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Hexagram Signs In Bamboo Slips

lienshan

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hi Sergio ... thanks for your posting of this uptodate article :)

New to me is, that the number nine now is found in six-digit hexagrams, number ten in three-digit trigrams and the numbers two, three, four in eight six-digit hexagrams (mentioned in a footnote).

New to me (and maybe others) is too the bamboo slips of Geling Xincai. I found this description:

The bamboo slips concerning divination excavated at Geling Village , Xincai County , Henan Province recorded the hexagram lines and the line statements. This paper attempts to analyze the line statements by images, through which we find that the line statements tally with the images. This approach can also be found in Zuo's Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals and Guo yu (Remarks of Monarchs), from which we can learn that people in then the Chu area in the Warring States period adopted the divination methods by the Zhouyi , which are in alignment to the divination methods used in the Spring and Autumn period. Since the line statements in the bamboo slips manuscript can not be found in the received version of the Zhouyi , they should derive from another kind of version being transmitted at that time.

The Geling Xincai and Baoshan bamboo slips might be of same nature, because they both consist of hexagram pairs made by four numbers, while the Jianggling Tianxingguan bamboo slips consist of hexagram pairs made by five numbers? The three groups of hexagram pairs are resulted from actual divination, but were they all related to other divination manuals than the Zhouyi?

lienshan
 

sergio

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Hi Lienshan;
Glad you like it,I knew you would when I saw it.I am still in the process of "digesting"the paper(I know paper is hard ti digest,Luis)but what I read so far looks a bit speculative.At the same time I am reading "Researches on the I Ching:by Iulian Shutskii(hope I got it right and he pointed out that some scholars theorize that the Yi is an extension of a former oracle comprised of pentagrams not hexagrams.Apparently the sixth line was a Chou improvement.Got to go back to my Perpetual Bubblewrap!...
Sergio
 

charly

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H... I am reading "Researches on the I Ching:by Iulian Shutskii ... pointed out that some scholars theorize that the Yi is an extension of a former oracle comprised of pentagrams not hexagrams.Apparently the sixth line was a Chou improvement...
Sergio:

Migh you post some quotes from Shutsky?

I believe that the YI, as stuff for interpreting yarrow oracles, had its origins in oral literacy and memorious practitioners, and that maybe yarrow casting had earlier origins than Shang Turtle Oracles.

Arrow divination is found among primitive people and casting cowries among african primitives (1).

Maybe binary YES/NO oracles begin throwing a bone (2) or a cowry shell and multiple binary oracles begin with the practice of throwing one time and another until the desired answer is got. Surely that sort of trick is very ancient. That's why the YI warns «no more than twice».

Don't you trust?

TOUCHING THOMAS:
Wb1420C.JPG
Mr. Li reads a bronze inscription
From: http://www.xawb.com/gb/news/2007-09/25/content_1327180.htm

Yours,

Charly

____________________
(1) Also among american-africans in our own times.
(2) In my country folklore there is a game called «taba». The «taba» is a bone that can fall with a face called «cara» (face) up or another called «culo» (bottom) up, like a coin.
 
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sergio

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Hola Charly;
First my apologies for the delay in answering but I just got back from a week long Ba Gua Zhang training camp at the Catskill mountains.(a great experience indeed).Shchutskii deals at length with the I Ching as an ancient text examining its structure both textually and semantycally,its origins,its history,authorship and its huge commentatory tradition not only Chinese but Japanese as well.In Part II,chapter 1 he examins the monolithic nature of the text .In what he calls the most ancient layer of the text he tackles the phrase Yuan Heng L i Yen which he claims is a mantic formula part of a much older oral tradition.( He studies the language and usages of words in different times to identify the dates the different layers of the Yi were written,much like saying "cool"is late XX early XXI century language and "groovy"more 60's lenguage usage.)So by determining what those older mantic formulae are and where they appeared in the text he determines that they only appeared in 32 hexagrams.He then goes on to say that"-.. Chu Shi in his book Science of the I Ching for beginners develops an entire theory ...of the gradual increase of the lines in the symbols of the Book of Changes,a)two symbols of one line,b)four symbols of two lines,c)eigth symbols of three lines,d)sixteen symbols of four lines,e)thirty two symbols of five lines,f)sixty four symbols of six lines.Thus the 64 hexagrams could be produced from 32 symbols composed of 5 lines each to which one line was added,yang or yin.Naito was inclined to think that the older layers of the Book of Change was composed of symbols made up of five or fewer lines but not six.From this considerations it might follow that at some time before the appearance of the 64 hexagrams and their texts there were only 32 symbols of 5 lines;to these symbols then was added the corresponding text which in a significantly expanded form became the Boof of Changes we know.However,no matter how attractive this hypothesis,is it true?"
Tune in tomorrow for more.....(I am really tire right now and,since I don't have a scanner....you get the idea...)
Sergio
 

lienshan

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Thus the 64 hexagrams could be produced from 32 symbols composed of 5 lines each to which one line was added,yang or yin.
hi Sergio

Which one of the six hexagram lines is the added line?

lienshan
 

sergio

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HiLienshan;
It's the sixth line, but this detail will become more obvious in my next quote from Shchustkii's book.
Sergio
 

charly

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... Shchutskii deals at length with the I Ching as an ancient text examining its structure both textually and semantycally,its origins,its history,authorship and its huge commentatory tradition not only Chinese but Japanese as well...He then goes on to say that"-.. Chu Shi in his book Science of the I Ching for beginners develops an entire theory ...of the gradual increase of the lines in the symbols of the Book of Changes...
From this considerations it might follow that at some time before the appearance of the 64 hexagrams and their texts there were only 32 symbols of 5 lines;to these symbols then was added the corresponding text which in a significantly expanded form became the Boof of Changes we know...
Thanks, very much, Sergio:

In the web there is no much stuff about Schutskii aports. I believe tha's credible the evolution fron binary divination to more complex forms. but what facts hold the idea of progressing one line at a time?

Till now I believed that first was the binary divination (2 symbols), in a middle stage was the Ba Gua (8 symbols) trigrams that later doubled produced the 64 hexagrams, say the YI evolved jumping from one line symbols to three line symbols and to six line symbols.

I never saw two-line symbols, fourth-line nor five-line symbols. You do?

But about the results recorded using numerals I understood that always were trigrams or hexagrams but recorded using a variable stock of numerals of wich only matters if odd or even, yin or yang.

Five numeral hexagrams, I understood, are hexagrams described using a sequence of six numerals from a whole of five. For unknown reasons some available numerical characters were not used. Maybe I misunderstood the texts due to lack of pictures.

I wonder what will provide us the destiny with Schutskii surveys.

The first source of my ideas was LiSe page quoting Rutt:


Yours

Charly
 

sergio

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Hola Charly;
You are welcome.Yes,I've seen the symbols.There is a lot of excellent information about the four emblems(the two line combinations of yin & yang)in Bradford's site.They represent many things, among them the four seasons,i.e. yang/yang-summer(strong yang)-yin below/yang above-fall(lesser yang)-yin/yin-winter(strong yin)-yang below/yin above-spring(lesser yang).They also represent wood-fire-water and metal. Regarding the four lines groups, they are the core of the nuclear hexagrams.If you add one line on top and another at bottom then you have the hexagrams as we know them.It's significance is less documented than the four emblems as it is its use in divination.Much of that is related to Jing Fan's work which is unfortunately lost.Harmen Mesker wrote an excellent paper on this subject which is as best as you can get on this subject.
I see this progressions mostly as a logical and simple way of combining two symbols and develop them to sustain a certain philosophy with the explanations attached to it as they unfold.Shchuskii's take on the 5 line symbols was more related to mantic formulas that might be attached to them since the number of hexagrams containing them was 32 which is also the number of possible combination of 5 lines.But upon examination that idea was disproved-there is no correlation between the two.Whatever meaning or significance was attached to the 5 line line symbols is lost in history once again;we can only speculate but so far the only reference to them I found was in a book translated by Jean Huon de Kermadec called "Heavenly Pennies".He says that this is a more common form of divination used for more mundane issues-the hexagrams been reserved for more important and profound issues.All of it extremely interesting .To me a system based on 5 lines would be a more philosophically logical one from the Chinese perspective hence the importance of the number 5.Each line would perfectly fit one of the elements for example,the top line would be obviously the most important in position-the highest_and of course ,the emperor's line.
Anyway,there many divination system,too numerous and varied to mention.The Greek divining with entrails,for example among the most weird(and gruesome).But that is another story....
Sergio
 

lienshan

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To me a system based on 5 lines would be a more philosophically logical one from the Chinese perspective hence the importance of the number 5.Each line would perfectly fit one of the elements for example,the top line would be obviously the most important in position-the highest_and of course ,the emperor's line.
hi Sergio

If the lower five lines represent the five elements, then I would name the top line: The Line of Changes

My approach to the subject is numerological. Each of the lower five lines have these values:

line 5 has value 0 or 32
line 4 has value 0 or 16
line 3 has value 0 or 8
line 2 has value 0 or 4
line 1 has value 0 or 2

line 6 (the top line) has value 1 (if it's a whole line) or value 2 (if it's a broken line)

the lower five lines have value 0 (if equal to the top line) or the number-value (if different to the top line)

Each hexagram is a number from 1 to 64 computed by addition of all six line values ;)

lienshan
 

sergio

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Hi Lienshan;
First I want to state for the record that I do not claim it is like that with the five lines,only expressed an hyphotethical pronouncement on the issue-the facts are obviuosly different .
In the field of elaborations you (or anybody else for that matterr)can say the sixth line is the "change line" and I have to say I am intrigued by the concept.Mainly because orthodoxy classifies(or dismisses)that line as not relevant becuase it is out of the situation.Sometime ago Chris Lofting claim it to be the final stage of a refining process therefore assigning it a greater importance in hierarchy of the gua.I read sometime ago a book-The Yellow river Legacy by Larry Schoenholst(I will check the spelling later)which is,incidentally,the originator of the 16 tokens method made famous by Karcher,in which he points to the importance of that line as a determining factor to the overall character of a gua.He said that two guas would be identical up to the fifth line and the sixth would be determining what the final "product"would be-obviuosly not a line to dismiss as "out of the situation"
Now,coming back to your take on it and the numerological approach you use ,let's say we take hex.#63.According to your system the values would be 1=2, 2=0,-3=8, 4=0, 5=16, 6=2.Total value 28.
So the sum of its lines values gives a different gua number than the one it is normally counted as.Your system workd well with hex,#1or #2for example but is not clear to me how it will still work with the other hexagrams.
Sergio
 

charly

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... Shchuskii's take on the 5 line symbols was more related to mantic formulas that might be attached to them ... .Whatever meaning or significance was attached to the 5 line line symbols is lost in history once again; we can only speculate but so far the only reference to them I found was in a book translated by Jean Huon de Kermadec called "Heavenly Pennies".He says that this is a more common form of divination used for more mundane issues-the hexagrams been reserved for more important and profound issues...
Sergio:

Does Schuskii attach a mantic formula for each symbol of the 32 set of 5-line symbols?

Does Kermadec say how does she for using the 5-line symbols?

On what basis can we speculate?

Maybe if we eliminate the last line of hexagrams, being the line of change, we can pair the text of the hexagrams that have in common the first 5 lines, with a given pair of hexagams we can proceed:
  • reading both and taking the common factors among it.
  • discarding one on some predefined basis, consultant's genre, even or odd day of consulting...

Yours,

Charly
 

sergio

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Hola Charly;
Shchustkii was trying to find a connection re:the 32 five line guas but there was no match so the theory was quickly dismissed.He claimed that the phrase "yuan hen li yen has been mistranslated and also taken as a sentence when it is ,in his opinion,a compound of four different adjetives or qualities .He saw those terms used not only together but separated in different combinations so he reasoned they might be placed in those 32 guas thus giving away the older configuration of the Yi in 5 line guas.Nice try but no results.
Kermadec's book describes a system of divination using five coins that upon tossing them would yield a figure which you look up in the book and read a decision and statement much like the Yi and that's it.
Larry Shoemholst in the book I mention before use the same line of reasoning you describe right now.He also gives a list of what he calls paragrams-a paragram been the other possibility had the sixth line been a yang instead of yin or viceversa but he does not elaborate any more than that admitting he is unable to determine the significance of it.
Now coming back to speculation,Lienshan calls that sixth line the"change line".Interesting.To me this six line business reminds me a bit of Schrodinger's cat-although I never fully understood what that was all about(mi pobre mente enferma ya no resiste mas...)CHAAN-CHAN!
Sergio
 

charly

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Hola Charly;
Shchustkii was trying to find a connection re:the 32 five line guas but there was no match so the theory was quickly dismissed.He claimed that the phrase "yuan hen li yen has been mistranslated and also taken as a sentence when it is ,in his opinion,a compound of four different adjetives or qualities .He saw those terms used not only together but separated in different combinations so he reasoned they might be placed in those 32 guas thus giving away the older configuration of the Yi in 5 line guas.Nice try but no results....

Thanks, Sergio:

I understand, but I get only 16 combinations with fourth words on/off:

Y H L Z
Y H L _
Y H _ Z
Y H _ _
Y _ L Z
Y _ L _
Y _ _ Z
Y _ _ _

_ H L Z
_ H L _
_ H _ Z
_ H _ _
_ _ L Z
_ _ L _
_ _ _ Z
_ _ _ _

If not sistematic combinations, maybe he means POWER WORDS freely scattered by diviners among the whole set of hexagrams ?

Yours,

Charly
 

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