Simple Two lines in Hexagram 7, the Army, talk about carting corpses: line 3: ‘Perhaps the army carts corpses.Pitfall.’ and line 5: ‘The fields have gameFruitful to speak of capture:No mistake.When the elder son leads the army,And younger son carts corpses:Constancy, pitfall.’ The core meaning is surely intuitively obvious: an… Read more »What’s wrong with carting corpses, anyway?
Line 3 of Hexagram 37, People in the Home, is full of noise and emotion: ‘People in the home scold and scold, Regrets, danger: good fortune. Wife and child giggle and giggle. In the end, shame.’ What’s the story behind this? Traditional interpretation… Read any traditional translation – Wilhelm/Baynes, Lynn,… Read more »The noises of Hexagram 37, line 3
I’ve treated myself to another new Yi book – Geoffrey Redmond’s I Ching (Book of Changes) – a critical translation of the ancient text – and it got me thinking about the different aspects of the book that are visible to different people. The good… To start, though, a sort-of… Read more »Geoffrey Redmond, and what we can see
I’ve been thinking about Hexagram 35 – and especially how it shows up as a relating hexagram. Introducing Hexagram 35 The name of this hexagram is ‘Advancing’, or ‘Progress’ or ‘Flourishing’. The oldest form of the character seems to show arrows in their sheath: Those arrows – along the text… Read more »Making the most of it
Looking simply at the shape of hexagram 33 with a naïve, imaginative eye… …we might see the entrance to a cave. And if you look at the picture painted by the trigrams, heaven above the mountain, then it conjures up the idea of a hermit who Retreats to the mountain-top.… Read more »Hexagram 33, Retreat
I’ve been mulling over this line – part of a recent open reading of mine – for a while. ‘Seeing the realm shining out. Fruitful and useful to be a guest of the king.’ Changing this line takes you to Hexagram 12, Blocked – a situation where no messages get… Read more »Contemplating 20 line 4
Integrating trigram imagery into a full reading is sometimes tricky: we don’t, after all, know what the trigrams represented to the people who first wrote the book. So attempting to justify text in terms of trigrams can get one tied up in all sorts of over-elaborate knots. However… those original… Read more »Drums in the lake
