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The Mei Hua and Na Jia methods of divination

eubie

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I picked up a book called "The Authentic I Ching" by Dr Wang Chang and Jon Sandifer. It includes information about two alternative methods of coming up with readings.

The first (Mei Hua) is where you come up with the hexagrams using the date and time. Then you analyse the relationship between the two trigrams, these relate to the subject and object in your question.

The second (Na Jia) involves analysing each line in turn of the hexagram, matching each with a specific element/animal and looking at how they work together.

To be honest, although these two methods look very interesting, I find the way in which the book descibes them very difficult to read, and have spotted one or two mistakes which are a bit obvious.

Does anyone else use these methods? I'd be interested to know more about how they can be put into practice - for example, I've attemped a reading using the Mei Hua method and it does indeed seem to make a lot of sense to me, although it's a lot easier if you use the Western calendar to come up with hexagrams rather than the Chinese lunar calendar.

Euan
 

gene

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I've seen the book. There are three methods in there, one I kind of liked that has to do with a self and response line, if I remember right. But the book was a bit tedious for my taste, sort of anyway. Can't teach this old dog new tricks I guess, the looking up of dates got me, and I wasn't sure I fully understood the whole process.

Gene
 

peter

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I used Mei Hua firstly (by Jou Tsung-hwa's description), but for more than a year I study and practice so-called 'na-jia' method. It has different names: "Wen Wang Ba Gua" (8 trigrams of King Wen), or "Wen Wang Ke" (Lessons of King Wen), or "Huo Zhu Lin". Very interesting thing, which doesn't involve texts, so your intuition works in rather different direction than with text lines. I like this method because it has precise matrices, so to say, so I can take a situation, divide it into aspects, and then Yi Jing answers me about the situation in terms of these aspects and their conditions. Firstly I studied this method by Alex Chiu's "Superiching" (www.superiching.com), but now I found some Chinese sources and trying to work with them. So if you have some questions - posibly I can answer them.
 

antonioacuna

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I have the book. In fact there has been two editions, and the second one contains corrections for many of the errors in the first. I have emailed with both the authors, and they agree that in the future, if there is a desire, a newer more practical edition would come out, including a workbook. I agree that the book can be a bit confusing, and many things are not quite explained,but droped on the reader as if by chance, and the examples do not necesaraly show 'all' the main issues that may arise. For example, we learn that in the Na jia method, if the moving line engenders, in the change, a line whose element destroys that of the line that created it, it is bad, and if that line is the self line, then bye-bye. But we never learn what happens if the response line is the one changing. It must be certainly better for some questions where that ensures total victory of the self (the querent or the issue at hand) over the actions, or the fact (i.e. 'will I win the contest?'). Otherwise, it is a great system. I found out that looking up at the dates in the tables is cumbersome, in fact, the tables could use some new design, and there are errors in some of them. One solution I use, is via the book: The tibetan oracle pack, by Stephen Skinner, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0609601644/sr=8-2/qid=1143971543/ref=sr_1_2/102-0074113-8806510?%5Fencoding=UTF8. The book has a deck of cards, each with the full divinatory cycle for each year, so I can find the whole of the earthly and heavenly branches config for a year-month-day-hour question with a few additions in as little as 4 minutes. I then go back to the book for the 'numbers' to obtain that way the hexagrams.

Mr wang and Mr sandifer have given us, overall, a great book. There is some mention of this book's methods in another post by me in the forum
 

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