The first thing you’re going to notice about this episode is the change of music. The new recording is Kimiko Ishizaka’s performance of the 9th of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, from her wonderful Open Goldberg Variations project. I hope you enjoy it! Three readings of mine get a mention in this… Read more »Shock, bogs, and not knowing
What is qian? I always find this the hardest trigram to describe. Mountains are big and rocky and don’t move; plants grow and move in the wind. Water flows and reflects, fire illuminates and burns, thunder crashes, earth sustains. But what does heaven do? And what does it mean for… Read more »Heaven inside (part 1)
Eight hexagrams of the Yijing are formed from doubled trigrams (chong gua 重卦) – the same trigram above and below. These hexagrams give us the names of the trigrams. They also – as Bradford Hatcher explained – provide some of the best evidence that the original authors of the oldest… Read more »The eight doubled-trigram hexagrams
People quite often ask me about the Yijing’s vocabulary of periods of time. But as I worked my way through them – seven days, three days, ten years… – I found one that I haven’t been asked about: a whole day. Just like seven days, three days and ten years,… Read more »All day
I’ve been having another look at the mysterious fourth line of Hexagram 1, Creative Force: ‘Someone leaping in the abyss.No mistake.’ Hexagram 1, line 4 A story of dragons This line is generally understood to be part of the story that begins in line 1, with the dragon still asleep… Read more »Leaping in the abyss
Recently, I heard someone say that the phrase ‘no mistake’, wu jiu 无咎, occurs so often in the Yijing that he tends to ignore it in readings. Well… you know how I generally feel about ignoring bits of readings… so, naturally, I dived back in to see what more I… Read more »Not a mistake
‘See the great person’ (or ‘great people’) is one of the Yijing’s recurrent phrases: in Hexagram 1, lines 2 and 5, in the oracle texts of hexagrams 6, 39, 45, 46 and 57, and in 39, line 6. (There’s also just ‘great person’ – without the advice to see them… Read more »Seeing the Great Person (a story)
