King Wen sequence the Holy Grail?

[Leerling]

The uploaded picture is somehow converted to a link.

Or isn't it? Who is seeing the hexagram?

 

[svenrus]

 

[Leerling]

 

[Leerling]

Back to the King Wen sequence: the hexagrams in the sequence are arranged in pairs of rotated of inverted hexagrams (see Wikipedia), so that makes me wonder how the sequence could also tell a historical tale (as it is assumed in some explanations). Shouldn't the sequence be either mathematically inspired or telling a historical tale? That is to say: when there is some order beyond that in pairs.

 

[bradford]

It could also be made to look extra mysterious by having enough order to tease and enough disorder to captivate and confound.

 

[Leerling]

It could also be made to look extra mysterious by having enough order to tease and enough disorder to captivate and confound.

You could be right. In that case the King Wen sequence is indeed a great success.

 

[hilary]

Back to the King Wen sequence: the hexagrams in the sequence are arranged in pairs of rotated of inverted hexagrams (see Wikipedia), so that makes me wonder how the sequence could also tell a historical tale (as it is assumed in some explanations). Shouldn't the sequence be either mathematically inspired or telling a historical tale? That is to say: when there is some order beyond that in pairs.

Who knows what it 'should' be doing?

What it seems to like doing is creating mirror-patterns from an array of different centres, like a kaleidoscope, and long strings of connections like a paperchain, peppered with the occasional clue to another location, like a treasure hunt.

(I'm with Bradford in that I don't find any single, logical explanation for the whole. It could certainly be designed to frustrate the logically-minded.)

 

[bradford]

I think what underpins my confidence that there is no perfect algorithm is that people have been trying for millennia to figure this out and haven't been able to. There have been professional code breakers working on this, too. I seriously doubt that anything that old would be that ridiculously complicated.

 

[Leerling]

Has the sequence also been investigated with the help of modern computers?

And who knows more about the following book:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/richard-s-...gram-sequence/paperback/product-18888005.html

 

[diamanda]

Shouldn't the sequence be either mathematically inspired or telling a historical tale?

Why "either/or"? The whole history of human mythology is a mixture of both: numbers, plus a philosophy to dress up the numbers nicely. E.g. check out the 12 olympian gods, the 12 apostles, numbers in norse mythology, numbers in egyptian mythology, etc. Obviously the I Ching is unsurpassable in intricacy, like a gorgeous mathematical mandala, but still - why would a sequence be "either mathematical or historical"..? It's both, simply, why does that confuse you?

Has the sequence also been investigated with the help of modern computers?

I don't understand what your goal is. What are you trying to prove?

 

[tacrab]

Richard Cook's ideas are interesting, though one really needs background in math to follow totally. He seeks a mathematical underpinning for the received order.

 

[Leerling]

Why "either/or"? The whole history of human mythology is a mixture of both: numbers, plus a philosophy to dress up the numbers nicely. E.g. check out the 12 olympian gods, the 12 apostles, numbers in norse mythology, numbers in egyptian mythology, etc. Obviously the I Ching is unsurpassable in intricacy, like a gorgeous mathematical mandala, but still - why would a sequence be "either mathematical or historical"..? It's both, simply, why does that confuse you?

As I have read somewhere there are basically two ways of explaining the King Wen sequence: 1. As a symbolical registration in hexagrams of a sequence of historical events; 2. As the expression of certain mathematical principles. It is sure that the most obvious order of the sequence (the ordering in pairs) is of the second kind. It seems rather unlikely that a sequence of historical events would also have actually happened in such pairs. (But on the other hand: reversion is the movement of the tao.)

I don't understand what your goal is. What are you trying to prove?

I'm just exploring the I Ching. The use as an oracle seems to me to have a psychological explanation. (There are experts on the I Ching who are of the same opinion, so I don't expect more experience with the I Ching will change that. But time will tell.) So for now what's left to study are the essentials of the historical development of the I Ching and the mathematical aspects. The historical development (as far as it is known) can be read in books, which a plan to do. The best way to understand the ins and outs of the mathematical aspects of the I Ching seems to me to first try for my self. Anyway: I just like thinking about riddles.


It's also possible that the King Wen sequence is basically a grand mystification suggesting more (hidden) order than there actually is. That will probably be my end position too, but first I want to see for myself.

 

[Leerling]

I don't understand what your goal is. What are you trying to prove?

As to computers:

Modern computers can be used to discover mathematical patterns in sequences of symbols. For a sequence based on a simple pattern there always is a simple algorithm that generates the sequence. The more complex a sequence is, the more convoluted the algorithms necessary to generate the sequence have to be. So if even a search by means of modern computer technology fails to find a simple algorithm that generates the King Wen sequence, than the sequence is most likely partially random.

By (partially) random I mean the following: it could be the case that the simplest way to describe the King Wen sequence (apart from the obvious elements of order) is to just write down the King Wen sequence, and that all algorithms generating the King Wen sequence would be more complicated than the written down King Wen sequence itself.

Those things could be investigated by modern computer technology, and probably already have?

 

[svenrus]

Once I read that Alfred Huang suggest the third hexagram to be actually counted for the first hexagram. I have a thought telling me that maybe the solution lay in the third hexagram firstly and then from there on... I can imagine King Wen starting with pure Yang, six unbroken lines, then pure Yin and thinking about which next; the last 62 hexagrams being a mix of the first two initial hexagrams. But don't ask me about where in hex. 3 the logic for that hex. to be first chosen lays.

 

[Trojina]

I'm just exploring the I Ching. The use as an oracle seems to me to have a psychological explanation. (There are experts on the I Ching who are of the same opinion, so I don't expect more experience with the I Ching will change that. But time will tell.)

As a matter of interest which experts are you referring to ?

 

[Leerling]

As a matter of interest which experts are you referring to ?

Will Buckingham and Edward A. Hacker. But as I am only beginning this study probably there are a lot more.

 

[Leerling]

Once I read that Alfred Huang suggest the third hexagram to be actually counted for the first hexagram. I have a thought telling me that maybe the solution lay in the third hexagram firstly and then from there on... I can imagine King Wen starting with pure Yang, six unbroken lines, then pure Yin and thinking about which next; the last 62 hexagrams being a mix of the first two initial hexagrams. But don't ask me about where in hex. 3 the logic for that hex. to be first chosen lays.

Do you refer to this book?

https://books.google.nl/books?id=xlsoDwAAQBAJ

 

[Trojina]

(There are experts on the I Ching who are of the same opinion, so I don't expect more experience with the I Ching will change that. But time will tell.)

And there are plenty of Yi users I imagine who don't call themselves 'experts' who also explain the way the Oracle works as psychological. How a person thinks Yi works often doesn't affect so much how they use it, it works for them anyway. But the opinion of an 'expert' on how Yi works as an Oracle is just that, only an opinion, no amount of learning and analysing, historical or mathematical makes a person any clearer about how the right answers come in consulting the I Ching since that is a matter of belief/opinion/experience. A person may be an expert in lots of areas of Yi for sure but when it comes to declaring how the right answers come, whether spiritual, psychological or cognitive then it's just a matter of opinion based on the person's world view.

You've summed up 'how it works' after a few casts and decided it's all 'psychological' so that's a quick and easy way to get the wonder of it all that out of the way I suppose so you can focus on the maths and such...but don't imagine there are experts who can tell you how answers come any more than there are 'experts' who can tell you the reason for existence, there are not experts in that field only a variety of differing world views and so on.

The historical development (as far as it is known) can be read in books, which a plan to do. The best way to understand the ins and outs of the mathematical aspects of the I Ching seems to me to first try for my self. Anyway: I just like thinking about riddles.

Then you are in for a life long treat with the I Ching

It's also possible that the King Wen sequence is basically a grand mystification suggesting more (hidden) order than there actually is. That will probably be my end position too, but first I want to see for myself.

Do you think you will reach an 'end position' ? I think if you do it will rather be simply where you decided to stop and rest for a while. Also I cannot see how you will be able to appreciate the hidden order fully if you are not familiar with how the oracle works in your life. Hilary, who has been studying Yi intensively for about 16 years now I think, is still only just discovering patterns within the sequence that no one else has ever found or seen. Some of these are shared in her writing in the Sequence section of Wikiwing (and there is a course on the sequence beginning over in CC). Whilst she has discovered these patterns and correspondences by studying the sequence itself, without her accumulated understanding of what the hexagrams means, through her life experience in her own and other's readings I doubt these new discoveries would stand out so clearly to her, if at all. She probably just wouldn't be able to see them. Without her prior understanding, not just intellectual understanding BTW, she would not be able to 'sense out' the resonances she has found and would not be able to say this about her work with the sequence

Who knows what it 'should' be doing?

What it seems to like doing is creating mirror-patterns from an array of different centres, like a kaleidoscope, and long strings of connections like a paperchain, peppered with the occasional clue to another location, like a treasure hunt.

That is the beauty and vast mystery of the sequence......her description makes me think of galaxies in space strung out into eternity with all kinds of pushes and pulls between them we cannot with our senses discern. That doesn't mean they don't exist it means our minds cannot comprehend their vastness. I think this is the case with the sequence.

So when you say the King Wen sequence is possibly 'basically a grand mystification' here

It's also possible that the King Wen sequence is basically a grand mystification suggesting more (hidden) order than there actually is. That will probably be my end position too, but first I want to see for myself.

....it seems kind of funny to me that you currently think it is all there for you see right now, and that you will come to a fixed conclusion and an 'end position' from the perspective you now have of what Yi is. The truth is more that as you grow your relationship with the I Ching the more of it can come into view for you. It's not so much you studying it as an interesting object and coming to conclusions it's more like you enter a vast space, not knowing where you are, waiting for the air to clear to see what's there, allowing it to be revealed to you.

 

[Freedda]

Leerling, you are of course free to pursue whatever line of inquiry you feel like. I'd say however, that this one seems headed for a dead end.

First and foremost, it seems you're trying to create some formula which represents the "I Ching World" but you're leaving out important parts of what that world includes, namely images and the meanings associated with those images.

It's as if you were trying to create a "Complete Algorithm for Human Beings" based on a complex formula which looks at the size, shape, weight, and surface area of the major organs." You might come up with some formula or algorithm, but what good would it be? What meaning or meanings would it carry?

Could it describe what heartache feels like? Or what it's like to cry or laugh? Or how women give birth? Or the complex and largely mysterious connections between mind and body? Would it include the many, many functions (think "meanings") of the various organs -- heart for pumping blood, lungs for giving the body oxygen, liver for cleansing, etc. -- and very importantly, how these are all tied and function together, and are interrelated? And finally, would it describe how people and all of existence are connected and interrelated?

With that said, it may be that you can tie 10 super computers together and come up with some unified formula or algorithm based on one of the numbered sequences of the I Ching -- but so what? The reason the sequence (and any subsets of that) have use is because people can perceive meanings from and within them. But you're setting the meaning function aside as if it's an unimportant add-on.

Regards, David.

 

[Leerling]

One more time: I don't deny the usefulness of the I Ching as an oracle.

But it just happens that I am personally most interested in the historical, formal and mathematical aspects of the I Ching.

Just as one can legitimately study paintings as physical objects one can legitimately study the formal and mathematical aspects of the I Ching. Of course the results of such specialist studies will not be the whole story (far from it!) but neither will discouraging such specialist research be of any help in forming a more comprehensive picture.

 

[hilary]

Oh yes, there is always something to be said for looking at a small part of the whole (eg lines without text) to try to find regular patterns there. Then if you find any, you can see whether they're reflected in the text. That would be one way of going about it.

(The most fruitful work with the Sequence I have ever seen, though, was done by Scott Davis in The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context. He takes the opposite approach, and starts from the assumption that text and sequence-structure are a single entity. This is how he can look at the whole with new eyes and sees a lot of things that had been invisible to me. (I have a nasty feeling that a lot of what Trojina's attributing to me are actually his discoveries. The funny thing is that he tends to say 'these hexagrams go together but there is no structural connection' when there is actually a great big perfectly regular trigram-mirroring pattern. Odd.)

...

The link https://www.onlineClarity.co.uk/images/gua gives "Whoops! Page Not Found". No problem, I will draw some pictures of hexagrams and trigrams of different sizes to use in the texts.

Sorry, I keep assuming everyone is familiar with web directories etc. That's the directory with the images in. So to use one of those images here, you need to paste the directory
https://www.onlineClarity.co.uk/images/gua
followed by for instance
/1.gif
into the 'from url' tab of the 'image' box. (Don't leave 'retrieve remote file and reference locally' checked. Normally of course that is only good manners, but since these are all hosted here anyway, it just creates unnecessary duplicates.)

 

[Leerling]

(The most fruitful work with the Sequence I have ever seen, though, was done by Scott Davis in The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context. He takes the opposite approach, and starts from the assumption that text and sequence-structure are a single entity. This is how he can look at the whole with new eyes and sees a lot of things that had been invisible to me. (I have a nasty feeling that a lot of what Trojina's attributing to me are actually his discoveries. The funny thing is that he tends to say 'these hexagrams go together but there is no structural connection' when there is actually a great big perfectly regular trigram-mirroring pattern. Odd.)

Added to my reading list.

Sorry, I keep assuming everyone is familiar with web directories etc. That's the directory with the images in. So to use one of those images here, you need to paste the directory
https://www.onlineClarity.co.uk/images/gua
followed by for instance
/1.gif
into the 'from url' tab of the 'image' box. (Don't leave 'retrieve remote file and reference locally' checked. Normally of course that is only good manners, but since these are all hosted here anyway, it just creates unnecessary duplicates.)

TEST

I already found out about the URL but didn't notice the 'retrieve remote file and reference locally' box. Let's see what happens:

Done (with 'retrieve remote file and reference locally' checked):



Done (with 'retrieve remote file and reference locally' unchecked):

 

[svenrus]

Leerling: The complete I Ching. Alfred Huang. The marked text here on hexagram 3





http://www.svenrus.dk/thecompleteichingalfredhuang.pdf

 

[tacrab]

We should thank Leerling for stimulating some interesting discussion!
Here are some more questions/ideas:

-Why is there an order to the hexagrams?
-Why are there pairs? What purpose do they serve? Are they used in the divination process? Is it possible that one of the hexagrams in a pair is the "lead" of the pair and the other one subordinate?
-What textual relationship is there with the graphic (line/trigram/hexagram)? (This is part of what Scott Davis explores.)

 

[Freedda]

Leerling, go forth and calculate! Perhaps you'll come up with something useful and beyond our expectations and assumptions!

Just as one can legitimately study paintings as physical objects ... Of course the results of such specialist studies will not be the whole story (far from it!) but neither will discouraging such specialist research be of any help in forming a more comprehensive picture.

I think the place of disconnect for me is you referring to something you've been calling the "the I Ching world view."

As with the example you gave above about painting -- as an artist, I could find a specialized study of some aspect of painting - say for example, the materials employed by Picasso - useful, but I would always tie them back to the practice of painting: how might I use these materials, are they archival, what affects could I get using them? etc. -- just as someone would want to tie an algorithm of the I Ching back to using the I Ching!

And I don't think anyone would refer to this specialized study as "Picasso's Universe," which could be the point of confusion which some people - including myself - are having.


Regards, David.

 

[Trojina]

One more time: I don't deny the usefulness of the I Ching as an oracle.

But it just happens that I am personally most interested in the historical, formal and mathematical aspects of the I Ching.

Yes, but it hasn't been that clear, for example in your very first post on this thread you asked directly about the sequence and the use of the I Ching as oracle here

Leerling

Default King Wen sequence the Holy Grail?

Two questions about the role of the King Wen sequence of the hexagrams:

Do we really need the King Wen sequence to use the I Ching as an oracle ?

Would Taoist philosophy profit from an explanation of the King Wen sequence?

Just as one can legitimately study paintings as physical objects one can legitimately study the formal and mathematical aspects of the I Ching. Of course the results of such specialist studies will not be the whole story (far from it!) but neither will discouraging such specialist research be of any help in forming a more comprehensive picture.

Yes of course one can legitimately study these formal and mathematical aspects of the I Ching but you did directly ask in your first post on this thread about the need to use the sequence when using I Ching as oracle. Also in other threads, as Fredda said, you have referred to such things as 'I Ching world view' so it's not always been terribly clear (to me) that you only wish to discuss certain aspects.



But yes go forth and do what you gotta do

 

[Leerling]

Leerling, go forth and calculate! Perhaps you'll come up with something useful and beyond our expectations and assumptions!

Maybe I will find something, and maybe not. As the I Ching has been researched for ages, I probably will find nothing new. But that doesn't bother me. I'll just give it a try, and I will certainly learn a lot along the way.

I think the place of disconnect for me is you referring to something you've been calling the "the I Ching world view."

As with the example you gave above about painting -- as an artist, I could find a specialized study of some aspect of painting - say for example, the materials employed by Picasso - useful, but I would always tie them back to the practice of painting: how might I use these materials, are they archival, what affects could I get using them? etc. -- just as someone would want to tie an algorithm of the I Ching back to using the I Ching!

As an artist you certainly would, but not everybody is an artist. And also not everybody is that interested in using the I Ching as an oracle. One can certainly study paintings as physical objects without ever wanting to paint anything oneself. For instance when you're only an art collector or dealer. Such a purely physical approach is presented for instance in the book:

https://books.google.nl/books?id=nobhBwAAQBAJ

As I believe I already said I consider the ambiguity of the I Ching as essential to its use as an oracle, so formal and mathematical approaches are not likely to be of much use in the oracular use of the I Ching.

And I don't think anyone would refer to this specialized study as "Picasso's Universe," which could be the point of confusion which some people - including myself - are having.

I would not refer to the physical study of Picasso's paintings as "Picasso's Universe" either. I could have used the expression "the rational reconstruction of some aspects of the I Ching as a proto-science" and I even contemplated some such expression, but I thought it to cumbersome and only inviting further discussion on the terms used. And that would lead us to Lakatos, the philosophy of science, etc. All guaranteed to keep us busy for weeks to come......

 

[Leerling]

Yes, but it hasn't been that clear, for example in your very first post on this thread you asked directly about the sequence and the use of the I Ching as oracle here

(...)

Yes of course one can legitimately study these formal and mathematical aspects of the I Ching but you did directly ask in your first post on this thread about the need to use the sequence when using I Ching as oracle. Also in other threads, as Fredda said, you have referred to such things as 'I Ching world view' so it's not always been terribly clear (to me) that you only wish to discuss certain aspects.

I have read some books and articles on the uses the I Ching and found no reference on the role played by the King Wen sequence in consulting the I Ching as an oracle. So naturally I wondered if it would make any difference to the oracular use of the I Ching what sequence the hexagrams are in. I'm wondering about all kind of things, so don't be surprised when I ask something outside my main perspective.

But yes go forth and do what you gotta do

Thank you.

 

[Leerling]

We should thank Leerling for stimulating some interesting discussion!
Here are some more questions/ideas:

-Why is there an order to the hexagrams?
-Why are there pairs? What purpose do they serve? Are they used in the divination process? Is it possible that one of the hexagrams in a pair is the "lead" of the pair and the other one subordinate?
-What textual relationship is there with the graphic (line/trigram/hexagram)? (This is part of what Scott Davis explores.)

When mentioning the hexagrams in a row or column they just have to be in some sequence. But I have also seen pictures where the hexagrams are arranged in geometrical patterns. The ordering in that case need not be linear. You could also place the hexagrams at random positions on a piece of paper, and in that case there will be no evident ordering at all. Or one could write the hexagrams on pebbles or something and put them in a box or vase....

However as with ordering books in a library it seems reasonable to place somehow similar hexagrams near to each other, and that would explain the ordering in pairs. As to the ordering of the pairs and within the pairs, that's an interesting question to which I as yet have no answer.

 

[Leerling]

Has anybody studied the work of this guy:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Larry_Schulz

I have taken a quick look, and it looks alright. But does it explain the King Wen sequence?