In my last post, I talked about how the Daxiang paints pictures of individual hexagrams, as a whole. In this one, I’d like to try a change of perspective, zooming in and zooming out, to see what comes into focus. Commentary on the lines The Image builds on and humanises… Read more »The genius of the Daxiang (part 2)
This post is for Liz, who commented, “Hi Hilary,Ok. Point blank – what does crossing the great river mean?” How does it feel? This is a better question to ask, because divination does not work by replacing images with what they mean. First, you use your imagination to get inside… Read more »What does ‘crossing the great river’ mean?
Ni, 泥 , simply means ‘mud’ – soil, putty, to daub with plaster. It’s the clay that was baked into bricks and tiles. I normally look for how a word is used in the Book of Songs, or the Book of Rites, but ni doesn’t appear anywhere in either of… Read more »Nothing quite like it
What are we Waiting for? Wilhelm says Hexagram 5 is about waiting for it to rain. SJ Marshall says it meant waiting for rain to stop. So too does Stephen Field: the hexagram name means ‘to stop for the rain’, but originally would probably have had the ‘water’ radical added… Read more »Hexagram 5, and rain-making (a rethink)
A thoroughly useful guiding principle for both diviners and translators: this means something. For diviners with/ translators of the Yijing, the principle needs elaborating: this means something, whether or not I have the faintest glimmerings of a clue what it means. That should really be inscribed in every Yijing book and… Read more »This means something
I’ve written very excited posts before about the pattern of complementary hexagrams in the Sequence of the Yijing. Quick recap: to find a hexagram’s complement, you change all 6 of its lines. Thus the complement of hexagram 1 is hexagram 2 – and the complement of Hexagram 3, Sprouting… Read more »Casting the vessel… of state?
I asked Yi, ‘Why do we dream?’ I had a few reasons for asking: huge curiosity about the answer, of course, and wondering what Yi might say out of all the possible answers I could think of. (‘Processing’ stuff from the day? Receiving messages? Random noise? Ongoing inner work?) Also… Read more »Dreams: rain dance of the soul?
