Comments on whole hexagrams, individual lines and so on
There’s a lot going on in the first line of Hexagram 53: ‘Wild geese gradually advance to the shore. The small child, danger, There are words, No mistake.’ This is the first stage in the journey of the wild geese as they gradually draw close to their natural home. Now… Read more »The wild geese at the shore
Watching TV gives you square eyes, so I’ve been told. Living with Yi gives you that much stranger phenomenon, hexagram eyes. You see little subtle reflections of ideas from the Yijing everywhere. My reading for this year begins with Hexagram 5, so I’m especially attuned to anything that talks about… Read more »Still reading with hexagram eyes
Over in the quaintly-named ‘Basics’ section of GreatVessel.com, there’s an enticing article on The Voices of the Lines. [Update: now moved here.] As with most of Stephen Karcher’s ideas nowadays, I find I need to take small portions and chew them over well, not try to swallow it all at… Read more »Line 1 as inklings
The fifth line of Hexagram 45, Gathering, reads: ‘Gathering, has a position. No mistake. No truth at all. From the source, ever-flowing constancy. Regrets vanish.’ How can your position in the gathering be ‘no mistake’ if it’s altogether without truth or trust? I picked up Anyway by Kent Keith, author… Read more »Positional friends in Hexagram 45
The Wing of the I Ching describing the Sequence of Hexagrams, the Xugua, generally has a laconic style, sometimes saying scarcely more than, ‘this hexagram is bound to follow from that one.’ But there’s an exception to this when you arrive at Hexagram 31, Influence. This is the first hexagram… Read more »Holism, Hexagram 31 and marriage
In The Geography of Thought – a fascinating book about the differences between modern Eastern and Western ways of thought – I learned that, “The combative, rhetorical form is … absent from Asian law. In Asia the law does not consist, as it does in the West for the most… Read more »Hexagram 6 and the Geography of Thought
Michael Graeme has generously provided his own in-depth, line-by-line notes on the I Ching as a free download, here. I’ve only just started looking through this myself, but it’s clearly thoughtful, intelligent work, worth studying. Thank you, Michael!
