On not knowing the first thing about the Yi Back in 2015, I titled a post, ‘I don’t know the first thing about the Yi‘. By this I meant not knowing how it came to be – how people first knew that a certain pattern of lines belonged with certain… Read more »Hexagrams as pictures
‘Not yet across, creating success.The small fox, almost across,Soaks its tail:No direction bears fruit.’ There are ten places where the Yi says that ‘no direction bears fruit’, or (in the Wilhelm/Baynes version) ‘nothing furthers’: 4.3, 19.3, 25.6, 27.3, 32.1, 34.6, 45.3, 54.0, 54.6, and finally 64.0. It’s easy to see… Read more »No direction bears fruit
In this episode, Raka shares two readings: ‘What if I go back to university for postgraduate studies?’ Yi answers with Hexagram 22, Beauty, changing at line 2 to 26, Great Taming: changing to and ‘What if I just leave this whole university thing?‘ …which gave her Hexagram 20, Seeing, changing… Read more »Podcast #18: dream and decision
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 is an embarrassingly ‘first world problems’ kind of reading, but happily Yi doesn’t judge – and it was tremendously helpful at the time, so I thought it would be a good one to share. The background How were things for you in March 2020? Round here, they were just… Read more »Dispersing Nourishment
Two more hexagrams with mountains on top, two more intriguing trigram pictures… Hexagram 26, Great Taming Hexagram 26 is ‘Great Taming’; ‘taming’, chu, originally means simply to rear domestic animals. Great Taming – rearing big animals, like the horse, bullock and boar in the moving line texts. By extension, it… Read more »Mountain above: hexagrams 26 and 27
As I prepare for the Yijing Foundations Class, I’m realising there are really just two essential elements for dependable readings: being able to connect with imagery, and knowing your way round the structure of a reading. This post’s about structure. At its very simplest, a reading’s structure is just the… Read more »Reading structure, and why it matters
