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hilary
Administrator
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Pairs and perspectives
Hexagrams – you probably know this – come in pairs: 1 with 2, 3 with 4, and so on, through to 63 with 64. Sometimes it’s obvious why a pair of hexagrams belong together, sometimes less so. It only really sank in for me recently why Hexagram 43, Deciding, would be paired with 44, Coupling:
What you must necessarily meet in the drama of Deciding is the messenger.
The Oracle of Hexagram 43 speaks to a messenger: someone who stands up in the king’s court and brings his message. He calls out (the outer trigram is dui, the lake, opening and communicating) with truth (it’s deepened and powered by the inner trigram qian, the irreducible truth of heaven). The ripples of change spread outward with the message, from the chambers to the town and beyond. Receiving Hexagram 43, we imagine this as the yang energy of decision rising through the five solid lines, pushing out the last trace of openness/ indecision in line 6.
Only… what would the experience of Deciding have been like for those who received the message? I can imagine that they were quite happy and secure before the messenger arrived. The message irrupts into the peaceful, ordered heart of the king’s court, creating openings, breaking through barriers. (43 is also ‘breaking through’ and the breaching of a dam.)
And this starts to sound a lot like the experience of Hexagram 44. The message tears through things like a whirlwind (Hexagram 44’s trigram picture) and life will never be the same again. You need to pass the message along, let it travel out from the royal chambers without making a fight of it…
What you will not want to do is set up house with the messenger.
Someone who brings messages like this is not going to fit in as a regular integrated part of your court. This is strictly a one-off.
In other words… broken and solid lines, yin and yang, are always relative. What feels like rising yang in 43 when it corresponds to your own decision, is going to feel like the arrival of yin when it’s undermining your status quo. There’s a single energetic situation here, the arrival/arising of a force bringing change, but it’s seen from two perspectives and hence described in two different metaphors.
How many other pairs work like this – a single energetic ‘shape’, seen from two different perspectives?
It would be very satisfying to be able to answer confidently, ‘All of them!’ and introduce a single, grand concept that would help to explain the whole book. And it surely ought to work like that for every inverse pair of hexagrams, since they are all quite literally a single shape seen from two different perspectives. (You can say that Hexagram 44 is Hexagram 43 upside-down – but I prefer to say that it’s what you see if you walk round 43 and look at it from the other direction.)
So we can look at each pair and ask,
‘Could both of these be true at once? Is there a place to stand where I’d see this one as that one?’
And disappointingly, I can’t always find one – or at all events, not without seriously torturing some hexagram meanings. Sometimes other concepts – like call-and-response – are just more useful to understand a pair. It’s a good way to think about them, though.
Think of Hexagrams 37 and 38, for instance.
Homes have an inside and also an outside. One home, two perspectives.
Or Hexagrams 19 and 20 –
R.J. Lynn translates,
and adds a footnote:
So this could be a single encounter.
Or how about 41/42, or 47/48, or even 35/36, which of course are as different as night and day…?
Hexagrams – you probably know this – come in pairs: 1 with 2, 3 with 4, and so on, through to 63 with 64. Sometimes it’s obvious why a pair of hexagrams belong together, sometimes less so. It only really sank in for me recently why Hexagram 43, Deciding, would be paired with 44, Coupling:
What you must necessarily meet in the drama of Deciding is the messenger.
The Oracle of Hexagram 43 speaks to a messenger: someone who stands up in the king’s court and brings his message. He calls out (the outer trigram is dui, the lake, opening and communicating) with truth (it’s deepened and powered by the inner trigram qian, the irreducible truth of heaven). The ripples of change spread outward with the message, from the chambers to the town and beyond. Receiving Hexagram 43, we imagine this as the yang energy of decision rising through the five solid lines, pushing out the last trace of openness/ indecision in line 6.
Only… what would the experience of Deciding have been like for those who received the message? I can imagine that they were quite happy and secure before the messenger arrived. The message irrupts into the peaceful, ordered heart of the king’s court, creating openings, breaking through barriers. (43 is also ‘breaking through’ and the breaching of a dam.)
And this starts to sound a lot like the experience of Hexagram 44. The message tears through things like a whirlwind (Hexagram 44’s trigram picture) and life will never be the same again. You need to pass the message along, let it travel out from the royal chambers without making a fight of it…
What you will not want to do is set up house with the messenger.
Someone who brings messages like this is not going to fit in as a regular integrated part of your court. This is strictly a one-off.
In other words… broken and solid lines, yin and yang, are always relative. What feels like rising yang in 43 when it corresponds to your own decision, is going to feel like the arrival of yin when it’s undermining your status quo. There’s a single energetic situation here, the arrival/arising of a force bringing change, but it’s seen from two perspectives and hence described in two different metaphors.
How many other pairs work like this – a single energetic ‘shape’, seen from two different perspectives?
It would be very satisfying to be able to answer confidently, ‘All of them!’ and introduce a single, grand concept that would help to explain the whole book. And it surely ought to work like that for every inverse pair of hexagrams, since they are all quite literally a single shape seen from two different perspectives. (You can say that Hexagram 44 is Hexagram 43 upside-down – but I prefer to say that it’s what you see if you walk round 43 and look at it from the other direction.)
So we can look at each pair and ask,
‘Could both of these be true at once? Is there a place to stand where I’d see this one as that one?’
And disappointingly, I can’t always find one – or at all events, not without seriously torturing some hexagram meanings. Sometimes other concepts – like call-and-response – are just more useful to understand a pair. It’s a good way to think about them, though.
Think of Hexagrams 37 and 38, for instance.
Homes have an inside and also an outside. One home, two perspectives.
Or Hexagrams 19 and 20 –
R.J. Lynn translates,
and adds a footnote:
So this could be a single encounter.
Or how about 41/42, or 47/48, or even 35/36, which of course are as different as night and day…?