Comments on whole hexagrams, individual lines and so on
Horses in ancient China http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~baojie/history/chinese/2002-12-02_horse.en.htm A nice, long article on the role of horses, basically in the military, from pre-Shang to post-Zhou times. Why would we be interested? It casts new light on why horses are so important in the Yi: why Prince Kang would be especially honoured by a… Read more »Horses in ancient China
I first met Margaret Pearson at a talk she was giving in Clare Hall, Cambridge, about the Yijing and her upcoming translation. She handed out excerpts from her first drafts, including Hexagram 11, and I started reading with great interest. Simple, fluent translation… a couple of ‘why did I never realise that?’ moments… A gently lucid commentary that I can see myself quoting in readings in future.
Then I looked at the Image – and there, instead of the usual ‘ruler’ or ‘prince’, was the queen, ‘guid[ing] the natural forces of both sky and earth’. Oh dear, I thought. She’s just arbitrarily converting the male to the female, I thought. After all, this character means a male ruler, right?
Um. It ain’t necessarily so.
There’s a phrase in the Judgements of hexagrams 31 and 44, along with 4, line 2: ‘taking a woman’. Its usual interpretation is ‘taking to wife’, though it’s the same word used to mean ‘take by force’ or ‘capture an animal’. What are we to make of the phrase? And does it mean something different in readings for men and women? And what have translators and commentators made of it?
Last time I splashed out on books I bought not just the shiny new Ritsema/Sabbadini, but also Sarah Allan’s The Shape of the Turtle. And I am enjoying it no end. She writes about Shang myth, but there are many, many resonances in the Zhouyi. But finding one with the… Read more »More trigrams in the sequence (hexagrams 6, 7 and 8)
I first learned from Nina Correa of Your Dao De Jing that in the first lines of the Daodejing –
‘The dao that can be told of is not the constant dao,
The name that can be named is not the constant name’
– the word ‘constant’ in the Mawangdui version is heng – the name of Hexagram 32.
In the first place, seeing an great person means finding a role model or guide. Find someone who can advise, ideally someone who’s been there and done that. Or go to the person who has more influence, make an important connection with someone who can make a difference. Richard Rutt suggests that in Zhou times it could mean ‘taking counsel, preparing for battle, parleying with enemy leaders, or consulting high soothsayers.’
Sketchy, impressionistic ideas, these, butI think there’s something behind them…
Looking at the mythical and legendary figures that walk the pages of the Yijing, I can’t help noticing how many pairs of fathers and sons there are. And the overarching theme seems to be the responsibility of the sons to take over their fathers’ work and either complete what they began, or redeem their failures.
