The ancient character for jie, the name of Hexagram 40, shows hands with a knife removing a cow’s horn. Perhaps this has to do with a horn implement for prising knots apart – Chinese boys could carry a knot-horn at their belt when they became men – or perhaps simply with… Read more »Hexagram 40, Release
Where you find the noble one We mostly come across the junzi, the ‘noble one’, in the Image Wing of the Yi. But he also features in many oracles and lines of the original text. Here’s the whole list: 1.3, 2.0, 3.3, 9.6, 12.0, 13.0, 15.0, 15.1, 15.3, 20.1, 20.5,… Read more »The noble one’s story
Four years ago 😯 , I posted about my first encounters with shadow hexagrams. And last week I was reminded of them again when a friend asked me to look at his connected-hexagrams-generating script that included Ideal and Shadow, along with many more of the creations from Stephen Karcher’s divination-laboratory.… Read more »Shadow hexagrams revisited
Apologies if you had higher expectations from that portentous title, but this is just a quick note – the kind of meeting of patterns of ideas that I enjoy. Here’s an article from Bri Saussy about sin. Now I’ve learned that the original Greek, hamartia, means missing the mark, I… Read more »Hexagram 40 and forgiveness
These are something I can’t write – I can’t help seeing the world through ‘hexagram glasses’ – but I love coming across them: articles about other things that just happen to be really excellent hexagram commentaries. Havi Brooks has been writing some very nice inadvertent Yijing things lately, even to… Read more »Accidental Yijing commentaries
I came across this animation at Patricia Bralley’s excellent blog, where she has it under the title ‘Addiction, Ego, Pain’. Of course, we don’t know what the scarf is made of… but it seems to me that another good title might be, “How to tell when you really need Hexagram… Read more »Knitting?
Hexagram 40 is Release: untying knots, removing artificial restraints and compulsions, and restoring complete, natural freedom of movement. Its moving lines talk about different kinds of captivity and release: simple ‘mistake’ at the first line, the release of a firm grip at the fourth, release from a looming, ominous presence… Read more »Release from the foxes
