A shared experience
This post is prompted by a conversation I had recently with someone who’s relatively new to the Yi . His first reading really grabbed his attention: it spoke to him directly in a way he hadn’t been expecting at all. Engaged and motivated, he set out to learn more, and soaked up knowledge at a rate of knots.
And then he realised how much there was to learn: the cultural roots of the Yi (yes, he knows what a tiger is, but what might it have represented to a Chinese diviner 3,000 years ago?); the historical and mythical allusions behind the imagery; the ancient Chinese language itself, with all its implications and connections that are inevitably lost in translation…
It might take a lifetime to wrap his head around all this – but how could he do a proper reading without taking it all into account? Wouldn’t he just be deluding himself that he had understood the answer, when really he had only imposed his own modern ideas on ancient imagery?
He isn’t – I hope – giving up on the Yi altogether, but now his relationship with it has to get through this layer of doubt, calcifying his intuitive response like hard water residue in the plumbing.
Everyone’s experience with Yi is individual, of course, but a trajectory something like this one is not that uncommon:
- you immediately recognise what your first reading is saying and have that vivid sense of being spoken to, so…
- you set out to learn more, so…
- you find out how much you don’t know, realise you can never learn it all, and, in one way or another, lose confidence.
And, of course, you’re quite right: you can’t learn it all. So what can we do?
Benefits of background knowledge
To start with the obvious: we can learn more, and this can make our readings clearer and better.
Having no knowledge of the Yi’s cultural roots can lead to nonsense. I’ve read a commentary that described hexagram 1’s dragons as bad, something like the Western dragon that is much in need of a good slaying by the nearest brave knight.
We can confuse ourselves with less spectacular misunderstandings, too – by thinking of horses as something to be ridden, for instance, with everything that image implies. (Horses were draught animals when the Zhouyi was written – riding came later.) Or if we think of marriage only romantically, not realising its political and strategic complexities, it will be very hard to understand its full scope as an image.
And where would we even start with a sacred tortoise, of all things?
Having no knowledge of the language can be a problem, too, in that it’s very easy to be misled by translations (let alone by commentaries…). We can easily latch onto a word or turn of phrase and make it central to our understanding, when in fact it’s only an artefact of translation. Two small examples –
Nouns in the original are not singular or plural. If your translation is advising you to ‘see great people’, you don’t need to worry if you can’t find more than one!
Also, it’s rare for the original to say ‘you’ or ‘your’. More often than not, if a translation (again, let alone a commentary) says ‘you’, this is just because that’s the most common application. On occasion, it could still be about someone else.
And one bigger thing: the names of hexagrams are necessarily translated by English words that don’t share all the implications of the Chinese. Hexagram 11 might be well‑named Peace, but that absolutely does not mean stillness or quiet. If you imagine it does, you’re going to be very surprised when small goes and great comes.
Whatever bits of knowledge we pick up along the way will help with this kind of thing. We can use Bradford Hatcher’s Book II, or the Eranos edition, to get a look at what is and isn’t in the text, and we can read up on the background.
A single scrap of knowledge can make a startling difference: for instance, learning that the name of Hexagram 55 is also the name of a citadel, the one where Wu took on the kingship after his father’s death. As for the sacred tortoise, Wilhelm/Baynes tells us something about it, and Wikipedia adds colour – though simply knowing about divination with turtle plastrons might be enough.
And without study?
And if you don’t have the time or inclination to start researching and trawling for extra background knowledge? What kind of readings can you hope to do then?
Answer – good ones.
You may never get very good at understanding the ancient text, something that does indeed require extensive academic study. But doing readings is not about deciphering ancient meanings: it’s about understanding what the oracle means now, today, in its conversation with you.
Also – it always has been. A thousand years ago today, someone cast a reading, and Yi made itself understood by connecting with their own unique inner landscape of imagery and knowledge. Two thousand years ago today, it did the same. Why would it be doing anything different today, or another thousand years from now?
In this respect, Yijing imagery is a little like dream imagery. If tigers, or horses, or elephants, have a particular personal significance to you, then that will be something you can recognise as part of your reading. What they might have meant to an ancient Chinese reader is worth knowing, can add depth and colour to your understanding, but it’s a great deal less important.
I imagine you’ve had the experience yourself of having the oracle speak to you – probably from the very beginning, no specialised study required. I have countless experiences of doing readings for people who were relatively or even completely new to Yi, who explained the imagery to me. It was their reading, and so it joined in direct, intimate conversation with their own inner world and language and dream life. What they knew about its meaning was not something I could have learned by reading another book.
Counterproductive learning
I’ll go a step further: learning more might not help at all.
If you cast Hexagram 10, I think your most valuable source of understanding is your own visceral sense of what it would mean to be close to a big, stripey thing with large teeth that might eat you. If you cast Hexagram 51, your most valuable source of understanding might well be how you felt the last time you were outside in a thunderstorm.
Would it help to read a paper or two about the ancient Chinese understanding of tigers or thunder? There’s certainly plenty there that might surprise you, plenty of good imagination food. But if your studies leave you relaxed and satisfied in your armchair, references all nicely collated, with the hair on the back of your neck lying peacefully in its place and not, for example, standing on end, then I don’t think this has helped you to understand your reading.
I also can’t help noticing that the best interpreters are not necessarily the best scholars, and vice versa. Researching and learning is one skill; engaging openly with a reading is something else.
Conclusions?
Only the simple and obvious, really.
Don’t forget you can outsource a whole lot of scholarship by using a decent translation, one that will explain at least some of the imagery and tell at least some of the stories. (Just don’t let it tell you what your hexagram is definitely ‘about’.)
Beyond that, yes, learn more! Follow where your curiosity leads, dive down all the rabbit holes, feed your imagination. This can always deepen and enrich your experience of divination – maybe especially when you do it between readings. You’re never going to solve every mystery or understand everything the original authors had in mind – no-one is – but you don’t need to, because you are talking with the oracle now, not 3,000 years ago. Never imagine that you don’t know enough to understand your reading.