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I am new to I Ching
- Thread starter Don1961
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surnevs
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If you don't have any books yet invest in Hilary Barrett's "I Ching", Arcturus, London 2020, or if she has published more recent books... (And keep that one as your only translation - at least for a beginning).
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And be sure to go through Hilary's Beginners' Course! It's exactly made for people who are brand new to this.
Briefly, though, the quote you mentioned is the line text, and it was written by the people who put the I Ching together, thousands of years ago, to describe what each possible change means.
When you cast each of the 6 lines in what's called your primary hexagram, each line can end up a changing line or not. If (in your example) line 4 of hexagram 53 changes, it produces a second hexagram called the relating hexagram.
So your example, written as "53.4 to 33", would work like this:
53...33
Counting from the bottom up, because that's the order lines are cast in, line 4 of hexagram 53 (written as "53.4") starts out as a broken line, called a yin line. It changes to a solid line, called a yang line. You can see in the diagrams that the 4th line is the only line that's different between the primary hexagram (the one you cast) and the relating hexagram.
(A changing yin line would properly be written as "--- x ---", a broken line with a little "x" in the middle space to indicate it's changing. The forum doesn't have a way to do that in a post, though.)
The text the authors wrote to describe that change is this:
"Wild geese gradually progress to the trees.
Maybe find a flat branch.
No mistake."
Exactly why that text belongs to that exact moving line connecting those two hexagrams is a very big subject.
("Moving line" and "changing line" mean the same thing. It doesn't matter which you use.)
Briefly, though, the quote you mentioned is the line text, and it was written by the people who put the I Ching together, thousands of years ago, to describe what each possible change means.
When you cast each of the 6 lines in what's called your primary hexagram, each line can end up a changing line or not. If (in your example) line 4 of hexagram 53 changes, it produces a second hexagram called the relating hexagram.
So your example, written as "53.4 to 33", would work like this:
53...33
Counting from the bottom up, because that's the order lines are cast in, line 4 of hexagram 53 (written as "53.4") starts out as a broken line, called a yin line. It changes to a solid line, called a yang line. You can see in the diagrams that the 4th line is the only line that's different between the primary hexagram (the one you cast) and the relating hexagram.
(A changing yin line would properly be written as "--- x ---", a broken line with a little "x" in the middle space to indicate it's changing. The forum doesn't have a way to do that in a post, though.)
The text the authors wrote to describe that change is this:
"Wild geese gradually progress to the trees.
Maybe find a flat branch.
No mistake."
Exactly why that text belongs to that exact moving line connecting those two hexagrams is a very big subject.
("Moving line" and "changing line" mean the same thing. It doesn't matter which you use.)
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Thank you