If you try for an ‘eagle’s-eye view’ of the Yijing, you get to admire its architecture: the intricate connections between hexagrams, the Sequence, two-line changes and so on. What if you zoom in, instead, for a mouse’s eye-view? Here’s an example of that. I’ve translated Hexagram 4’s Oracle like this:… Read more »Hexagram 4, ‘polluting the waters’
Here’s an interesting experiment you can play with: a reading without an oracle. That means setting out to receive guidance from the world without using anything intended for divination: no cards, runes, coins, stalks, charts or anything of the kind. Instead, you might listen to the first few words you… Read more »Reading without an oracle
A Change Circle member asked for examples and impressions of Hexagram 56, Travelling, as relating hexagram. After I’d trawled through my journal for examples for her, I thought I’d like to keep digging, so here’s the result… I’d expect the relating hexagram to describe subjective more than objective reality, and… Read more »Travelling as relating hexagram
Hexagram 63, Ji ji, Already Crossing, is followed by Wei ji, Not Yet Crossing. Wei 未, ‘not yet’, is the opposite of ji 既, ‘already’. It occurs three times in the Yi in addition to its appearance in Hexagram 64: in the Oracle of Hexagram 48, and in 49.5 and… Read more »Not yet
It can be interesting to look at how the names of the hexagrams are used in the text of the Yijing – I mean, besides in the eponymous hexagram. This happens quite a bit, and while sometimes it’s obviously just normal usage of a common word (like you 有, ‘having’… Read more »Already
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
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)
