would blow on special pitch-pipes, and from the character of the resulting sound would pronounce his conclusions: a note which was weak and did not have sufficient timbre would indicate a weak and vacillating ch'i, and would thus foretell defeat or disaster for the army concerned. Pitch-pipe soundings by shamans were taken for the 'home' army upon its marching off on compaign, and for the opposing army as it stood arrayed for battle in the distance. Sometimes, depending on the musical enquiries of the shaman, a battle would be called off, a retreat ordered, or an immediate attack launched. Music, therefore, was a serious business upon which tens of thousands of lives regularly depended (The Genius of China by Robert Temple, p.203).
Um...how on earth did pitch-pipe divination evolve into hermetically sealed rooms?
This doesn’t mean that the choice of ‘pitch-pipes’ as the meaning of lü in H7-1 is completely decided – there is not much context to be conclusive about this. In the (preliminary) translation of this line (below) it is valid to substitute ‘pitch-pipes’ with ‘statutes’.
'Denying slaves' or ' no virtue'. The character is a picture of a blinded slave, who had probably no other choice than being virtuous, so the character later became 'virtue'.
Initial 6: The legion marches out according to rules. Not very good augury: pitfall.
For organizing, every action has to fit in. One deviating action can mess up all. One shot fired at the wrong moment, one false note in a concert, one wrong decision of a surgeon. All the details have to be right, and then the whole is an organic whole and a structure with power.
And the text doesn't mention rooms at all as far as I can see, so anyone just reading the I Ching itself, without Pocossin's knowledge of pipes, ashes, and rooms wouldn't understand my reading about my cat meowing from a blocked-in spot...
Maybe that's where the ashes come in? Ashes would block a pitch-pipe from making a sound. If you set out according to a blocked pitch-pipe, there would be pitfall, so you must wait until the ashes are expelled and you get a clear tone to evaluate?
But why did they bother with the ashes in the first place? If there are 12 pitch-pipes making 12 different tones, and the point is to see which tone is strongest on a given day and that is the divination, what was the point of the ashes? Was part of it to see which pipe and which person blowing would be strong enough to expel the ashes before the others? So were there two signals? First to expel ashes, and then also the strongest tone?
Pocossin, do you happen to have any more information? Are the ashes mentioned in the Robert Temple book? I looked for it online, and it's not browsable at, say, Google Books.
To the best of my knowledge, ashes were not used in military pitch-pipe divination.
The purpose of military pitch-pipe divination was to appraise the qi of the two armies. The imperial purpose was to maintain correct pitch -- there was great anxiety that correct pitch would be lost -- and to determine the date of arrival of the monthly seasonal qi. The pitch-pipes were believed to resonate with their corresponding qi. Ashes were put in the pipes. When the ashes of a pipe were expelled, the qi that corresponded to that pitch-pipe was considered to be present. The hermetically sealed rooms kept air currents from interfering.
Surely I'm missing something somewhere. The rooms did explain my reading. Unless I'm more wildly off-track than I can even recognize.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).