Sketchy, impressionistic ideas, these, butI think there’s something behind them…
Looking at the mythical and legendary figures that walk the pages of the Yijing, I can’t help noticing how many pairs of fathers and sons there are. And the overarching theme seems to be the responsibility of the sons to take over their fathers’ work and either complete what they began, or redeem their failures.
There was Gun, to begin with, who stole the self-renewing soil from Heaven in an attempt to conquer the floods. He failed, and he was executed, and his son Yu was born from his body. Yu took up the work, but with a radical change from his father’s strategy: as well as building dams, he surveyed the landscape, planned the rivers’ courses, dredged their channels and dug new ones. And also, he enlisted help. Finally he succeeded, and went on to found the first dynasty, the Xia.
That radical change of strategy, as well as Yu’s limping gait after many years’ unbroken toil, are reflected in Hexagram 39. The ‘Pace of Yu’ is referred to again in 43.4 and 44.3, and the foundational meeting where he ordered the new world is a major theme of Hexagram 8. (These three allusions first identified, as far as I know, by Stephen Karcher, SJ Marshall and Gao Heng respectively.)
And then there is Wang Hai – a Shang leader – who was killed by the people of Yi, and his sons who returned to take back their flocks. (See hexagrams 34 and 56.) And, of course, there is King Wen, the Pattern King, and his sons, including Wu, Kang (of Hexagram 35) and Dan, the Duke of Zhou.
I wonder if it’s important that there is one father-and-son story for each of China’s first three dynasties, Xia, Shang, and Zhou, each casting light on these issues of inheritance and change from a new angle. The mandate passes from father to son; the son has to take up the responsibility and continue the work. But perhaps he can find new ways? Perhaps he has no choice but to find new ways, if he’s to meet the demands of his own time.
This seems to be a recurrent theme in the Yijing – and sometimes it comes as a challenge to be reborn out of your own old failures, like Yu from Gun’s belly, and ‘turn yourself around to renew your de.’
Sources and further reading:
Steve Marshall, The Mandate of Heaven
Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: an introduction
Stephen Karcher: Total I Ching
Richard Rutt, Zhouyi
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.