The Yi talks in images: hexagram shapes, trigram pictures, sometimes the original forms of the Chinese words themselves, and – most clearly – in its vignettes and stories. When you’re just getting started with readings, those are the images you can’t miss.
You might ask…
‘How to start a conversation to help this decision along?’
And Yi might answer with,
‘Coming slowly, slowly,
Confined in a bronze chariot.
Shame.
There is completion.’
(Hexagram 47, line 4)
or,
‘Your wheels dragged back.
Constancy, good fortune.’
(Hexagram 64, line 2)
Of course you would read the whole hexagram and the relating hexagram to set this in context, not just your moving line! But this post is just about how you’d engage with the imagery, so I’ll zoom in.
What’s the first thing to do with an answer like this?
Not ‘look up the commentary to tell you what it means.’
Also not ‘ask AI to tell you what it means.’ I think this can be extra-tempting because while it’s hard for the wording of a pre-written commentary to fit all possible questions, if you feed your situation and question into the AI it will spit out a wholly personalised answer. And it will probably do a reasonable job of interpreting the image and turning it into advice about your conversation – AI can be surprisingly good with metaphor.
So why not just go straight to the end result, save a lot of time and effort, and find out what your reading means?
Well – by analogy – if I wanted to transform my cardiovascular fitness, I could train for a marathon. (There is exactly zero chance of this ever happening, but just for the sake of the comparison…) But why not just go straight to the end result, save a lot of time and effort, and buy a marathon completion medal on eBay?
That’s not a wonderful analogy (connecting with imagery is actually fun), but hopefully you see what I mean: it would be pointless to get the appearance of the end result without having undergone the transformation. And with Yi, inside the imagery is where the transformation happens.
A good first step is to shelve the whole issue of what the image means, how to make sense of it, and what it’s telling you about your question. Instead, you set out to get a feel for it.
Possibly my favourite way to do this is to ask tremendously simple questions about the image itself.
‘Coming slowly, slowly,
Confined in a bronze chariot.
Shame.
There is completion.’
What’s it like to be confined in a bronze chariot?
Stuffy, I think, and cramped. I can’t feel the ground under my feet, I can’t stop to take in my surroundings, or speed up and feel my muscles working.
What’s a chariot? What’s it for?
It’s a vehicle. It’s to get me to my destination – not necessarily more quickly than walking, but more smoothly and with less effort. I just climb in, get driven there, and climb out again.
What would change about it if you covered it in bronze?
It would be splendidly shiny, polished to a fine gleam, not just an ordinary chariot for everyday journeys. And it would be much heavier, lumbering along slowly, hard for the poor horses to get it moving. It’s not going to be nimble; you wouldn’t want to use this one on the battlefield.
(This is one place where commentary might come in useful: this isn’t a chariot of solid bronze, it’s decorated with bronze – ‘the conveyance of the aristocrat’ according to Stephen Field.)
You’ll notice I’m not asking any questions about the conversation I might or might not start, or the decision that needs making. All I’m doing is digging more deeply into the image itself.
Also, you might be noticing that my answers aren’t the ones you would give. Two people asking themselves about the same image will come up with different answers, and this is OK – in fact, it’s the whole point. Your bronzed chariot might feel luxurious; mine seems to be a bit of a bone-rattler. Mine feels passive; you might be driving. That inner experience each of us has is the reading happening.
And at some point, as you imagine yourself into the image, you will probably have something of an ‘aha!’ moment.
Even then, this is not your cue to do a ‘find and replace’ operation on your reading, inserting ‘take it slow’ in place of the bronze chariot, or the one applying the brakes in 64.2.
I included those two lines because they might both be interpreted as ‘take it slow’, but they feel completely different. There’s the effort of getting the heavy vehicle moving – and there’s applying the drag so your wheels don’t spin out of control down the bank into the river. If you keep the sound and motion of the chariot, or the smell of the river mud, present to your imagination, then you can take that whole subtle inner experience with you into the conversation. The trouble with taking away only the advice to ‘go slow’ is that you can understand ‘go slow’ completely: it makes sense. A vehicle careening down the bank towards the river does more than make sense.
More on this here – and in the ‘Connecting with Imagery’ workshop, which walks you through more examples and more ways of connecting.