I dropped into Oxford today on the way home from a friend’s, and found my way into Blackwell’s – the university bookshop. And down to the Chinese history section, where I came across an intimidating-looking tome called To become a god: cosmology, sacrifice and self-divinisation in Early China. With about 7 minutes to closing time, I took it over to the desk to find out what it cost.
£17.
Hmmm. On the one hand, the chapter headings are fascinating: ‘Transforming the spirits: sacrifice in the Shang’; ‘A moral cosmos: Zhou sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven’; ‘Spirits within humans: the issue of shamanism in early China and early Greece.’ On the other hand, these are 300 very dense and scholarly pages, and what are my chances of getting through them without getting lost?
5 minutes to go to closing time. What I need at this point is someone to tell me what I could get from buying this. (It’s not so much the money as that we have books stacked on the floor here for lack of wall-space…) So I asked the kind man at the desk,
“Have you heard of the I Ching?”
“No, sorry…”
“That’s good. Could you give me a number between 1 and 64?”
“21, my lucky number”
“Ah. Better buy the book, then.’ And as I was heading off to find a till (though still wondering if I could maybe re-interpret and just watch TV instead), “Just to make sure, could you give me a number between 1 and 6?”
“4”
Hexagram 21, line 4:
‘Biting through dried meat bones,
Gaining a metal arrow.
Harvest from constancy in difficulties.
Good fortune.’
So the book is something to gnaw and bite my way through, with the promise of Nourishment (relating hexagram 27). Dry (!), hard work, but with stuff of solid value there that I can use to ‘catch’ more living ideas in future. Have I bitten off more than I can chew? I had that distinct sensation of Yi pulling my leg.
You no doubt guessed I bought the book. And the kind oracle-dispensing man at the desk didn’t bat an eyelid – though since this is Oxford’s academic bookshop we’re talking about, I was probably the least eccentric person he met all day.