On his TarotTools site, Mark McElroy keeps coming up with creative suggestions for tarot ‘exercises’ – which, with the minimum of adaptation, could just as well become questions for mind-stretching I Ching readings. A recent article of his, Make Better Choices, suggests questions such as, ‘What core value might I… Read more »Good ideas from tarot
Found at Luminous Heart: “Being without doubt has nothing to do with accepting the validity of a philosophy or concept. Absence of doubt comes from trusting in the heart, trusting yourself. Being without doubt means that you connect with yourself, that you experience mind and body being synchronized together. When… Read more »No Doubt
Someone asked me in an email about what special qualities you need to read the Yijing, and about how intuitive I am. Eeek. 😯 When I first started out with Yi, I would have had a short and simple answer to that second question: not in the least intuitive. The… Read more »What gifts do you need to read the Yijing?
The biggest story arc of the Yijing is the Conquest story: how the Zhou people inherited the mandate of heaven and overthrew the Shang dynasty. It’s a great narrative of Change: the decay of the Shang; the preparations of the good Zhou ruler Wen, making his people worthy of the… Read more »Fathers and sons II: carting corpses
Horses in ancient China http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~baojie/history/chinese/2002-12-02_horse.en.htm A nice, long article on the role of horses, basically in the military, from pre-Shang to post-Zhou times. Why would we be interested? It casts new light on why horses are so important in the Yi: why Prince Kang would be especially honoured by a… Read more »Horses in ancient China
I imagine anyone who’s consulted with Yi must have had the experience. Ask question; receive answer; say ‘Huh??’
And this is where it’s easy to go wrong – where the desire that caused us to ask in the first place won’t accept this lack of clarity, and we find a reason to ask another question, quick. (I touched on this in my post on ‘How long does a reading last?‘ – in response to which Steve Marshall pointed out that answers to big questions can last ten years and more.)
I first met Margaret Pearson at a talk she was giving in Clare Hall, Cambridge, about the Yijing and her upcoming translation. She handed out excerpts from her first drafts, including Hexagram 11, and I started reading with great interest. Simple, fluent translation… a couple of ‘why did I never realise that?’ moments… A gently lucid commentary that I can see myself quoting in readings in future.
Then I looked at the Image – and there, instead of the usual ‘ruler’ or ‘prince’, was the queen, ‘guid[ing] the natural forces of both sky and earth’. Oh dear, I thought. She’s just arbitrarily converting the male to the female, I thought. After all, this character means a male ruler, right?
Um. It ain’t necessarily so.
