...life can be translucent
Menu

Yearly Archives: 2019

The Yi barbarians

The Yi barbarians

Hexagram 36 is called Ming Yi 明夷, Brightness Hiding or Brightness Wounded. The double meaning of ‘Yi’ here (a completely different word to the name of the book) allows the hexagram name to contain a whole story: when wounded, you hide; once bitten, twice shy.

It also means something ordinary, smooth, level, and barbarian tribes – the ones who might wound you, as you can imagine from the ancient character, which shows a great man with (merging with?) a bow:

Yi, 夷

The ‘Yi’ character appears twice more in the book, in 55.4 and 59.4. It turns out that these three occurrences are connected both thematically and structurally.

In both 55.4 and 59.4, ‘Yi’ refers to specific people – the Yi barbarians:

‘Feng is screened off
At midday, seeing the Dipper.
Meeting your Yi lord,
Good fortune.’

Hexagram 55 line 4

‘Dispersing your flock,
From the source, good fortune.
Dispersing gains the hilltop,
No barbarian [Yi] has occasion to think of this.’

Hexagram 59, line 4

55.4 changes to 36: this is the Brightness Hiding moment of Abundance, at the garrison of Feng. Here, the light can be fully hidden, fear and threat may dominate, but you can still see the Dipper. (The nearest English equivalent might be ‘see your true North’.)

The line goes still further, with the extraordinary implication that you might make an ally of the Yi lord, despite all he represents: fear, wounding, oppression, the darkening of the light. It’s a real challenge to find how such a meeting can be ‘good fortune’, one I grappled with before.

Hexagram 59, Dispersing, is the opposite of 55 – different at every line:

Hence 59.4 is the opposite of 55.4 – though another, maybe more interesting way of putting this is to say that changing every line of 59 except this one leads 59 back to 36:

changes to

In other words, 59.4 is exactly how not to reach 36. This line’s about the perfect antithesis of barbarity: something, it says, that the barbarians couldn’t even imagine.

What could this be?

The trigrams of Hexagram 59 show wind above water, stirring and evaporating it. So line 4 would be the moment when the water has just become water vapour and begun to rise into the wind. It’s undergone a change of state, and a change of direction.

Disperse your flock, says the line, and gain the hilltop. Remember the atmosphere of Hexagram 36: you’re under threat, you could be hurt (again); you hide. If the barbarians are invading, wouldn’t it make sense to round up your flocks into a defensible enclosure and do your best to hide them?

Perhaps – but it probably makes perfect sense to the barbarians, too. Whereas if your flock is dispersed, there’s nothing for them to attack – in fact, there’s no flock at all, just some scattered sheep. If you’re not gathering your possessions together and holding on, there’s no target: you’re not available to be oppressed. This is the line with no connection to Hexagram 36.

Another way to see the shift in thinking here: it’s recognising that what you treated as a noun is really just a verb. The classic example is a fist: ‘fist’ is a noun, an object, like ‘book’ or ‘brick’. Only… books and bricks don’t disappear, but relax your hand, and where has the fist gone?

Flocks could be the same, and so could any ‘possession’ or ‘position’: it exists for as long as someone holds it, and if no-one holds it, it’s not a possession or position any more. Ice melts, water evaporates, things change state and turn out to be ways of acting, and not at all the ‘things’ they’d become in your mental shorthand. Hexagram 59 in action.

Dispersing gains the hilltop: it rises. Yi-thinking – barbarian thinking, ‘levelled’ thinking – can’t conceive of that extra dimension.

New in the Resonance Journal: reading insights

New in the Resonance Journal: reading insights

The Yijing doesn’t just talk to you one reading at a time: it communicates a lot through the patterns and themes that recur through many readings. The Resonance Journal has always been brilliant for finding these patterns in your readings: they’re a click or two away, via the Cast History feature (the easy option, my… Continue Reading

Leave, go out and far away

Leave, go out and far away

‘Dispersing blood. Leave, go out and far away. Not a mistake.’ Hexagram 59, line 6 ‘Dispersing blood‘? What does that mean? Wilhelm says it means avoiding an existing danger, ‘dispersion of that which might lead to bloodshed’ for both oneself and others. Lynn, following Wang Bi, has the same idea: ‘This one disperses the threat… Continue Reading

Hexagram 64: Not Yet Across

Hexagram 64: Not Yet Across

Its name and nature At the very end of the Yijing comes the hexagram called Not Yet Across – the embodiment of incompletion and imperfection, an ellipsis in hexagram form. It’s a very large-scale, oracle-sized joke about our expectations of tidiness and order. The Chinese name has two characters: 未濟, wei meaning ‘not-yet’ and ji… Continue Reading

How do you cast your readings?

How do you cast your readings?

Does computerised casting work? From time to time, someone will ask me whether it’s acceptable to cast the I Ching – that venerable, 3,000-year-old oracle – by tapping a button on a screen. And quite a bit more often, I’ll hear from someone how they received an answer that spoke to them with complete clarity… Continue Reading

Hexagram 56 in trigrams

Hexagram 56 in trigrams
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Hexagram 56, Travelling

Fire on the mountain The trigrams of Hexagram 56 show inner mountain and outer fire. The picture, for me, suggests the nomads’ campfire. It has limited fuel and a limited duration, and the travellers will need to resolve any disputes before the ashes are cool, so they can move on unencumbered in the morning. A… Continue Reading

Hexagram 56, Travelling

Hexagram 56, Travelling
This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Hexagram 56, Travelling

Following your flag The name of Hexagram 56 is lu 旅, Travelling. The Chinese character (which also means a division of troops) originally shows people around the flag, and was normally written simply with two people under the flag, almost as if sheltering under a roof: An ancient Chinese settlement would be built around its banner,… Continue Reading

Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom

Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).