Comments on whole hexagrams, individual lines and so on
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.
‘Obstructing it, non-people.
No harvest in noble one’s constancy.
Great goes, small comes.’
The ‘usual’ interpretation of the Judgement of Hexagram 12 is that there are bad people at work, dominating the environment, sabotaging the noble one’s good efforts. And sometimes, indeed, it can mean exactly that – in particular, that someone is promoting malicious rumours. But in my experience of hexagram 12, this isn’t always – or even usually – the case.
Some translations offer an alternative perspective. James Legge writes of ‘the want of good understanding between men’; Thomas Cleary, in his Taoist I Ching, has ‘denial of humanity’. The Obstruction isn’t necessarily caused by the presence of bad people, but by people denying one anothers’ humanity.
Harmen’s gone back to the first character of the Zhouyi and offers the theory that it originally depicted a banner. As always with Harmen, very interesting reading! The banner of ‘qian’ – Harmen’s Dagboek
Hexagram 36, Brightness Hiding or Brightness Injured, can certainly be a danger-signal in a reading: hide your light, risk of injury ahead. But it is also a postive strategy, as this Deng Ming-Dao quotation from Donna Woodka’s Changing Places blog shows. (One to subscribe to, I think.) It also shows… Read more »Hexagram 36 as a Daoist strategy
