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 the Oracle text, but it’s… Continue Reading
...life can be translucent
Tag Archives: 33
A patchwork of hexagrams
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. (Za 雜, ‘mixed’, implies a… Continue Reading
Advice for an author
Episode 10 of the I Ching with Clarity podcast features a listener’s reading. Lynn Keller’s book, Thanksgiving in America, is just coming out; she asked Yi what her focus should be now with the book, and received Hexagram 33, Retreating, changing at lines 3 and 4 to 20, Seeing. changing to In the course of… Continue Reading
Who is the ‘superior man’?
The person who emailed me this question found the expression ‘superior man’ quite off-putting. I can see why: arranging half of humanity into superiors and inferiors, inviting the reader to identify not just as a good person but as someone better than the rest… none of this feels sympathetic to me, either. And, I would argue,… Continue Reading
Multiple moving lines, revisited
It’s a common source of confusion and frustration with I Ching readings: ‘My answer has multiple moving lines, and they contradict one another. How am I supposed to make sense of this?’ Here’s an article to help you with that. Why ‘revisited’? Many years ago now, I wrote a rambling overview of ways people consider… Continue Reading
Hexagram 33, Retreat
Looking simply at the shape of hexagram 33 with a naïve, imaginative eye… …we might see the entrance to a cave. And if you look at the picture painted by the trigrams, heaven above the mountain, then it conjures up the idea of a hermit who Retreats to the mountain-top. Retreat from… All this is… Continue Reading
Hexagram 44, insect bites and nuclears
Here is a remarkable article from Alexa over at the Quotable I Ching, about Hexagram 44 and desire – and, yes, insect bites. Remarkable for how she captures the spirit of the hexagram – and without mentioning the ‘powerful woman’ even once. She says the ‘encounter’ of 44 is like the encounter with a biting… Continue Reading
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