I Ching with Clarity

Where they are in the Yijing

There are three mentions in the Zhouyi - the oldest layer of the Yijing text - of 'establishing feudal lords': in the Oracle of Hexagram 3, and its first line, and in the Oracle of Hexagram 16. (Then they're also mentioned in the Image of Hexagram 8, and there's Lord Kang in Hexagram 35.)

If you mostly use the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, you may well have no idea what I'm on about. (Of course this may often happen to many people and for unrelated but excellent reasons…) It doesn't mention 'establishing feudal lords', only 'installing helpers'. 'In order to overcome the chaos' of Hexagram 3, according to Wilhelm's commentary, 'he needs helpers.' And at Hexagram 16, 'It is Enthusiasm that enables us to install helpers for the completion of an undertaking without fear of secret opposition.' Helpers create order, foster harmony and get things done.

And this is - of course - good, directly usable advice: get some help in place if you want to accomplish anything. However, if we dig a bit further into the original meaning, there might be more to learn.

What is a feudal lord, anyway?

Feudal lords are those appointed by the king to rule the regions in his stead. The Chinese words in hexagrams 3 and 16 are 建侯, jian hou, and they can be literally translated as 'enfeoff a lord'. The etymology of both characters is interesting:

侯 hou, lord, shows a person and an arrow hitting a target - or in very early forms, just the arrow in the target. A lord may originally have been a distinguished archer. The Shuowen says of this,

'Targets for archery at the great Spring Ceremony. The character shows a man and the target where he has shot his arrow. The sovereign shot at bear, tiger and leopard targets [ie targets made from these animal skins], showing thus that he repressed rebellion. The feudal lords shot at bear, boar and tiger, the senior officials at large deer, the officials at smaller deer and at panther, to expel evil influences from the fields.'

So… perhaps the foundational idea is that a lord is someone who keeps things safe and peaceful, deterring attacks and driving out enemies material or spiritual, through his skill with the bow.

And 建 jian, meaning to enfeoff, establish, found, originally seems to have depicted a man driving a post into the ground. (As always with ancient Chinese characters, this isn't an exact science - no doubt different scribes wrote the word differently - but the bronze inscription characters here and here look very much like someone driving in a post.)

Installing feudal lords starts to look a little like building a line of defence - and that's certainly part of the historical picture. According to the Book of Rites, immediately after King Wu had overthrown the Shang regime, before he had even descended from his chariot, he had already begun to enfeoff lords. They would have held land on his behalf, outposts distributed along the Yellow River Valley.

A noble, often a relation of the king's, might be comfortably ensconced in the security of the capital, only to be told by his king to take troops and set out to establish a garrison - Britannica describes these as 'colonies'. Such lords would support one another, and could also call on military support from the centre.

In this way the ruler at the centre expands his sphere of influence and - I imagine - creates a 'buffer zone' between the capital and hostile forces. It reminds me of the defensive role of the archer, and the lords driving evil influences from the fields.

Within his own realm, a feudal lord was like a mini-king: making local law, conducting religious rites, and entitled to his share of local produce. He would also owe a duty to the king, to provide tribute and soldiers. The flow of resources goes both ways, both from and to the capital, and also between the feudal states in mutual support.

In the bronze vessels cast to commemorate enfeoffments, becoming a feudal lord is described as a great honour, one the lord accepts with humility and gratitude. Inscriptions express faith that the newly-cast vessel would be handed down to their descendants, and so too would the fief. There's no sense here of defence or precarity, only becoming part of an ever-expanding, harmonious realm, held together by bonds of mutual loyalty.

A second look at the text

What light could all this cast on the hexagrams?

The name of Hexagram 3, zhun, might be translated as 'sprouting' and 'Difficulty at the Beginning' - but also (pronounced tun) means to station troops, or a garrison. In other words, exactly what a feudal lord would establish when first sent out to bring a new region into the king's realm.

And there's the most basic idea of Hexagram 3: that this is the beginning. Wu starts naming feudal lords before he even gets down from his chariot. To weave together a thriving, interconnected kingdom, you need your garrisons first. To grow an oak tree, the acorn starts with roots.

In the Oracle of Hexagram 3, setting up feudal lords is one half of a contrast:

'Sprouting.
From the source, creating success, constancy bears fruit.
Don't use this to have a direction to go,
Fruitful to establish feudal lords.'

'Do this, not that': don't go places, don't set out to explore in a single direction; instead, consolidate power at the centre first by spreading your network in all directions. This is how to grow.

There might (speculation alert!) be a more specific contrast implied here. Harmen Mesker has suggested that the 'direction to go', 攸往 you wang, is a 'far place', and this is about making a royal journey out to the border realms. Shang kings (according to Britannica) had been largely peripatetic, constantly touring in an effort to maintain their influence and alliances with regional lords. But if the regional lords are your own appointees (and probably family members), the strength of the network would strengthen the centre and mean less need to tour.

So… 'having a direction to go' vs 'establishing feudal lords' is the difference between narrowing and expanding possibilities, but perhaps also between trying to do it all yourself, be everywhere at once, and delegation. (Or 'installing helpers', as a wise translator once wrote...)

There's a spectrum of associations for feudal lords: from the harmonious flow of support and loyalty through an ordered network, through to a venture into new territory to establish the first garrison. Plainly, Hexagram 3 is at the beginning.

But… look what stands across from it: its complementary hexagram, 50, the Vessel. The rituals of enfeoffment could involve a gift of metal with which to cast the new commemorative vessel - we know this from an inscription on a bronze vessel from the reign of King Cheng (~1042 to 1021 BC). That has to cast new light on the whole big, beautiful pattern the Sequence of Hexagrams makes between hexagrams 3 and 50. (I've described these patterns more completely and clearly in Exploring the Sequence, available in the Change Circle Library.)

Then comes 3.1 - the absolute beginning of the beginning:

'Encircled by stones.
Fruitful to settle with constancy,
Fruitful to establish feudal lords.'

When this line changes, it reveals Hexagram 8, Seeking Union, with its trigrams showing the rivers flowing over the earth. I remember the feudal outposts established along the Yellow River Valley - and the Image of Hexagram 8:

'Above earth is the stream. Seeking Union.
The ancient kings founded countless cities for relationships with all the feudal lords.'

And finally Hexagram 16, Enthusiasm, or Anticipating - or Readiness, as Bradford Hatcher translates it.

'Enthusiasm.
Fruitful to set up feudal lords and mobilise the armies.'

Now the feudal lords are linked with mobilisation. I'm no longer sure whether these armies will be marching from the regions to the capital or vice versa, but either way, the local lords will provide them with structure and direction.

Traditionally this is seen as the role of line 4, the single yang line, mobilising the army of yin lines. Action emerges from compliance like the outer trigram thunder from inner trigram earth. So R.J. Lynn translates the Oracle of 16 as,

'It is fitting to establish a chief and to send the army into action.'

Hexagram 3 made me think of how feudal lords broke new ground and expanded the king's realm; Hexagram 16 reminds me more of their role as defensive outposts. Energy is gathered and galvanised in 16 partly in sheer delight, and also partly to be ready. Remember the role of 16 in inspiring the creation of fortifications and warning systems?

‘They made defensive double gates and watchmen’s clappers to keep off marauders. This may have come from Yu.’ (16)

(That's from the chapter of the Dazhuan that describes how certain hexagrams work almost as culture heroes.)

Feudal lords in readings

And so to the point of it all: will that extra bit of background information make a difference in readings?

I think - unsurprisingly - it depends on the reading. I can think of a couple where 'install helpers' is exactly the advice needed, and the rest is probably clutter. In the 45th episode of the podcast, Abby understood the feudal lords of Hexagram 3 as the people whose advice helped her to resolve a family conflict. In the 33rd, Joanna's Hexagram 16 feudal lords made sense as relationships she could usefully develop in another country before moving her whole family there.

But I've also come across many readings where the extra background does help. Here are a few…

In the last podcast, with Hexagram 3 unchanging, Ludimila connected with the idea of feudal lords bringing knowledge and resources to the centre. In this connection, I really appreciate Bradford Hatcher's wisdom on Hexagram 3:

'And when it seems to be only you, against all the chaotic world, the trick is to rethink what 'you' is, to include the sum of all your helpers and all the resources at hand. Collect the wits first and start turning things to advantage.'

If we're asking, 'What helpers? There's no-one to help me!' - which in Hexagram 3, we well might be - this would have us think not so much of appointing the feudal lords as recognising where they already are, or converting aspects of the existing situation into feudal lords. (There's an element of that in the historical picture, too: existing Shang rulers were involved in consolidating the Zhou kingdom.)

One idea that comes through again and again, especially with Hexagram 3 line 1 (and actually with Abby's reading, too) is that of feudal lords as a network of mutual support that makes your world bigger. People caught amidst the 'encircling stones' might find new connections - often new friendships - beyond a claustrophobic family, or oppressive marriage or job, so that they can see themselves and their situation in a new way.

I had 3.1 as advice for the last Christmas I spent with my mother-in-law. She would come to stay with us, and she and I would sit together in the one small room of the house that could be kept (almost) warm enough for her comfort, where I wondered how to make things feel even slightly festive for her. The local church welcomed her with great, practical kindness to a beautiful Christmas service - but apart from that, she was happier staying in. We settled down inside the rock circle of her blindness and frailty, where Youtube videos of songs she remembered (every word of) from 70 years ago played the part of feudal lords, bringing more life and delight into our small room.

Also - especially with Hexagram 16 - it can help to think of feudal lords specifically as a defensive perimeter, expanding security.

For instance… I find I've received Hexagram 16 a couple of times when asking about the effect of fluoride on my teeth. (It forms a compound on the surface of the teeth that's more acid-resistant than natural enamel.)

Then there's a reading Balata shared on the forum: 16 unchanging as the best description of a composer who first hired assistants as he began to go deaf, and ended up passing off their work in its entirety as his own. You can see his 'ghost composers' as feudal lords, increasingly employed to defend a central self-concept.

(But on the other hand, and before I pigeon-hole 16's feudal lords into a purely defensive role, there's also a story on the forum of Hexagram 16 describing why someone couldn't contact an elderly friend. He was fine; it was just that his students had got him a new email address and he needed to reinstate her as a phone contact.)

16's feudal lords take on their organising, ordering role in podcast 52, where Roslyn needed to develop a business plan/ strategy/ structure (her word), not just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick.

And in podcast 49, they were the people who run Family Constellations workshops and who are delegated there as representatives, who need to be interconnected in mutual support, as parts of a greater whole - ensuring the whole thing is grounded, not just a flight of fantasy. Lux called them the 'people that hold the space'.

A few portable ideas

If you're a king establishing feudal lords, what might you be doing?

• creating an interconnected, mutually enriching network
• delegating and decentralising
• making your world bigger, opening up resources, creating greater resilience
• protecting the centre, creating more safety, holding the space

I Ching Community discussion

Ludimila had graduated in psychology and opened her doors as a therapist a few years previously, but wondered whether she was being prompted to hold onto her secure, old work as a teacher and translator. So she asked,

'What should I focus on professionally?'

and cast Hexagram 3, Sprouting, with no changing lines. It's a beautifully simple answer, and we thoroughly enjoyed exploring it together.

Those explorations touched on the nuclear story, at which point I came up with a highly sophisticated visual aid...

(This may come in useful towards the end of the episode if you're not familiar with nuclear trigrams and hexagrams!)

You can learn more about Ludimila and her work here - she does sessions in both Portugese and English.

Introducing the book

Johan Hausen has kindly sent me a review copy of his book, Yijing Ethics. It's a transcription of the oral teachings of Xing De, also called Li Shifu, a Daoist renunciant who is deeply immersed and skilled in traditional Daoist arts. (He is a healer as well as a Yijing practitioner.) So Xing De is a link in a long, long chain of transmitted teaching - and I wasn't far into the book before I realised how different his mental landscape is from mine, not least in its concept of ethics.

The book is tiny: sixty-odd well spaced pages, plus another twenty of Hausen's explanatory end notes, which are essential and very much worth reading. Its contents:

The Introduction - introducing the Yi to newcomers (from a traditional rather than an academic perspective) and laying out Li Shifu's basic approach.

The Yi Jing Virtues and Karma - going into more depth on the world view behind the practice.

Yijing Requirements - describing the full ritual surrounding readings.

Legends and Stories - lively tales of real-life readings, and an intriguing glimpse into divinations to locate lost objects with the properties of a single trigram.

And then come the endnotes. (I can recommend reading with a second bookmark in the endnotes so you can look all of them up.)

Yijing Ethics is the 'prequel' to a bigger volume on using the Yijing for healing. We'll have to wait for that volume for an explanation of how Li Shifu does readings - apparently with a textless method that uses the theory of five phases.

First reactions…

In a nutshell, this little book gives me a glimpse of a whole different world of divination.

My first reaction was funny in an embarrassing sort of way: oh, I already know this. I already know there's a traditional approach to the Yijing that uses incense and altars; I know that in this traditional view, the oracle is not to be consulted in trivial matters. I also already know I don't agree with the necessity of incense or the interdiction of small questions.

Reading a little further, it dawned on me that there's a difference between knowing about something, and knowing it. I don't know the traditional approach of ritual before divination, because I've never undertaken it as a regular practice; this has never been my way of expressing the reverence and gratitude I feel for the Yi. Yijing Ethics comes from someone who knows this practice in his bones. It's not so much food for thought as an invitation to experience.

Ethics?

I probably shouldn't be surprised that 'Yijing ethics' means something very different for Li Shifu. There are some fundamentals we have in common: not consulting for excessive riches or power (not directly with your own readings, nor as a practitioner); being guided by reverence and gratitude for the oracle. But questions I might consider to be 'Yijing ethics' (like 'When is it OK to divine about another person?') aren't here at all. And the way the book opens is quite disconcerting...

In his introduction, he explains the questions you can ask the Yi - and almost every single one of them is asking for a prediction, like 'Will I win the competition or not?' There are no questions at all about choosing your path, no requests for advice. That doesn't necessarily mean he would never consider such questions, of course, it's just startling to me that he doesn't mention any.

There's just one exception: he also mentions asking for medical diagnosis - which is something that I would never get into for other people, precisely for ethical reasons! 'When healing through the Yijing,' he says, 'there is no need to prescribe medicine.'

Like I said, this is all disconcerting. But as I reflect some more, a bit of light begins to dawn.

Why would it be unethical for me to use the Yijing to diagnose people's medical issues? Because I've discovered that I can't do it very well - but the medical profession can. Li Shifu's experience is not necessarily the same.

Why would you think of the Yi as a means of prediction, and in medical cases of description, but not as a source of wise counsel? It depends on what you consider to be a worthy goal - of any human endeavour, divination included. More on that below, under 'desire'.

So what are 'Yijing ethics'?

The essentials

Everyone reading this will have their own habitual patterns of approaching Yi, some with more 'ritual' elements than others. In my world, this is just a matter of what works best for each person to help us to focus.

But this book comes from a different world. Here, traditional spiritual practices are absolutely, inseparably part of reverence and sincerity in divination. Gratitude to the oracle entails reciting a certain prayer. 'Yijing ethics' means ritual - not exclusively, but inseparably.

So divination requires music, incense and prayer. It requires purification for three days before consulting, during which time, 'you must not think about anything bad or harmful, such as relationship issues or sexual matters.'

Also, it's based on the practice of sitting meditation to cultivate the inner qualities needed. In support of this comes a quotation from the Dazhuan - part 1, chapter 10:

寂然不動，感而遂通
'Quiet and unmoving, perceive it and succeed in communion.'

I went and looked this up, as that's not the translation I remembered. And sure enough, in Wilhelm/Baynes this passage comes out as, 'The Changes… are quiescent and do not move. But if they are stimulated, they penetrate all situations.' For Wilhelm (and other translators I've seen), this passage describes qualities of the book - how it does nothing until activated by a questioner. But for Li Shifu, these are the necessary qualities and practice of a diviner.

Divination and desire

This is where the complete difference in world view really comes into focus.

At first, what Li Shifu says about desire seemed to fall into that comfortable basket of 'things I already know'. He does not want the Yi to be connected with materialism: practitioners should not be driven by their 'need' for another Rolls or private jet, nor yet for 'fame and reputation'. Readings should not be used for excessive gain, either. (Though doing readings for others in return for a subsistence living is fine.)

But the basic idea is far more radical than that. From the Introduction:

'Humans always act, too readily, from the place of their own needs and desires. The Yi Jing came to lead us out of that.'

And later:

'It is not possible to impart the Yi Jing and its practice to someone who pursues their desires with it, even if only in dreams.'

Now, it's possible that by 'desire' he means only rampant materialism, and not the desire for community, or to create, or to be of service - the kind of desire I would think of as divine guidance. But he never hints at such a distinction.

And if he in fact means all desires, then that might explain why his idea of divination is asking for a prediction. 'How can I attain this thing I desire?' would be a completely wrong-headed question; 'Will this thing I desire happen?' would be more acceptable, because it doesn't involve the reading in pursuing the desire.

He goes one step further:

'There is no need to cast oracles to avoid bad things happening, and we should endure the bad along with the good.'

One of those excellent end notes explains Li Shifu's assertion that 'to consult the Yi Jing excessively will affect one's karma':

'This effect on one's karma will be either as the creation of a karmic attachment to controlling one's future or because one misses out on lessons in the cultivation of virtue (such as learning forbearance) by shunning any negative experiences.'

I would agree that readings should not be used as a way to avoid the fullness of experience, but this goes one step further. If you need bad experiences to learn from, then using readings to avoid bad experiences is completely counter-productive.

The primary objective for Li Shifu is not to change your experience, but to grow in understanding. This is why readings to restore physical health are acceptable, because the body is a necessary vehicle for spiritual cultivation. Readings about anything that isn't such a necessity - like material comfort - are less so.

He even says that if a reading predicts you will lose all your wealth from a choice, you should not use this reading to change course and avoid the loss. Instead, you should learn from the experience of loss. When you have learned, then perhaps you can change the causes and hence the effects.

Conclusions?

I find this book a fascinating glimpse into a whole different world of divination. I don't want to move there, but I do want to understand it better.

And amidst all the difference, the points of contact and shared experience are all the more striking. He gives the example of approaching the oracle with sincerity, making a correct forecast - and then months later, finding he'd had the wrong hexagram. 'The fourth and fifth dimensions,' he says, 'are full of mischievous spirits.' Even in our different worlds, I think we've met some of the same spirits.

Looking at a reading the other day, I found myself revisiting (after a gap of ten years) the idea of qian, heaven - the name of Hexagram 1 - as a central axis. It's a concept that shows up in many ways…

What does qian mean?

The character qian is now simply the name of the hexagram (and trigram): it means pure yang, heaven and its influence. (More on that in a moment…)

Here's what I've gleaned from Harmen, LiSe and assorted dictionaries about the character qian…

Qian 乾 breaks down into two component parts:

• 倝 gan, meaning dry, dried or drought
• 乙 yi, which is the second heavenly stem and means 'second' generally

Some say that 乙 originally represented a germinating sprout, full of potential energy; others say that it's originally a small stream of water. The Pleco dictionary says this is a 'distinguishing mark' that contributes no particular meaning to the character; Stephen Field says the whole character's meaning 'is derived from the lower right-hand element in the graph depicting the "twist" of a newly emerged sprout.' The decomposition of Chinese characters is not an exact science…

But it's the other part of the character that brings me back to qian as axis. Gan, 'dried', breaks down in turn into two components:

• the rising sun, sunrise
• yan 㫃 , a flag flying in the wind

Harmen dug up some very interesting nuggets about the flag: how the flagpole would be set up in the centre of the town or village, with all the houses facing towards it, and how it might also act as the gnomon of a sundial.

So the flagpole is the centre: we build our settlement around it; we look to it to orient ourselves. In battle or on the march we gather around it and look to it for orders; its bright blazon shows who we are.

What is the 'influence of heaven'?

This definition of qian can seem very abstract. What's 'heaven' and how does it influence us? Once we've cleared out the serried ranks of angels and archangels cluttering our Western imaginations, what's left?

There is a Chinese concept of the 'will of heaven' that's not unrecognisably different from the Christian idea of a 'divine will'. But qian is not just 'heaven' but also the firmament: where sun, moon and stars follow their courses. (Remember the rising sun is part of the character.)

Qian is made of closed, firm lines. Nothing whatsoever can be done to it. (Unlike the open lines of kun, earth, which can be broken open by plough/roots/rivers, excavated, piled into ramparts, baked into bricks…) Those parallel, unbroken lines remind me of long-exposure photos of the night sky:

Quick question: what time is it now, as you're reading this?

You probably glanced reflexively at the corner of your screen to find out. A decade or so ago, you might have looked at your watch (confession: I still do), and I suppose Grannie would have looked at the clock on the mantelpiece to see when it was time to get started on supper. But not so many generations ago, your reflexive glance would have been to the sky, to see the angle of the sun.

You need to know what time it is because you understand and order your life in days and nights. You also order it by seasons - especially if you're a farmer - and to know accurately what time of year it is, you look at the night sky.

This is the story traced through the line texts of Hexagram 1, or at least part of it: the dragon constellation that is submerged in line 1, when it's too early to sow, and begins its journey across the sky as work in the fields begins.

It's good to appreciate how much this dragon does not come with 'pause' or 'fast forward' buttons. (Every year without fail, Facebook gardening groups are full of pictures of forlorn, leggy seedlings that were sown too soon and light-deprived.) Qian is what is so.

The sun and stars are for time what the flagstaff is for space: what our lives revolve around; how we orient ourselves; where we start from; how we know what to do.

Sequence reflections

Is this characteristic of qian reflected in the Sequence?

Well, it's literally where we start from - the first hexagram. And the trigrams qian and kun are mostly concentrated towards the beginning of the book: in eight of the first 10 hexagram pairs, and none of the final 10.

I've started talking about qian and kun together because that's how they work. Every hexagram pattern that includes the trigram qian is adjacent to a pattern with trigram kun - most often followed by it, as hexagram 1 is by hexagram 2. Sun and stars only 'move' because we have a place to stand to watch them; the flagstaff is planted in the earth.

Here's the complete list of hexagrams with qian as a component trigram:

• 1
• 5/6
• 9/10
• 11/12
• 13/14
• 25/26
• 33/34
• 43/44

As we emerge from the dense cluster of heaven and earth trigrams from hexagram 5 to 16, a pattern appears: 13-16, 23-26, 33-36 and 43-46 are all qian and kun pairs. (23-26 are the exception to the rule that qian comes first.) How about imagining these as the flagstaff planted in the earth at the centre of each group of ten hexagrams?

When qian and kun are combined into a single hexagram, in hexagrams 11/12, they become the axis of what Scott Davis dubbed the first 'big/little' set of hexagrams. Have a look -

(I've turned the hexagrams on their sides so you can more easily see each single pattern that forms an inverse pair of hexagrams.)

11/12 is like a mirror, with two qian hexagrams closest to it and two kun hexagrams beyond them. Also, all the hexagrams in here are complementary/ opposite to one another: 7/8 to 13/14, 9/10 to 15/16, and 11/12, of course, are a complementary pair.

What does this matter?

Sequence patterns are satisfying in their own way, but are they worth noticing? In other words, does this make any difference in readings?

All the reflections, shared themes and stories of 11/12 and their surroundings most certainly do, but they're way beyond the scope of a blog post. You can find much more about them in Exploring the Sequence, which is part of the Change Circle Library.

As for the idea that each decade of hexagrams might have its own qian-kun 'flagstaff' planted at its centre: this is one I'm just starting to play with. You can do the same - in general, from your experience with the hexagrams, and especially as they come up in your own readings. That's always the real proof of the pudding. See what tastes good!

We might experiment with thinking of the earth hexagrams (7/8, 15/16, 35/36, 45/46) as responses to the challenge of the heaven ones (5/6, 13/14, 33/34, 43/44). (I know that begs the question of what to do with 23/24-25/26.) If the Army is gathered in response to the obstruction of Hexagram 6, then can we also imagine Seeking Union as a response to, or an expression of, Waiting? How about hexagrams 35 and 36 as historically grounded, real life responses to the question of whether to Retreat or stand firm?

…and so on. When I next receive hexagrams from these neighbouring pairs for related readings, I'll certainly sit up and take notice - and look for the flagstaff.

I Ching Community discussion

That was Nathaniel's question for this podcast episode. Here's the reading he cast -

- Hexagram 26, Great Tending, changing at line 1 to Hexagram 18, Corruption. As you might imagine, the moving line gave us pause for thought!

Nathaniel mentioned a previous episode, the one about Family Constellations work, that also featured Hexagram 18, and also Benebell Wen's interesting new translation; I mentioned Margaret Pearson's.

(If you'd like to share a reading of your own on the podcast, you can book that here!)

https://livingchange.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/episode53.mp3

I want to review Larry Schulz' The Weaving Maiden's Mystery, only I'm not at all sure where to start. There's his theory of the Sequence of Hexagrams, starting from the premise that hexagrams are diagrams of weaving patterns, and the logic of their sequence derives from the logic of weaving.

Then there's the novel, which is about a young weaver coming to understand this tradition. (Yes, there is a novel about a theory of the Sequence of Hexagrams! How brilliant is that?)

90% of its plot is simply the protagonist's progress in constructing the Sequence, using her 'sampler', a set of knotted threads representing the weaving patterns. As she comes to understand the rules, she works out which knot patterns belong in which positions. (Though many of her discoveries are made when fellow-weavers just show or tell her where patterns go. The Sequence has many hidden patterns - and Schulz's work reveals many I'd never seen before - but it can't actually be reduced to/ reconstructed from a set of rules.)

And there's an audiobook version of the novel, performed by the author. This was my first encounter with his work, so maybe I'll begin with that…

As an audiobook

You might be worried at the prospect of an author reading their own self-published work - something that rarely goes well. You needn't be: this is really good. It's well-read, well-recorded, even well sung (yes, there are songs): a delight.

The only difficulty with the audio version is that the whole plot is about deciphering a mystery of visual patterns. The text is full of strings like 'XXOXXX', and I was left flailing about trying to remember whether X was meant to represent yang or yin (it's yang) and visualise hexagrams as I went along.

Likewise, there are many technical descriptions of weaving, which are fascinating - and the kind of thing I can only follow very slowly while staring at diagrams. So as an audiobook, this is a serious challenge to your powers of visualisation. It might be better not to listen to this one when driving if you want to avoid Pattern 29.

(Pattern 29 does not mean hexagram 29. The only numbers you'll find in the book refer to the numbers of weaving patterns, not hexagrams. Each inverse pair of hexagrams (3/4, 5/6) is a unique pattern of lines; the second hexagram of the pair is found by inverting the first. Hexagram 1 is pattern 1, Hexagram 2 is pattern 2, Hexagrams 3 and 4 are pattern 3, and so on. Since I've only memorised hexagram numbers over the years, not pattern numbers, I was still flailing.)

All of which is to say that by all means you should buy the audiobook, but definitely get the Kindle version too, so you can have the Xs and Os in front of you, and perhaps a Sequence diagram close by. I listened through, thought I must be missing a great deal, and bought the Kindle version - and sure enough, I had been.

Here's an excerpt. Our protagonist is trying to reconstruct the sequence on her 'sampler': the 36 hexagram patterns recorded as knotted strings, arranged in two rows strung between bamboo rods. Some groups of patterns are identified by using threads of the same colour…

"Could the blue mean that 3 and 4 had something to do with 36? Are they actually tabbies? Blue plain weave is what the working people wear. I feel those two. Both have little den on top XOX; 3 has little weft twill XOO on the bottom. If the third place of 3 were an X instead of an O, the Pattern would be the same as 36. 4 has little satin XXX on the bottom. If its middle knot were an O, it would be Pattern 36 too. So both of them are only one warp or weft different from Pattern 36."

There follows something about a 'double weave with a tabby ground' that goes soaring over my head.

Note - this is from some way on in the book; he does take a while to build up to this kind of thing! But to explain: pattern 3 = hexagrams 3 and 4; pattern 4 = hexagrams 5 and 6; pattern 36 = 63/64. 3.3 changes to 63, and so too does 5.2: each is just one line change away.

(We have already been told that the protagonist thinks of Hexagram 29 as 'den': the holes where animals hide, as opposed to the net of Hexagram 30 that catches them. So 'little den' means upper trigram kan. At this point - unless I'm completely misunderstanding everything, which is quite possible - I think he's got his Xs and Os reversed.)

As a novel

The Weaving Maiden's Mystery isn't a dramatic, plot- or character-driven book. It's gentle, exploratory and above all deeply atmospheric, bringing the setting in Warring States China vividly to life.

Don't let the above excerpt give you the wrong idea! While there are plenty of tabbies and twills, heddles and treadles, Xs and Os, there's also trade, dance, song, martial arts and kite-flying, and a dash of court intrigue. There are casual references to cowries as money, or the significance of a dress having especially fine sleeves. All this cultural scene-setting is fascinating and beautifully done.

In addition to this deep immersion in the time, there are also bonuses for Yijing people: allusions scattered through the book just for us. The very opening, for instance, is going to sound familiar if you've read the Dazhuan. The way the expert weaver handling cords on the 'flower tower' above the loom stores spare cords between her fingers might remind you of something. And so on.

All this makes it seem quite odd, at least to me, that divination itself is handled rather awkwardly. The weavers divine with knotted threads, which means they have to pick two hexagram-patterns independently, instead of revealing one with change built in. (A method that really isn't workable in practice, as it leaves you just as likely to get 6 lines changing as 1.) And their attitude to divination is a strangely modern one of suspicion and fear - that it's a powerful thing, best avoided in case it says something bad, as if the whole purpose of divination were to tell fortunes.

Yet at the same time, the understanding of what a hexagram pattern is - how it's simply 'there' as part of the cosmos, and how the patterns 'help us think about things, and then we can make the things we think about' - is lovely.

The theory

Explaining a theory of the Sequence in a novel is a really extraordinary idea, but it works startlingly well. There's a strong physical sense of the patterns and processes involved - for instance, it's only when the teacher hangs upside-down, bat-fashion, to inspect the loom, that our heroine gets the idea of inverse hexagrams. The weaving lore gives you a valuable new way to see hexagrams.

Having said that, if you're mostly interested in the Yeeky side of things, I would suggest starting with Schulz's academia.edu page before taking time for the novel. There, you'll find its pre-publication afterword, with illustrations, and also a very clearly written, fascinating paper from 2011, which presents most of the same Sequence patterns but without the weaving element, which makes it all much easier to follow. It's eye-opening stuff: there's more pattern and regularly to the Sequence than I'd realised. (I won't even attempt to describe his insights here - I couldn't do them justice.)

In both papers and novel, I especially appreciate his approach to exceptions. Almost all the Sequence's rules have exceptions. As a weaver says in the novel,

"Once you see the rule, there's no need to show it every time. You know it's there. We learn a lot from the exceptions.'"

This makes such a refreshing change from those who notice rules and exceptions and conclude the Yijing must be wrong and need tidying up in light of their superior insight. Schulz assumes there are reasons for the exceptions, and goes looking for them. Indeed, he seems to have the sense that the Sequence packs in as much significance as possible, observing as many ordering principles or describing as many relationships as possible. So whenever it isn't reducible to rules, this is our cue to learn something.

I've learned from Scott Davis to look to the words of the text for this. The words don't have much of a place in the novel, though - perhaps understandably, as that really would be a lot for it to carry.

Making it all about weaving patterns means the words of the text can be somewhat optional. He still brings them in as somehow mysteriously associated with the lines/knots, a few times: some words arrive by telepathic transmission or intuitive flash; others show up in stories and songs that are associated with different patterns for reasons no-one knows. A few are said to have a weaving theme, even to describe a configuration of the loom. But he need not look at connections between text and structure in any sustained way, because of course weaving patterns are not about words.

Still… that doesn't mean we can't, taking his insights as inspiration…

You can find the Weaving Maiden's Mystery here. Enjoy!