I'm about to run a Yijing Foundations Class - we're starting on September 21st. You can't enrol for the class yet, but if you add your name to the notifications list...

...then you'll be one of the first to know as soon as the 'doors' are open. (Since this is a small group, with just 12 places for new students, it could be over-subscribed.)

Of course, the name of the class rather begs the question: what are 'foundations' for Yijing readings?

They're much the same as foundations for buildings: the inconspicuous part you build on, without which the whole structure is liable to collapse as soon as it's asked to bear any weight. I've actually written about this before, and don't have much to add, so I hope you don't mind if I quote myself...

To start with, there are the foundations I can include on the syllabus:

• ways to relate to all the imagery (words and trigrams)
• understanding the structure of a reading (primary, relating, lines positions)
  and also
• knowing what you’re asking

I know these are ‘foundations’ because I’ve seen over the years how missing any one of them will create confusion and frustration, and stymie the whole process of building a good relationship with the oracle.

But then there are the other foundations, the ones that are harder to name, that underpin any lasting relationship with Yi. They're laid through your own conversations with Yi, in the reading practice we do (and there is a lot of reading practice!), and maybe also through witnessing how the oracle works/talks with other students. These foundations aren’t knowledge, nor even skills, but habits of mind.

I think it all comes down to trusting the oracle. Only… what does that mean, in practice?

Respect

Trusting an oracle means respecting it as an oracle, not some kind of random, Rorschach blot test. That is, knowing that it has something specific to say to you, and being willing to pay attention to its whole message.

I believe you show respect to an oracle through the quality of attention you pay it. This needs to be full, true, non-selective attention, and that means reading what it says. Skipping over the oracle’s words in favour of the commentary (or forum replies or trigram associations or what you ‘know it means’) is not respect.

Confidence

The Chinese word fu 孚 – as in the name of Hexagram 61, Inner Truth – means truth, trust and confidence: all the ingredients of rapport and relationship. Sometimes, all that’s missing from a reading is confidence.

So often, I hear people say,

‘As soon as I read it, it made me think of…’
or
‘Oh, that’s exactly like…’
or
‘It feels as though it’s telling me…’

‘…but I’m not an expert, I’m not sure – I might have got it all wrong.’

No. No, you have not ‘got it wrong’. That ‘oh!‘ moment of recognition is the reading. It feels as though it’s speaking to you directly because it’s speaking to you directly, because that’s how oracles work.

You can’t get this wrong, and there is no ‘expert’, in print or online or in person, who can tell you otherwise, because this is the oracle speaking to you, not to them.

They might tell you, from their experience, that this hexagram or line normally means something else, or that 3,000 years ago it meant something else. That’s valuable information for you to remember for future readings – which has nothing to do with this moment of connection between you and Yi.

Sometimes the moment of recognition is like a lightning bolt, unmissable; sometimes it’s more of a tiny spark that needs nurturing and breathing space. (This is another good reason not to read too much of the translator’s commentary: it might smother your spark.)

In other words, trusting the oracle is also a matter of trusting yourself. A reading doesn’t exist between the covers of a book; it happens when you read.

Patience

What when there’s no lightning bolt, not even much of a spark – nothing doing?

For some people, this never happens, but most of us will feel ‘stuck’ on a reading from time to time. It’s very tempting in such moments to jump straight to browsing commentaries, or friendly forum people who can tell you, ‘this line means this‘. And these will help – sometimes, they’ll provide just what you need to unlock your own understanding.

The key, though, is learning to stop saying, ‘I don’t get it,’ and start saying, ‘I don’t get it yet ‘. Then you can go for a walk, or cook supper, or sleep on it, and let the meaning emerge. ‘Aha’ can also happen slowly. The little word ‘yet’ makes all the difference in the world – and it can be the only difference between my approach to a reading and someone who’s ‘stuck’.

Openness

This could be the trickiest aspect of respect: openness to the oracle’s response, whatever it says.

To awaken this kind of respect, I think it helps to conceive of Yi as a separate being, a ‘person’ in its own right. Even if you actually believe that the oracle is the voice of some layer or aspect of your own consciousness, you have to let it say things that you – your conscious self – would never have said.

And then you have to be willing to let yourself be guided, and change your plans. To start now, even though you’d feel more comfortable with an extra month’s research – or not to start now, but go back to the drawing board instead. To spend money on the risky proposition – or not to buy the super-shiny object available for a limited time only; to start the scary conversation – or not send the email you’ve been writing in your head for days.

Sometimes this will mean going against other people’s advice, or against ‘common sense’. It will often appear quite inexplicable to onlookers. Two provisos, though:

First, you have to be very sure that you’re responding to what the oracle is actually saying, not just what you wish it had said. (Though in fact, once you’ve experienced both a real ‘aha’ moment and wishful-thinking interpretation – and I think we’ve all done both – it’s not so hard to tell the difference…)

And second, the Yi was never intended to be the only guide to a decision: it doesn’t replace research, expert advice – or even common sense.

In practice, if you approach every reading with this degree of respect – knowing what difference it could make – it’s likely to mean you do fewer readings! If you know you intend to do (or not do) something, if you know that it’s the right choice for you, you won’t consult. Not because you’re worried about what Yi might say, but because you aren’t.

(From the outside looking in, some people imagine that trusting an oracle more must mean trusting yourself - your own judgement and intuition - less. I've found that in practice, in a good relationship with Yi, that's not how it works: self-trust and oracle-trust turn out to nourish one another, or perhaps to be the same thing.)

I Ching Community discussion

In this episode, Natalia is asking a wide-open question: where is she to go next? And Yi's answer combines focus with openness: Hexagram 7, the Army, changing at line 2 to Hexagram 2, Earth:

(You may notice something different at the beginning and end of this episode. The music is the same - the Allemande from Bach's first suite for 'cello - but since there's some ambiguity about the public domain status of the recording I've been using in previous episodes, I've switched to a lovely, eloquent performance by Colin Carr, published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and available here in full under this Creative Commons licence.)

I almost titled this post 'working with trigrams' - but the most useful, productive ways I know of to engage with trigrams in readings actually feel a lot more like play. And besides, who needs more work?

So here's how I suggest you start playing. (This is really not a comprehensive guide! That would be book-sized - and once you start playing, you can write your own book.)

First - what not to do

Don't forget about trigrams altogether! This is easily done, especially when you're just getting started with the Yijing. Trigrams make for a convenient chart to look up your hexagram, and then you read the words… and then if you get back to trigrams at all, it's as something of an afterthought, an optional extra.

You can do useful readings this way, hear things you need to hear… but it can all get a bit cerebral, ungrounded - and unmemorable. You can end up fixating on single words of translation - or worse, of commentary - and losing your sense of how this all works in the hexagram(s) as a whole.

And on the other hand - don't get sucked into treating this as some sort of hierarchy, where you're not a real expert until you can do without the text altogether. Yes, you could do readings without ever opening the book. Likewise, a close friend could probably communicate quite a lot to you in mime, and it could be fun to try this and see how far you get. But if your aim is actually to understand your friend fully, why wouldn't you let them speak to you as well?

(And sticking with this analogy for a moment - anyone who's engaged in any kind of online communication knows how much it can suffer for lack of body language and tone of voice. That's like a reading with no awareness of hexagram structure - no trigrams, no hexagram shape, no line positions.)

Secondly, don't start with a list of trigram attributes and treat interpretation as a pair of 'fill in the blanks' exercises: inner world = [pick a word from the list]; outer world = [pick a word from the list].

Why not? Trigram lore is vast and fascinating, after all, and opens up applications you might never find with just the text.

For one thing, picking isolated words from a list is arid and mechanical, which never makes for good readings. If you go straight to 'what does it mean?' and miss out any experience of the imagery, you're not engaging with the oracle at all.

Also, you're more or less bound to end up picking out properties to suit what you want, consciously or not. (Yes, this is a potential trap with any interpretation - we all do it - but it's a whole lot easier to fall into this way than with - say - a complete scenario or story, such as the text might offer you.)

And if you're picking an application for one trigram at a time, what about the relationship between the trigrams? They don't just sit inert on top of one another like bricks; they interact.

What to do (or how to begin)

(These are just first steps, to get underway and open up more possibilities. Rule 1 of Yijing interpretation: there is always more!)

To start with, see what picture the two trigrams paint when you look at them together. A trigram embodies a way of moving and relating, so what it's relating to makes a difference. (For some examples of how this works, you could browse through the 'light inside' series of posts, about li, fire/light, as inner trigram.) You can use whatever trigram associations you're familiar with to paint your pictures, but you don't need a lot of specialist knowledge: simply their images from nature (sky, earth, thunder, water, mountain…) will give you plenty of ideas.

Take Hexagram 39, Limping: water above, mountain below.

What does water above a mountain look like?

There's more than one thing you could imagine here, and no 'right answer'. (Engaging your imagination and dreaming up your own picture is part of the interpretation process.) You might imagine a rainstorm shrouding the summit, or a stream flowing over rocks.

Last autumn, I found myself walking through Hexagram 39, tromping up a steep hill in the rain, watching the water rushing down round my (wet) feet. The clouds rose, the rain fell, and the streams flowed. And then I thought - hm - what does water do, when it's up a mountain? Answer: it flows down. Only humans insist on going up.

And that connects immediately with the text: the clouds rose, then the rain falls; it turns round. The same turnaround is in the oracle - the 180 degree turn between south-and-west and north-and-east - and in each of the lines that contrasts going and coming. But my experience of squelching up the hill while the water flowed down doesn't just give me insight into the text, it gives me a feel for it. That's what stays with you.

Of course, some trigrams don't so readily form pictures. Hexagram 11, Flow, has heaven below earth -

- which is beyond my imaginary painter, anyway. With these, it helps to think about how each trigram moves, or what they do. Heaven moves ceaselessly, it rises (ever gazed into the sky and had that sense of falling upward?); earth is still, and sinks down. And remember how energy 'wants' to move up through a hexagram, from inside to outside. Then you have, maybe not quite a picture, but something like a diagram: creative heaven-energy rising, infusing the spaces of the earth and bringing it all to life.

This way of seeing is a bit harder - or rather, it's only easy when you're more familiar with trigrams. Most I Ching books will have some commentary that gets you started.

You may find you can also understand a lot just by looking at the shape of the trigrams and feeling your way in. Solid lines are energetic and full; open lines are empty space. How do these feel - especially, how do the first three lines of your hexagram feel as you're casting them, as an inner state? Inner kan, running water, often feels to me like butterflies in the stomach. Inner gen, mountain, feels solid and still.

And then how could that tip over into the outer trigram's way of moving or being? (In Hexagram 39, you could feel irreducibly robust, inwardly, but still find ways to flow like water.)

All this is really a non-verbal way of connecting with your hexagram - not 'making sense of' it, not even necessarily understanding it, but internalising it, so the experience becomes vivid and immediate. Then the understanding you derive from the words (not least words about the trigrams) will be more visceral, and more memorable.

And just to reiterate - you're not looking for the right answer, only for the experience of connection. Trigrams will feel different for different people, and in different hexagrams, and on different days.

Even if this is all sounding a bit remote, you can always trust the Image - that part of the text that names the hexagram's component trigrams and then tells you what the noble one (or sometimes the ancient kings) will do. The more I read this, the more respect I have for its authors. (See also - 'The genius of the Daxiang'.)

Only do bear in mind that the Image is advice. The noble one is demonstrating an ideal response to those trigram energies. It's not a prediction, and not even necessarily a promise that you'll be able to attain this ideal - more of a model and aspiration.

I Ching Community discussion

A story in three parts?

I've mentioned before that there's a pattern in the Zhouyi of concepts or images showing up in threes: three pots, three almost-full moons, three raids that are marital allies, not robbers, and so on. And there are also three zhang 章: in lines 2.3, 44.5 and 55.5.

‘Containing a thing of beauty: this allows constancy.
Maybe engaged in a king’s business -
Without accomplishment, there is completion.’

'Using willow to wrap gourds.
Containing a thing of beauty,
It comes falling from its source in heaven.'

'A thing of beauty coming.
Brings reward and praise, good fortune.'

Only a zhang, that 'thing of beauty', is something of a mystery object. In Wilhelm/Baynes it becomes 'lines' (two sets of 'hidden lines,' then 'lines are coming' in 55.5); Field has 'the pattern holds' when zhang is hidden, but then substitutes 'Shang' for zhang at 55.5 so he can translate 'he comes to Shang'. Lynn has 'effaces his own prominent qualities,' 'harbours beauty within,' and finally 'this one arrives here and manifests himself'. Bradford Hatcher: 'Restraint in display,' 'restraint is displayed,' and 'the pattern emerges'. And one more: Deng Ming Dao, 'hide your talents,' 'held in place', and 'receiving the seal'.

According to various dictionaries, zhang means…

• splendid, distinguished
• obvious, apparent
• elegant, well-made
• a stanza of poetry or section of a musical composition
• customs, law, institution
• a moral example
• the blazon on a standard
• the insignia of court officers

Originally, it was (probably) one half of a jade gui tablet, which might be bestowed on you as token of your royal authority for a mission. (There's no agreement on the character's etymology: Sears says it's a speaking mouth plus the number ten; the Pleco dictionary says it's jade and the chisel to work it.)

All of which gives a clear sense of a theme, but not a unitary translation.

Exploring 44.5, I found,

In the Shijing, the Book of Songs, this word means variously the blazon on a flag, finely woven cloth, elegant speech, gold and jade ornaments, ancient statutes, the laws or the personal example given by a great ruler, and the form of the Milky Way in the heavens.

The simplest thing I can say about all these is that they're meant to be seen. Going back to the original idea of a jade token of authority, being seen is really the entire point.

And yet in 2.3 and 44.5, this beautiful thing is han 含: literally, held inside the mouth; by extension, contained and concealed, like life force in the grain (or in the human). From early times, han meant keeping your mouth shut and concealing your feelings.

This seems to me a really extraordinary thing to do with a blazon, or insignia, or personal example, or law, or musical composition… let alone with a jade token of authority. What could possibly be happening here? And when the zhang concealed in 2.3 and 44.5 'comes, bringing reward and praise' in 55.5, what story is being told?

(Note: some translators escape the paradox by saying a jade baton is being held in front of the mouth to hide it when speaking to the king. I'm not convinced at all - not when han specifically means holding something inside the mouth. Han was actually used in the Liji for the practice of putting jade in the corpse's mouth to ensure a good afterlife.)

Line by line…

2.3 changing to 15

‘Containing a thing of beauty: this allows constancy.
Someone engaged in the king’s business -
Without accomplishment, there is completion.’

The inner logic and contrasts of this line seem fairly clear. Containing the zhang makes constancy possible: you can persist, find truth and carry it through, because that shining sign is hidden away. And then in parallel, if you're doing the king's work, you can bring it to an end ('allows constancy'), though without accomplishment (because the zhang is hidden?).

What could this actually mean in practice?

Zhang is a word that requires context to narrow down its meaning - which naturally makes it perfect for use in an oracle, where each individual reading provides its own context. This line adds a little context of its own, though, with the king's work - something you might well do with a zhang that is half a jade gui, the token of mandate and personal authority.

Maybe hiding the token is why there is no 'accomplishment'. 'Accomplishment' means specifically completed work: the house is built, the cloth is woven, the war is won. It's not just that we finished working, but the work itself is finished. 'Completion' means simply the end of a period of time: you came through it.

And… 'completion' is a key word in 15, Integrity, the hexagram revealed when 2.3 changes:

'Integrity creates success.
The noble one completes it.'

And 15.3, changing back to 2:

'Toiling with integrity.
A noble one completes it.
Good fortune.'

The noble one of 15 stays in his lane, does the work there is for him to do, isn't worried about how it will look - and this is consistently described as a recipe for success. The Tuanzhuan for 15, its commentary on the oracle/judgement text, suggests why:

'It is the way of heaven to decrease the arrogant and to augment the humble.
It is the way of earth radically to change the arrogant and to flow into the humble.
The souls and spirits harm the arrogant and bless the humble.
It is the way of people to hate the arrogant and to love the humble.'

Perhaps this is why hiding the shining zhang allows constancy, by leaving space to receive blessing, not being so 'full of yourself' (the literal meaning of 'arrogant' is 'full to overflowing') as to excite antagonism.

Tradition generally agrees that this line is about concealing one's talents - think of the English expression, 'swallow your pride'. I've found it can also mean not broadcasting your plans, not using your insights to win the argument, or specifically hiding the full extent of your authority in the situation (even, or especially, when insisting on it seems like the obvious shortcut to achieve your goals). The trigram kun here is becoming gen, mountain: putting a lid on things.

So at the end of the story, you will have no accomplishment, nothing 'to show for it', and quite possibly no-one will know you got anything done. But you will have come through, and stayed loyal. My experience of the line has been that you do attain your ends, though I wonder whether that's always the case: the goal might need to be redefined.

44.5 changing to 50

'Using willow to wrap gourds.
Containing a thing of beauty,
It comes falling from its source in heaven.'

The sheer brilliance of the imagery of this line, the perfect way it shows the meeting of Coupling with the Vessel, makes me fall in love with this book all over again.

So… this line looks to Hexagram 50, the Vessel. That is, it's looking to create something very like a zhang: a complete and beautifully crafted work of art that makes tangible the spiritual authority of the new regime. But it is the fifth line, the decisive moment, of Coupling, the hexagram of the disruptively powerful woman, not to be married because such a marriage could not last. There is too much energy here for the structures available - nothing that will be neatly contained. And whatever had seemed complete and settled before has just been opened up and brought into question. In such a time, meeting with all this unpredictable, uncontrollable, unassimilable power, how can anyone start thinking about casting a vessel?

Answer: by creating a gourd vessel, one that is not cast in a mould, but grows into one.

The changing line shows this happening with something like stop-motion animation, as the inner solid line of the upper trigram qian opens up and creates the gourd's hollow interior. (Not the only line where this happens.)

How to make a gourd vessel

A bottle gourd actually grows into a usable bottle shape on its own: you need only wait very patiently for it to ripen and then dry out fully. You would still use a willow wrapping to cushion the brittle gourd and to give it a handle/ hanging loop.

But to create the vessel shape you want, you can't start with a mature gourd: you need to shape it as it grows. Since the Qing Dynasty at least - and maybe earlier, who knows? - there has been a technique of enclosing the small, growing gourd in a two-part mould, so it would grow into the chosen shape.

You could create the mould by a process quite similar to casting a bronze vessel: make the shape you want from clay, bake it hard, then layer clay on top of this to make a reverse-image mould. To make a bronze vessel, you bind the two halves of the mould together with spacers inbetween, bury them to hold them in place, and pour in molten metal. To make a simple gourd bottle, you bind the mould firmly to your growing gourd. If all goes well, then after many months of growth you will be able to remove the mould and reveal the finished product… the zhang?

As I scoured the internet to learn more about this, I came across a truly fascinating article about a modern gourd artist, and his process of mastering the mould technique. Nowadays, apparently, he uses ropes and cords to shape the growing gourds. I wonder if the flexibility and strength of willow withies would be more useful than reinforcement with steel?

In 2001, Kung ordered a mold of the bodhisattva Kuanyin, with which he planned to shape a growing gourd. But the melon refused to co-operate, and burst through the steel-reinforced plaster mold by a good ten centimeters. This illustrated to Kung the resilience of nature-even something as small as a young melon could summon such explosive power in the name of self-preservation.
After three years' work, Kung came to the realization that some kind of "escape route" needs to be left in any mold, so that once the melon has fully grown into the mold, it can carry on growing out through that hole, leaving both artist and nature satisfied.

So there is the story of someone searching for ways to engage with Hexagram 44's power so as to create a Vessel that is also a work of art.

44.5's 'thing of beauty' is the finished gourd bottle, I think, which in turn works as a symbol of fertility (because gourds are full of seeds!) and a swelling pregnancy. And the birth of the heir in turn prefigures the coming new regime with the vessel that embodies its spiritual authority.

And 'falling from heaven'?

'Using willow to wrap gourds.
Containing a thing of beauty,
It comes falling from its source in heaven.'

The Chinese really only says 'there is falling from heaven' - something coming down to us. The verb 隕 yun, 'fall', is an interesting one: it means to fall to the ground like rain or leaves. A yun star is a falling star, and a yun stone a meteorite, so some authors see a celestial sign here; it's hard, in any case, not to think of the Mandate of Heaven coming to the Zhou people. The character yun is written with components for hills or a barrier and, on the right, the phonetic part showing a round ding-vessel.

55.5 changing to 49

We started with someone doing the king's work at 2.3, and now we reach Hexagram 55, Feng, the citadel where Wu, the heir, becomes king. And here, the 'thing of beauty' itself is coming, out in the open:

'A thing of beauty coming.
Brings reward and praise, good fortune.'

Compared with the imagery-wrapped-in-imagery of 44.5, this is a tremendously simple line. Zhang comes. There is reward - 慶 qing, celebration, good fortune, congratulations and gifts - and praise - 譽 yu, honour, eulogy. Good fortune.

So… what is the 'thing of beauty' now? Schilling, who has a very coherent view of all three lines (more on that in a moment), sees it as a sign of the mandate: either revealing it causes the sun (darkened in 55.2.3.4) to be unveiled, or the re-appearing sun is the zhang.

I think this line must mean the way is clear for Zhou victory - I tend to imagine the coming 'thing of beauty' as the shining clear statutes and moral example of the new regime. Zhou will overthrow Shang, and there will be huge celebrations.

The overthrow is - of course - heralded in the connected hexagram 49, Radical Change, the inverse pair of Hexagram 50.

'Radical change.
On your own day, there is truth and confidence.
Creating success from the source, constancy bears fruit.
Regrets vanish.'

A story?

These three lines make a very elegant triangle, don't they? You could see it as standing on its broad base: two contained zhang, one open and celebrated. Or perhaps the triangle stands on its apex: one line at the third place, referencing the king's work, and then two at the fifth place, the line of the ruler, changing to paired hexagrams 49 and 50.

And they also seem to me to tell a clear story.

In Hexagram 2, where the noble one sets out on her journey to find a place to be of service and at home, someone embarks on king's work while keeping their token of authority well-hidden. They are receptive, with Integrity, and so they can complete it - or get through it.

Then it's time to incubate the thing of beauty, grow it into shape, still keeping the plan (heaven's plan, perhaps) hidden safely away. Benebell Wen actually suggests that the 'willow', Qi, in 44.5 is the state of Qi, and the wrapped fruit is Jiang Ziya, a real hidden treasure whom King Wen persuaded to be his advisor when he came upon the old sage fishing without hooks, and who subsequently also guided King Wu. You can read more about Jiang Ziya here - including how he advised Wen to be patient and await the right time for the conquest.

(Bradford Hatcher also thought 44.5 was all about patience, and things 'will have fallen from heaven' if we wait for heaven's timing - something equally applicable to pregnancies and drying gourds.)

And finally, the signs are visible in the open in 55.5, when the whole revolution and transformation is at hand.

Schilling - who is very good at tracing patterns and themes within and between hexagrams - suggests that the zhang might be an omen Wen received to show he was chosen to overthrow Shang, perhaps even a sign visible on his own body. This sign must be hidden at first, while Wen - a famously humble servant-king - is a loyal Shang subject. (There's another way those qualities of Hexagram 15, not provoking antagonism, might be important.) Then in 44.5 its concealment allows for the descent of something (Mandate?) from heaven. And what was hidden is unveiled in 55.5: the sign, with the sun. The long-hidden mandate (or inner vision, or spiritual gift) can become manifest at last.

I Ching Community discussion

(Just one reading, sorry, not a universal formula.)

Paloma asked what to do about her worrying pension-less state, and cast Hexagram 5, Waiting, changing at lines 4 and 5 to 34, Great Vigour -

So we talked about patience, and self-care, and standing firm, and also not standing firm at the bottom of a hole...

If you have a reading you'd like to share on the podcast, please book yourself a slot here!

Outside the boxes

When I first heard about Benebell Wen's I Ching, I thought it sounded unpromising. An I Ching book by someone who had already published on tarot, who maintains a website with sections on feng shui, numerology, Western astrology and esoteric Taoism as well as tarot and the I Ching, all while working full time as a corporate lawyer. This was going to be one of those sad little pamphlet-sized offerings of undigested, rehashed Wilhelm/Baynes, right?

(pause)

Er, no. (That's 900+ pages.)

Also, take a look at the table of contents, included in Amazon's excerpt from the Kindle version. Here's how it begins:

...and it continues; do have a look. (The Kindle version is ridiculously cheap in the UK at the moment, by the way.)

So this really does not fit into the box I had ready for it, or indeed any box I can think of. That chapter on Yixue suggests why: Benebell Wen is very well aware of how many different ways there have been of engaging with and understanding the Yi over the millennia. She's not a disciple of any of them, and sees no reason not to draw on them all, or find new ones.

I'd recommend reading what she has to say about the book on her own website, where she calls it both an 'I Ching reference book' and a 'magical grimoire'. She also shares some generous excerpts to give you a flavour of it, including its unique 'practicums'.

Why buy it?

Again - just look at the contents list. That Yixue chapter ranges across Yi's history through China, East Asia and Europe, up to the present day. She's especially good at bringing her knowledge to life. There are many vivid stories from myth and legend, all great imagination food for readings. I'd never before read about Yu the Great receiving jade tablets of magical secrets from Fuxi in a cave, for instance. (It's odd she doesn't mention this one when she gets to 62.5!)

I especially appreciate her portraits of the trigrams, with associated immortals and Feng Shui/ magical/ meditative practices. That whole practical, 'practicum' element of the book, the 'grimoire', is something I've not seen elsewhere, certainly not with these strong Taoist roots.

The introduction doesn't attempt to separate out tradition from history - it tells both in a single story - and so we end up with yin and yang appearing at the beginning, and the Early Heaven bagua before Later Heaven. (Her videos on Youtube have the occasional error, too, though they're still well worth watching.) But better vivid, living tradition with some inaccuracies than dry-as-dust academic correctness, perhaps?

That rich imagination-food continues throughout the translation, which is interspersed with panels telling all kinds of stories from myth and history. And these are Benebell's own versions of the stories: 55's (possible) eclipse comes with a magus who fails to reverse it and has his arm broken in punishment at line 3. Wang Hai shows up in hexagrams 23 and 56, but he's innocent of all wrong-doing, except perhaps in a remote footnote. She's not just following in the footsteps of academics, and there will definitely be associations here you haven't seen elsewhere. Hexagram 54, for instance, will tell you about Tai Si, but also Chang-Er, who went to the moon. 44.5 comes with a page about 'Jiang Ziya, the white muskmelon'.

She presents all these as associations and possibilities, never as the One True Meaning. I imagine she's much too aware of the different meanings lines have held for different people over the centuries to fall into that trap. So her account of Hexagram 55 ends with a panel on eclipses, with their dates, but notes that whether the text refers to either 'is a matter for speculation'. Which is good, because 'here is what this hexagram is about' is just not how readings work.

Translation troubles

(Sadly, there are some.)

No Oracle/ Image

Benebell does not translate the Oracle/Judgement and Image in their entirety. Instead, you get bits of each, interspersed with her commentary, and all blended together. Most Yijing translations use different typefaces to differentiate between translation and commentary - and she does the same with the moving line texts, but not with Oracle and Image. Here, the bold text is a mish-mash of translation and commentary.

Here's Hexagram 28, as an example. She translates the whole as 'Undertake the Great', not 'excess' or 'transition' or 'crossing the line'. (She's not at all consistent in her translation of guo - you wouldn't know that 62 is the small version of the same action.) After a summary of how she interprets the hexagram as a whole, comes -

The lake rises over the trees; marsh submerging wood. Embarking on a great endeavor. The sage is independent and fearless, ever concerned for the world. Let the heart be stable and calm, no matter what conditions endeavor to challenge it. A fragile, unstable roof beam - a critical situation.
Renouncing the world you knew. Expelling melancholy. It is a tipping point. You are reaching critical mass.
Yet fortune favors the inquirer - 利有攸往 (li you you wang). Undertaking a great challenge is likely to yield success, so proceed with confidence.
Take the transformative path. It is a turning point in your life.

There's no way you could reconstruct the original text from this - which is a shame, because the original has its own internal logic:

'Great Exceeding, the ridgepole warps.
Fruitful to have a direction to go.
Creating success.'

That sounds to me as though it's useful to have somewhere to go because of the state of the ridgepole. And likewise with the Image: the original has a prevailing theme of being alone, withdrawing, which is diluted or demoted in her version.

Oddnesses and inconsistencies

The translation of the lines is full of interesting ideas, and some quite odd ones, but none of them seems to be consistently applied through the book. Again and again, I come across an intriguing translation that makes me sit up and take notice, look to see what she's made of the same word or words elsewhere, and find there is no similarity at all: it's as if the lines had been translated by different people.

For instance…

The final three words of 18.1 are 厲終吉 li zhong ji, which I translated, quite conventionally, as, 'danger, in the end good fortune.' Benebell has something very different:

'The whetstone comes to the end of its life - auspicious for the future to come; prosperity and great fortune.'

And she picks up on this in her commentary on the line:

'The whetstone, or a stone used to sharpen metal tools, axes and daggers, symbolizes refinement and the strengthening of character through friction; it's also a symbol of cultivating a new warrior king.'

Li, usually translated as an omen word meaning 'danger', did also mean 'whetstone', and there is no punctuation in the original, so 'danger; in the end, good fortune' might also mean 'whetstone ending; good fortune.' Certainly the symbolism of the whetstone as she describes it feels like good, rich stuff for readings.

Exactly the same phrase - 厲終吉 li zhong ji - occurs in Hexagram 6 line 3, where she translates:
'…leads first into trouble, but then to prosperity.'
There's not a ghost of a whetstone here, nor for any other instances of li that I've come across so far in the book.

There are lots of examples like this: she'll pick a character, draw out its ancient etymological associations, make them central to a translation or interpretation - and then completely lose sight of them for every other instance of the character.

One more example - 5's crows.

The first bolded sentence for Hexagram 5 is 'Crows above the clouds.' There's a whole page about 'The crow and the totemic emblem of the Shang because '於 Yu is a reference to a bird in the sky.'

Wait… crows? What's this yu character where she found them?

It's the one used in all the lines of Hexagram 5 as a preposition after 'waiting' (and then after 'entering' in line 6): waiting at the outskirts, on the sands, and so on. Obviously it couldn't be translated here as 'crow', and she doesn't attempt that - but she does make the crow a core part of the hexagram's meaning.

If I'm reading the dictionary correctly, 於 could mean 'crow' when pronounced differently; she hasn't invented this. But the word is used liberally throughout the Zhouyi as a preposition, including in every line of Hexagram 53 in exactly the same way as in the lines of Hexagram 5. (The wild geese gradually progress yu the shore, the rocks, and so on.) I didn't manage to count all the occurrences of yu in the book, but there are more than sixty. Not so much as a feather of a crow accompanies any of them in translation or commentary.

I'm left feeling as though this is partly a translation, partly a riff on individual character associations - not connected with the character's meaning in the sentence, and not part of any decision for the translation or interpretation as a whole.

I don't know why she's done this, but I'm going to hazard a guess that perhaps this has to do with her experiences as a diviner. (She does use the Yi for readings.) I think singling out a character's associations in a reading can work: there could be a single moment of synchronicity when it's revelatory for Hexagram 5 to remind you of crows.

So… perhaps these associations come from such one-off reading experiences? I'm just not persuaded that they belong in a book people will consult for every reading. There, I want imagination food, yes, but with consistency, thought through with care. Partly so it won't send you on wild crow chases unrelated to your reading, and also partly so you can trace real associations from one reading to the next.

(If you cast 44.5 about a topic and later cast 55.5 about something connected, ideally your translation should let you see how Yi is referring back to the previous reading and telling you your story. Benebell has fascinating insight into 44.5 which disappears completely from 2.3 or 55.5.)

Who's this for?

Sadly, not for beginners, because of its translation troubles. If you're going to be introduced to the I Ching, you need to start with the I Ching in as direct a translation as possible. (I know it isn't altogether possible.) Without that, you can never truly connect with the oracle.

It's a shame, as that generous, eclectic introduction would be a lovely place to start, just to get a sense of the scale of the book and the diversity of approaches available.

But if you're no longer a beginner, if you have access to a translation or two and would like to explore further and have your ideas about Yi, its meanings and uses and roots, expanded, then definitely buy this one. You'll love it.

If you look at that 'this is not a pamphlet' photo, the pages identified with the grey margins are the translation, and all the rest is background: history, myth, stories, esotericism from Crowley to Taoist magic, trigrams and DNA and Boddhisattvas… the whole technicolor panoply of the I Ching across time and space. (Or at least more of it than I've ever seen in one place before.) All this, and a fat bibliography and footnotes.

She uses a great breadth of sources, something that really comes across in the footnotes. Note 47 to the translation refers to an obscure academic paper about an incident in the life of King Wen. Note 48 proposes ritual magic remedies 'for amplifying Wood and Thunder to counteract the blockading effects of Hexagram 47.' Note 49 refers to something from Yale University Press. A later footnote tells you in detail how to use 56.1 as a curse. Like I said, I haven't found a box this book will fit in.

I also appreciate the way she uses all this: the eclipses of 55 being 'a matter for speculation'; how she suggests a Taoist mystic could 'repurpose' 64.4 (where the Thunderer subdues the Demon Country) as spell-crafting instructions. She has lots of ideas, she makes them available, and doesn't try to nail anything down or claim that she know 'What It Means'.

I won't be relying on anything here as a sole source of information, but I also wouldn't want to miss out on the breadth, depth and richness of it all. Do visit her site and explore.