I’ve been looking lately at something so simple I almost missed it: how the ideas in the Yijing’s texts develop, from one phrase to the next. It’s easy to look at something like, ‘Dispersing, creating success.With the king’s presence, there is a temple.Fruitful to cross the great river,Constancy bears fruit.’… Read more »One step at a time
When qian, heaven, is the inner trigram, it might be realised through… Then what? The remaining two hexagrams with qian inside are 34, Great Vigour – heaven inside thunder – and 43, Deciding – heaven inside the lake. Creative force expressed through swift initiative? and through joyful interaction? Hexagram 34,… Read more »Heaven inside (part 3)
Question: ‘What do I need to focus on now so that I can be living my best life in my third age?’ Answer: Hexagram 23, Stripping Away, changing at lines 1,2,3,4 and 6 to 34, Great Vigour. changing to With her very first question to the Yi, Parmjit asked for… Read more »First reading
(Just one reading, sorry, not a universal formula.) Paloma asked what to do about her worrying pension-less state, and cast Hexagram 5, Waiting, changing at lines 4 and 5 to 34, Great Vigour – changing to So we talked about patience, and self-care, and standing firm, and also not standing… Read more »Panic-free finances
Question: “What advice can be offered for more effectively providing meditative peace and healing through playing Shakuhachi flute music?” Answer: Great Vigour in Flow. changing to A Yeeky thing I mentioned during this reading: the idea of a dabagua, or ‘big trigram’ hexagram. If you take the trigram dui, lake…… Read more »Creating peace through music
‘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
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of a ‘culture hero’: A culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. Chinese mythology seems to be especially full of these: people who are recognised as heroic because they invented millet farming,… Read more »Hexagrams as culture heroes
