Introducing the Zagua The Yi became the Yijing, a Classic book, as it grew its Ten Wings: ten bodies of commentary and reflections on the oracle and its hexagrams. The Zagua, ‘Mixed hexagrams’, is the tenth and last of these: a short, simple, rhyming description of the hexagrams in pairs.… Read more »A patchwork of hexagrams
When you’re looking at a hexagram through the lens of its trigrams, I think it’s important to see how they work together, as a trigram picture rather than a dry list of attributes. However, it’s still interesting to single out a trigram and a position (inside or outside), to compare… Read more »Mountain above
From its first appearance in the first words of the Yi, the creative flow through the four characters yuan heng li zhen is tangible. Its power is felt in the other five hexagrams with the whole, uninterrupted formula. But the natural cohesion of the four-word formula can also be felt… Read more »Theme and variations
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
This morning I picked up a book at random, opened it at random, and found myself reading what Thomas Moore has to say about jealousy in Care of the Soul. He relates it to the myth of Hippolytus, a young man who was a devotee of the goddess Artemis, something… Read more »Reading with hexagram eyes again
Each hexagram of the Yijing contains a nuclear hexagram at its core. And since the nuclear hexagram unfolds from lines 2-5, it’s the first and last lines, the ‘entrance and exit’ or ‘roots and shoots’ of the hexagram, that vary – so that four hexagrams can be formed around each… Read more »The family of 54
A round-up of readings from the run-up to the election, with thanks to Google. The earliest pertinent reading I found was from 24th May: “What will an Obama presidency bring to the nation?” Now, there’s some ambiguity around this reading: for one thing, by July the original poster was saying… Read more »I Ching on Obama
