Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
‘Creative Force is firm; the Earth is open.’
‘Seeking Union means delight; the Army means grieving.’
‘Shock begins. Stilling stops.’
‘Biting Through means eating; Beauty is without colour.’
‘Western writers have generally found it banal, if not embarrassing. Legge concluded that it was a mere jeu d’esprit. Joseph de Prémare, however, “the father of sinology”, writing in August 1731…, said the last Wing was “the most profound of all the commentaries included in the Yijing.”
If it is indeed profound, the depths are obscure…’
Richard Rutt, Zhouyi
‘Opposing means outside. People in the Home means inside.’
‘Clarity is above, the chasm is below.’
‘Following has no causes. Corruption, and then order.’
‘Great Vigour means stopping, Retreating means withdrawing.’
I looked him up in the wiki:This is the first I’ve heard of Joseph de Prémare, but I like him already!
Sounds like he was one of those Jesuit priests who believed that 15 expressed the core message of the True Faith, that Yi proved that the Chinese had an intuitive understanding of Christianity that could be brought to the surface. There was some big ongoing fight between two orders, the Jesuits and ... I forget. But the former thought that missionary work could build on and work in alliance with the Chinese classics, and the latter thought they were either complete garbage or the work of the devil, or maybe both.De Prémare's writings also include a defense of figurism proposed by Joachim Bouvet, which held that the doctrines of Christianity were mystically embodied in the Chinese classics.
I value these a great deal too. It always helps a great deal to think of the other in the pair in readings. They have to be more than a teaching aid since pairs are pairs not only teaching aids. I mean a pair is irrefutably a pair, 37 can't be a pair with anything other than 38.And finally, it does this in a very economical way. There are no explanations, no added theories, decidedly no metaphysical commentary – just the contrasts. I imagine this Wing might have been a teaching aid, something a wise teacher dreamt up to help their students recall the hexagrams. (Group them in pairs, and there’s less to remember.) We get to slip in – just a little late – at the back of the class.
Yes it's really hard to connect what is contrasting through Wilhelm's miscellaneous notes! Recently someone was asking 'where on earth do you get this from?' that's how overlooked this wing is.In my admiration for the Zagua, I seem to be in a rather small minority. Wilhelm includes it in Book III as ‘Miscellaneous Notes’, where he splits the text for each pair between hexagrams, making the contrast between them invisible. Hexagram 7: ‘The Army means mourning.’ Hexagram 8, four pages later: ‘Holding Together is something joyous.’ This seems to be a tradition – Lynn often does the same.
What about 3 and 4, they are the same hexagram from a different perspective but it is far harder to sum up the contrast of the pair. Well you have in your book as like an infant viewing the world from the security of the cradle though I see little security in 3. Wilhelm's miscellaneous says 'Chun is visible but ha snot yet lost it's dwelling' which I guess amounts to your 'not letting go of your dwelling place'. For 4 he has 'Youthful folly means confusion and subsequent enlightenment.' while you have 'Not knowing: disordered and also clear.' I'm not very clear still about 3/4 as a pair.It was reading this that finally made the penny drop for me about inverse hexagram pairs (pairs that are the same pattern of lines, turned upside-down): they’re the same landscape, seen from a different perspective. The home has an inside and an outside; where there’s an ‘us’, there’s also a ‘them’. What you see depends on where you stand.
The same basic situation of being at the absolute beginning, being the infant, but the difference between being the centre of the universe (everything I throw out of this pram always comes back!) and toddling off into huge spaces to see what happens. 3 struggles, but it's like the seed's struggle to break through the soil. It knows where it is, and the overall movement is radiating out from the centre.What about 3 and 4, they are the same hexagram from a different perspective but it is far harder to sum up the contrast of the pair. Well you have in your book as like an infant viewing the world from the security of the cradle though I see little security in 3. Wilhelm's miscellaneous says 'Chun is visible but ha snot yet lost it's dwelling' which I guess amounts to your 'not letting go of your dwelling place'. For 4 he has 'Youthful folly means confusion and subsequent enlightenment.' while you have 'Not knowing: disordered and also clear.' I'm not very clear still about 3/4 as a pair.
Hm. It's interesting they both get defined by what they're not, and the general situation they have in common is one of not having what you need (I think).I like 5/6 as a pair because there is conflict latent in Waiting and there is waiting latent in Conflict. But the 10th wing verse does not really highlight what I see in that. From your book
'Waiting means no progress, Arguing means no connection'
Hmmm I think 5 and 6 are as good an example of the same thing from a differetn perspective as 37 and 38 are.
Let's see how Wilhelm hacks it up
5. Misc notes. 'Waiting means not advancing.'
6. " " 'Conflict means not to love'
Wow that was a shock, the use of the word 'love' there which is nowhere else in Yi is it?
I'm not really with that one since they don't dovetail the way other examples do. 5 and 6 are the same landscape viewed from different angle as in if you walked up to the top of 5 and looked down you'd see 6 but the mnemonic (if that is what it really is) doesn't show the connection between the 2. 5 waits to get what it needs and 6 has to to accept not getting.
Hmm, yes, Wilhelm and the wings. As a great fan of Wilhelm-Baynes, I couldn't agree more with Steve Marshall when he talked about the organization of the wings in W-B being a sinological maze from the department of utter confusion. He's got a whole chapter on it. It's very useful for working out where all those little bits of old commentary that are cobbled together in book three are actually coming from. And even if you still can't work it out, at least it's reassuring to know that SOMEONE thinks there's an explanation for it. It's also very reassuring to realize that other people have trouble with it too. I always thought it was just me, and that I must be just slightly more stupid than average.One thing you can do is copy out those shorter wings from Wilhelm to make your own united study material. Or, Legge and Rutt both have those wings as independent texts.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).