Hexagram 12 – Blocked? ‘Blocking it, non-people. Noble one’s constancy bears no fruit. Great goes, small comes.’ Hexagram 12, the Oracle However clearly we understand that there are no ‘bad’ hexagrams, we’re probably not over the moon when we cast Hexagram 12. It’s at least nice to be able to… Read more »Another Yijing Easter egg*
Hexagram 36 is called Ming Yi 明夷, Brightness Hiding or Brightness Wounded. The double meaning of ‘Yi’ here (a completely different word to the name of the book) allows the hexagram name to contain a whole story: when wounded, you hide; once bitten, twice shy. It also means something ordinary,… Read more »The Yi barbarians
The Yijing doesn’t just talk to you one reading at a time: it communicates a lot through the patterns and themes that recur through many readings. The Resonance Journal has always been brilliant for finding these patterns in your readings: they’re a click or two away, via the Cast History… Read more »New in the Resonance Journal: reading insights
‘Dispersing blood. Leave, go out and far away. Not a mistake.’ Hexagram 59, line 6 ‘Dispersing blood‘? What does that mean? Wilhelm says it means avoiding an existing danger, ‘dispersion of that which might lead to bloodshed’ for both oneself and others. Lynn, following Wang Bi, has the same idea:… Read more »Leave, go out and far away
Its name and nature At the very end of the Yijing comes the hexagram called Not Yet Across – the embodiment of incompletion and imperfection, an ellipsis in hexagram form. It’s a very large-scale, oracle-sized joke about our expectations of tidiness and order. The Chinese name has two characters: 未濟,… Read more »Hexagram 64: Not Yet Across
Does computerised casting work? From time to time, someone will ask me whether it’s acceptable to cast the I Ching – that venerable, 3,000-year-old oracle – by tapping a button on a screen. And quite a bit more often, I’ll hear from someone how they received an answer that spoke… Read more »How do you cast your readings?
Fire on the mountain The trigrams of Hexagram 56 show inner mountain and outer fire. The picture, for me, suggests the nomads’ campfire. It has limited fuel and a limited duration, and the travellers will need to resolve any disputes before the ashes are cool, so they can move on… Read more »Hexagram 56 in trigrams
