The second chapter of David Pankenier’s lovely book, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China – Conforming Earth to Heaven – rejoices in the title, ‘Watching for dragons.’ In it he talks in detail about the dragon of Hexagram 1, and also proposes a whole new idea about why the dragons are fighting in 2.6.… Read more »Why dragons fight in hexagram 2
Hexagram 1 says yuan heng li zhen – from the source, creating success, constancy bears fruit. Hexagram 2 says yuan heng li pinma zhi zhen – from the source, creating success, a mare’s constancy bears fruit The remaining hexagrams can be seen as ‘children’ of these two – 62 ways of blending… Read more »Yuan heng li zhen
También disponible en español Hexagram 1 is so simple it’s tremendously hard to get to grips with. The simplicity starts with its shape – – six solid, ‘yang’ lines, pure and whole, light with no shade, no nuances, no spaces, no ‘picture’. The significance of those six solid lines is… Read more »The elusively simple Hexagram 1
Where you find the noble one We mostly come across the junzi, the ‘noble one’, in the Image Wing of the Yi. But he also features in many oracles and lines of the original text. Here’s the whole list: 1.3, 2.0, 3.3, 9.6, 12.0, 13.0, 15.0, 15.1, 15.3, 20.1, 20.5,… Read more »The noble one’s story
Something I’d like to do this year: learn more about how to work with dreams and Yi, together, as a single fabric of meaning. (Something that’ll be made much more practical by this journal software.) So I’m casting readings like this one and this one in an attempt to create a… Read more »What to do with dreams?
The lines of the first two hexagrams can be regarded as keys to understanding all the lines – all yang lines at the beginning being a little like the submerged dragon, all yin lines at the beginning being somehow akin to treading on hoarfrost. These lines are formative, models for… Read more »First instances
Oh dear, oh dear. Another one – someone explaining how the Yijing is not just an oracle, but ‘so much more than that’. I do wish people would not say this without pausing for a moment to contemplate what an oracle is. A variation on this ‘just an oracle’ idea… Read more »Just an oracle
