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49.5 “The great man changes like a tiger...”: The Ultimate Aim of Yi with Respect to the Diviner?

peters

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Bradford Hatcher, in Vol.1 of his The Book of Changes: Yijing Word by Word, comments:

Readers who come to the Yijing in search of a fortune teller, seeking objective answers to questions about their fate, soon learn that this function of the book is not its driving purpose, but merely its customary and initiatory means of access; it might even be called the bait, used to draw the unsuspecting into divinations deeper realms….With the Yijing, well, it’s a book: like a door, it opens and closes. It has no choice but to field any question. Its intent, and not-so-hidden motive, is only its original intent: to serve the reader, with assistance in finding the attitude which will optimize a situation, without hurting the reader’s feelings. (pp.47-8)

Philip K. Dick, whose relation to the I Ching was, to a certain extent, problematic, observed in an interview:

What is the importance of the I Ching in your own life?

Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have a universal quality. For instance: “The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised.” If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.

[www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-archive/vertex-interview-with-philip-k-dick/]

Both these statements point to a certain ulterior – better to say ultimate – motive of Yi with respect to the diviner. Hatcher refers to Yi’s willingness to address specific, immediate questions posed to it as ‘the bait’. In contrast to this, the ultimate motive of Yi might be termed ‘the long game’. What is this ‘long game’? It is, very simply, to inculcate, within the diviner, the wisdom-perspective of Yi itself. Dick identifies this in his phrase, “It will make you into a Taoist.” But we don’t need to bring the specific term ‘Taoist’ into it, as Taoism itself postdates the Zhouyi. Perhaps we might simply replace ‘Taoist’ with ‘Sage’, taken loosely as one who accords in his or her person with what Karcher translates as Sage-Mind (shengren).

Very shortly following first consulting the I Ching, I humbly ventured the question “May I be so bold as to inquire who or what you are?” I was already aware, from background reading, that what answered through the I Ching was often or even typically avoidant with respect to such direct questions regarding its nature. In answer, I was directed to the changing line 49.5, which, in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, is:

“The great man changes like a tiger. Even before he questions the oracle he is believed.”

I pondered upon this, ventured an initial interpretation, only to have it rejected upon consultation as to its correctness. I then pondered for several hours more, before venturing the following interpretation, which met with approval:

Yi has redirected the question. Instead of answering so intimate a question, Yi has instead answered what is possible for me, were I to learn the wisdom that Yi would impart. I, in learning the Way of Yi, would transform naturally with the Tao, such that I would sufficiently embody Yi’s wisdom and know the Way without consulting Yi. That is, rather than Yi answering about him/herself, Yi has instead answered about my nature and quality should I conform myself to the nature of Yi. Yi has thus turned the question back to me and indicated his/her concern or intention with regard to me. There is nothing rebuffing about this; rather Yi has ‘preserved his/her dignity’ while bringing the question back to what really matters for me: not ‘what is Yi’, but ‘what would I be, were I brought in conformity with Yi’, that is to say become a ‘great man’ (da ren). In sum, then, the meaning of 49.5 is “learn from Yi, inculcate his/her wisdom and qualities, and then you will know what Yi is.”

I was delighted with this reply, but what proved even more remarkable was coming across, over the course of the following several weeks, a number of references addressing this precise understanding, which I share below. Perhaps the final one regarding Jung is the most remarkable, but all are of interest.
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Looking back on such an oracle in a day or two can be very instructive, and ultimately will prove to you just what a fine art interpretation is, since it depends upon your state of mind and 'correct' interpretation posits by its very nature… a state of mind. Hence you can conclude that the Yi wishes you to see things a certain way. Learn that and acquire that state of mind, and there is no need to consult the Yi: ‘Changes like a tiger – already knowing before consulting the oracle’ – hexagram 49/5.

[https://www.biroco.com/yijing/avoid.htm]
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Eventually, as Siu points out, such aids are not needed, for (to paraphrase Siu) [cf. R.G.H. Siu, The Man of Many Qualities: A Legacy of the I Ching, (1968)], your personality merges with “your very being,” the Higher Self. “From then on, your actions are no longer heralded by your own learning, but evoked by the universal harmony. Being one with nature, you apprehend the all—totally, instantaneously, ineffably. This is the ultimate lesson of the I Ching.” The ultimate lesson is to become one with your own Self.

[Elmer Green, “The I Ching Effect”]
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As a person matures to sageness, the explicit knowledge of the formal pronouncements of the hexagrams disappears into his deeper subconscious. Eventually, he becomes oblivious of the very preachings themselves, and the spirit of the I Ching merges with his very being. From then on, his actions are no longer heralded by his own learning but evoked by the universal harmony. Being one with nature, he apprehends the all – totally, instantaneously, ineffably. This is the ultimate lesson of the I Ching.

[R.G.H. Siu, The Man of Many Qualities: A Legacy of the I Ching]
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Each one of us is connected with Universal Intelligence at all times. A man whose development was at a sufficiently high stage and who was adequately spiritual, would have no need for a ‘go between’ such as the I Ching to give him guidance. He would either intuitively know what to do or else ascertain it from higher sources, since all is already known in what the I Ching calls ‘heaven’.

[W.A. Sherrill & Wen-Kuang Chu, An Anthology of I Ching]
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In spite of his reservations about direct imitation of Eastern methods of meditation, Jung honored the spirit of the East and valued it highly. His friendship with Richard Wilhelm, moreover, provided him with full access to the spirit which animates the Book of Changes, the I Ching, in all its range and depth. For a long time, he used the I Ching to obtain responses to questions about doubtful situations, but he gave it up toward the end of his life when he became aware that he always knew in advance, before he threw the yarrow stalks, what the answer would be. In other words, he was so open to, so prepared for, the meaning constellated in the unconscious that he was no longer able to use the oracle as a roundabout way via an outer technique.

[Marie-Louise von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time]
 
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Freedda

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Hatcher refers to Yi’s willingness to address specific, immediate questions posed to it as ‘the bait’. In contrast to this, the ultimate motive of Yi might be termed ‘the long game’. What is this ‘long game’? It is, very simply, to inculcate, within the diviner, the wisdom-perspective of Yi itself.
My understanding of what Bradford Hatcher is saying is quite different. It seems to me that 'the bait' here is the promise of wish fulfillment or even enlightenment, when in fact one of the Yi's main functions is to offer us practical, everyday advice:

.... you need to pay more attention to where you are going; you need to slow down a bit; don't think about your future gains right now but instead do the work you need to, to reap a future harvest; or, you need to work on your family issues (correcting father’s or mother's fixations) which are getting in the way of your happiness ....

So, perhaps the promise of enlightnment, or giving us a more universal or 'long game' perspective is 'the bait' that draws us in, only for us to find that it's still the day-to-day and our own habits and conditioning that we need to deal with - and this is what the Yi helps us navigate.

But is this it's only function? I don't believe so, and perhaps this idea of a 'long game' is also part of it; that it also has the function of imparting (on the part of the Yi) or of us gaining (on our parts) a 'wisdom perspective'. But I don't ever feel the need to make any sort of enlightned-mudane / high-lower / heavenly-earthly separations or distinctions, or to think one is better, or more primary.

Though they are from different sources, I see the Yi a bit like I do Buddhism. On the one hand Buddhism is about wisdow, enlightenment and understanding emptiness! But on the other hand, the Budhha also taught about how to be in the world: right action, right speech, right livelihood and so forth. In fact, someone once asked the Buddha what place the Sangha - the community of follower on the same path - has in one's spiritual life. He responded that the sangha - what we might think of as our community - isn't just a part of one's spiritual life - it is the whole of one's spiritual life!

So similarly, the Yi might not just be about some kind of ultimate enlightenment, but it is also instructions for ourselves and our community about how to get along and make our way in the world.

.... I humbly ventured the question “May I be so bold as to inquire who or what you are?” .... In answer, I was directed to the changing line 49.5 .....
First, I have a question: was 49.5 > 55 the reading your got, or was the line 49.5 just a part of the response you got? (... and of course the obvious question, if it was only a part, what was the actual reading?)

And .... I've seen a few times where people asked this question of the Yi - or a very similar one - but they all got different responses. It makes me wonder then, a) could these different responses be offering different facets of who or what the Yi is, b) is the question it's answering more like 'who or what are you, to me?, and c) even with this one response you got, people will have different ideas / understandings /take-aways of who or what the Yi is.

D.
 
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peters

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Dear Freedda,

My understanding of what Bradford Hatcher is saying is quite different. It seems to me that ‘the bait’ here is the promise of wish fulfillment or even enlightenment, when in fact one of the Yi’s main functions is to offer us practical, everyday advice…

That doesn’t seem correct, although I agree Hatcher is not completely clear in his intent. He is certainly not saying “that ‘the bait’ here is the promise of wish fulfillment or even enlightenment.” He does mention fortune-telling and seeking objective answers to fate in relation to what he terms ‘the bait’. In any case, my quoting of the passage in question here was merely by way of entry and not the principal point under discussion.

So, perhaps the promise of enlightenment, or giving us a more universal or ‘long game’ perspective is ’the bait’ that draws us in…

Again, this is a kind of inverted interpretation on the quoted passage, but doesn’t accord with its actual statement. I’m not really comfortable bringing in ‘enlightenment’ as a term here – I don’t think it really applies to what is being discussed. Further, I don’t see in the Zhouyi oracular text anything resembling “the promise of enlightenment” or anything similar, which suggests that this can’t serve as ‘the bait’ as you propose.

…only for us to find that it’s still the day-to-day and our own habits and conditioning that we need to deal with - and this is what the Yi helps us navigate. But is this it’s only function? I don’t believe so, and perhaps this idea of a ‘long game’ is also part of it; that it also has the function of imparting (on the part of the Yi) or of us gaining (on our parts) a ‘wisdom perspective’. But I don’t ever feel the need to make any sort of enlightened-mundane / high-lower / heavenly-earthly separations or distinctions, or to think one is better, or more primary.

Well yes, of course. If we were to term the ‘everyday’ specific guidance from Yi the ‘short game’, what is evident is that Yi’s ‘long game’ is only gained through repeated ‘short games’. That is probably not the best analogy, but I hope the point is clear. Let me try another. Stephen Karcher once referred in an interview to gradually being ‘cooked’ in the vessel of Hexagram 50, which reminds me of nothing so much of Rumi’s story of the chickpeas in the pot. Alternatively, we might think of a cloth being dyed in a vat. We come to Yi with a particular query and there is a ‘transfer’, not just of information but of outlook, attitude, perspective. The cloth takes on a tinge of color. We come back again, another ‘connection’, and slightly deeper hue taken on. The steps of the dance repeat, again and again, perhaps over decades, and eventually the cloth is vibrant with the color of the dyeing vat. Is the ‘higher’ separate from the ‘lower’ here? Of course not – they are one and the same. The only difference is one of maturation

Though they are from different sources, I see the Yi a bit like I do Buddhism. On the one hand Buddhism is about wisdom, enlightenment and understanding emptiness! But on the other hand, the Buddha also taught about how to be in the world: right action, right speech, right livelihood and so forth. …So similarly, the Yi might not just be about some kind of ultimate enlightenment, but it is also instructions for ourselves and our community about how to get along and make our way in the world.

Yes, this is the ‘two truths’ doctrine of Buddhism, the level distinction between the “conventional” (saṁvṛti) and “ultimate” (paramārtha) truths. Again, though, I am not really pointing to “some kind of ultimate enlightenment”, taken in the Buddhist or Vedantic sense, nor am I pointing to a disjunctive condition or state with respect to one’s ‘ordinary’ getting on in the world.

First, I have a question: was 49.5 > 55 the reading your got, or was the line 49.5 just a part of the response you got? (... and of course, the obvious question, if it was only a part, what was the actual reading?)

I don’t really want to get into those details, but in any case, it is a distraction from the main point of my posting, which is found in the collected quotes following my reading interpretation of 49.5. That is the point to focus on.

And .... I’ve seen a few times where people asked this question of the Yi - or a very similar one - but they all got different responses. It makes me wonder then, a) could these different responses be offering different facets of who or what the Yi is, b) is the question it’s answering more like ‘who or what are you, to me?, and c) even with this one response you got, people will have different ideas / understandings /take-aways of who or what the Yi is.

Yes. Again, this is hardly surprising, that Yi should respond in a variety of ways to such an inquiry regarding its nature. I think all three of your suggestions have merit and could be operating solely or in combination in different cases. It could also simply be that Yi is avoidant regarding inquiries into its/his/her nature in different ways in different circumstances at it sees fit. We all have sufficient experience of human conversational avoidance to have a sense of how this might go.
 
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Freedda

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That doesn’t seem correct .... (and) Again, this is a kind of inverted interpretation
And again, this is only your opinion you're sharing here, as am I.
The cloth takes on a tinge of color. We come back again, another ‘connection’, and slightly deeper hue taken on. The steps ... repeat, again and again, ... and eventually the cloth is vibrant with the color of the dyeing vat. Is the ‘higher’ separate from the ‘lower’ here? Of course not – they are one and the same. The only difference is one of maturation ....
This color analogy only goes so far, or ... it has many more permutations: someone may only want a robin's egg blue, and not a dark indigo to begin with, so how dark the color gets is not really important; this darkening of the color over time may only be important to the dyer and maybe not the end user; and you might have a beautiful shade of light grey that only gets less attractive or useful the darker it gets .... to name a few.

Re: line 49.5 and the reading your got ...
.... I don’t really want to get into those details ....
I was - and still am - curious to know what the original response was to your query. I'm only asking you to share it, not that we need to further examine it here.

But you may be right, that Bradford Hatcher could be talking about 'fortune telling' as the 'bait' and not what you call a 'wisdom-perspective' and which I was calling enlightenment. But whatever his intent, I believe the Yi serves us equally well in giving practical day-to-day advice, and advice about spiritual matters .... or whatever we want to call them: wisdom-perspective, enlightenment, the long game and so forth.

But whatever advice it's giving - at whatever level - I don't think it merely 'imparts' advice or wisdom like a genie granting wishes. It takes our involvement and persistence, and perhaps patience and a bit of our own wisdom thrown in - or at least that's my perspective.

D.
 
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peters

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Dear Freedda:

And again, this is only your opinion you’re sharing here, as am I.

Fair enough. But again, while your interpretive proposal is interesting, I don’t think it is supportable on the basis of Bradford’s passage. Again, though, this is really just a point of entry to the main point of the post and not worth getting bogged down in.

This color analogy only goes so far, or ... it has many more permutations: someone may only want a robin’s egg blue, and not a dark indigo to begin with, so how dark the color gets is not really important; this darkening of the color over time may only be important to the dyer and maybe not the end user; and you might have a beautiful shade of light grey that only gets less attractive or useful the darker it gets .... to name a few.

I’m not entirely clear as to the extended metaphor you are proposing, but let me impute a possible meaning and comment accordingly. Under the hypothetical situation where two or more individuals are, let us say, ‘well dyed’ in the wisdom perspective of Yi, will they have identical outlooks and reactions when faced with an identical situation? Put more pointedly, are all sages basically the same? My suspicion is no, and for the following reason. Individuals seem to be ‘stamped’ from birth with distinctive temperaments, as parents of multiple children can readily attest, and as personality/temperament metrics such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Five-Factor Model attempt to measure. These distinctive temperaments are, to a large degree, fixed ‘givens’ for individuals. It would make sense that even if a specific individual matures in a wisdom-perspective under the long influence of Yi, that will be shaped and colored by his distinctive temperament. So yes, the ‘dye color’, even when vibrant from the dyeing vat of Yi, may well vary from individual to individual.

But you may be right, that Bradford Hatcher could be talking about ‘fortune telling’ as the ‘bait’ and not what you call a ‘wisdom-perspective’ and which I was calling enlightenment. But whatever his intent, I believe the Yi serves us equally well in giving practical day-to-day advice, and advice about spiritual matters .... or whatever we want to call them: wisdom-perspective, enlightenment, the long game and so forth.

But whatever advice it’s giving - at whatever level - I don’t think it merely ‘imparts’ advice or wisdom like a genie granting wishes. It takes our involvement and persistence, and perhaps patience and a bit of our own wisdom thrown in - or at least that’s my perspective.

Yes, I think this is all eminently sound.
 

peters

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I just last night discovered another remarkable reference relating to 49.5, which may be appended to the collected reference passages in my original positing. This is from Diana ffarington Hook’s The I Ching and Its Associations. Along with Marie-Louise von Franz’s remarkable comment regarding Jung’s ceasing to consult the oracle in his old age, it forms the only other concrete example of which I am aware of this kind of ‘internalization’ of the wisdom-perspective of Yi. As this was an exceptional experience for the author, it might be taken to represent a kind of intermediate maturation in this internalization. The passage is as follows:

Case no. 17 Should [hard] contact lenses be fitted?

One day, when out in the car with the family, I experienced one of those rare flashes of intuition. Someone mentioned that they would like to wear contact lenses instead of spectacles, but would first like to have the I Ching’s assurance that they personally could use them with safety. At this moment I suddenly knew with conviction, that on arriving home, I should cast hexagram 30, The Clinging, Fire, the double-trigram hexagram which depicts a pair of eyes. This would, I suppose, have been a natural guess, but how was I to know that the I Ching would choose it and give such a clear answer? For instance, if predicting an earthquake, it might not necessarily give hexagram 51, This was the first time I had experienced such an intuitional flash of precognition with regard to the I Ching, though I could not go so far as to say whether there would be any moving lines or what any subsequent hexagram might be. As one progresses, such experiences can become more frequent, forging ever stronger links between the unconscious and the conscious mind, until eventually one should be able to obtain the answers without even having to resort to the I Ching itself, thus developing the capacity for clairvoyance, the value of the I Ching for such training being inestimable. On arriving home, I asked the I Ching about the lenses and, as expected, cast hexagram 30. [Full casting and interpretation follow.] (p.99)
 

peters

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Yet another reference apropos to this thread:

Reading or studying the I Ching encourages and even compels one to think along its lines, becoming a better person for the experience. Its practicality and wisdom gradually become a resource that resides within one's mind or psyche and serves as a ready source of comfort, support, encouragement, inspiration and reflection.

[Mondo Secter, The I Ching Handbook, p.xxv]
 

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