Jou Tsung Hwa

[yick]

I like his book The Tao of I Ching - Way to divination, as a beginner I appreciate his Zhan or hints on diving, which I often find useful. But there are many things I don't know what to think of:

1. Sections Window of the hexagram and Image and Symbol are very different from what I've seen in other books. is there some serious tradition behind them? Are there other books with something similar?

2. When consulting about health, Jou interprets static hexagrams like Qian(1) or Dayou(14) as bad omens. It's very strange to me. It is derived from some theory of Pure, Quihun and Youhun hexagrams. Is interpreting responses on health questions really so different?

3. What do you think about alternative methods of divination he cites from the book Plum Flower Mind I Ching?

 

[Sparhawk]

I like his book The Tao of I Ching - Way to divination, as a beginner I appreciate his Zhan or hints on diving, which I often find useful. But there are many things I don't know what to think of:

Hi Yick,

I hope you don't mind me advising something that goes against what you are doing. If you indeed are a beginner in the Yi and your intention is to "consult the book" and are finding ways to do it better, try to forget about other books for a while. Try to stick to some of the most read and used translations, like Wilhelm/Baynes, and use only that to exhaustion for a couple of years. This will exercise your intuition and will make answers easier and easier to interpret as you go along. Once you feel to be on more or less solid ground regarding interpretations, then start reading has much as you can from the material that is available from other authors.

In this particular case, I would not suggest to use Jou Tsung Hwa as one of your first books to wonder about as it will lead to a lot more confusion than is worth.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like JTH. It is just that it should not be a book marketed or used by beginners to "refine" their ways of interpretation.

Cheers,

Luis

 

[yick]

Hi Luis,
thank you for your worries, I'll try to make my question clear. Maybe I'm really too early too obsesive about the Yi, but I can't help myself, It was love at first sight. I started with the Yi about four months ago and it struck me with the relevance of its answers as well as with the beauty of its structure and feeling that there is much more to learn about it than a mere divination of my everyday questions.

I now have a few free months so I decided I'd use this time for building strong foundations and go as far as I can. I started to gather books to decide what is worth learning and what is not. As my native language is not english it was a difficult task because there are not many seriously looking translations besides Wilhelm in my country. So I started to look for english ones and the problem was the opposite, there were to many books. Finally I sticked with Wilhelm/Baynes translation and I was beside myself with happiness when I found Bradford's translation with all of its background information.

Jou Tsung Hwa's book I found very useful with its hints on divination, they inspire me to look from different angles on particular lines, and I consider making this book my third basic source of information.

My question was what do you think about his sections Window of the hexagram and Image and Symbol, whether they are useful for general understanding of hexagrams, if there is some school behind it or if it's something arbitrary.

As for asking about health, I would never consider auspicious hexagrams as bad omens if I left it to my intuition and here in JTH seems to be some special system which does so, so I ask about it.

And those alternative methods of divination, I don't want to mess my head up with them now, but I want to know if they are correct at least, and what do you think overall about this book.

Thanks

 

[toganm]

As for asking about health, I would never consider auspicious hexagrams as bad omens if I left it to my intuition and here in JTH seems to be some special system which does so, so I ask about it.

In terms of medical divination Pure hexagrams (where both upper and lower are the same trigram) generally means there is a serious condition even though the patient may look healthy.

Some hexagrams because their shape intimates tombstones in Oriental iconography are considered bad especially if the patient is in their terminal stage. These hexs are 7, 12, 16, 45, 62.

Another group with possible grave consequences are the following hexagrams: 18, 23, 28, 33, 36, 38, 43 and 49.

Hexagrams indicating diseases of sexual origin are 11, 18, 31 and 54. There could be a hidden history for the patient.

Gui hun hexagrams, return of Hun ( etheral soul in Chinese medicine), symbolically mean the soul, Hun, is returning to the origin, ie. death These hexagrams are 7, 8, 13, 14, 17, 18, 53 and 54

You Hun ,wandering Hun, hexagrams represents coma or near death situations as Hun is wandering around. These hexagrams are 5, 6, 27, 28, 35, 36, 61 and 62.

Medical interpretation ( at least the way I learned) involves an understanding of Chinese point of view how the body works in terms of organs, five phases, sheng (generation) cycle and Ko (obstruction/destruction) cycle. Of course the general principles still do apply, like how to interprete when there are more than 1 changing lines, ... etc.

If you are interested in medical interpretation Miki Shima's Medical I Ching is the only one I know however if one does not have the chinese medical understanding it can be easly said; it is a list of diseases for every hexagram and line.

Hope this helps,

Togan

 

[yick]

Thanks,

You added those "tombstone" reminding hexagrams, so if I add all these hexagrams together, there are not many auspicious left. It seems that medical interpretation really needs some specialization, otherwise one can hurt himself.

I found some really interesting, although for me not very practical article about Eight Palaces system where this Youhun, Guihun theory seems to have origin.

http://home.wanadoo.nl/harmen.mesker/eh.pdf

There is also mentioned one chinese book - Duanyi-tianji (the Complete Yijing Mystery) from which Jou seems to have borowed a lot of material. Many things are mentioned there, but not explained further in this article, at least it shows me how much more there is to see...