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What is the name of that 'other' oracle ... ? (w. 4.096 verses) Answered: Yilin or 'Forest of Changes'

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Freedda

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Was it on this forum? I believe there was a thread somewhere about another oracle system, that has 4,096, or 4,096 'statements' - one for each possible combination of line castings .... I believe that some believe it is based on the Yi, and is perhaps a good companion to the Yi (e.g. that for each reading you get, you only look up one statement - regardless of how many changing lines you get)?

Someone else said that it had a different purpose, or there was a differnt way you consulted it, and someone else - maybe the thread's author? - said that much of the book was destroyed so what we are left with is an incomplete copy - where someone 'filled in' the blanks by repeating other known lines (which seems that it might make it a bit unuseable, or far, far less useful, as if you had a Yi with half of the hexagrams and lines missing - and someone had instead filled in the blanks.)

But besides all this, I'm interested in finding that thread, or at least knowing the name of that oracle.

Thanks, David.
 
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bradford

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Yi Lin or Forest of Changes. It has a different text for all 4096 possible Gua castings. The texts are different from the Zhouyi. People here have worked on translatons but I don't know who, if anyone, has completed a good one.
 

Gmulii

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Was it on this forum? I believe there was a thread somewhere about another oracle system, that has 4,096, or 4,096 'statements' - one for each possible combination of line castings .... I believe that some believe it is based on the Yi, and is perhaps a good companion to the Yi (e.g. that for each reading you get, you only look up one statement - regardless of how many changing lines you get)?

Someone else said that it had a different purpose, or there was a differnt way you consulted it, and someone else - maybe the thread's author? - said that much of the book was destroyed so what we are left with is an incomplete copy - where someone 'filled in' the blanks by repeating other known lines (which seems that it might make it a bit unuseable, or far, far less useful, as if you had a Yi with half of the hexagrams and lines missing - and someone had instead filled in the blanks.)

But besides all this, I'm interested in finding that thread, or at least knowing the name of that oracle.

Thanks, David.

While I don't know the specific systems with 4096 statements, I can think of some with a lot of statements. There are a lot of those.

Its interesting to mention that there are a lot of divination systems in China and around it.
When it comes to statements that come with the lines or from other places, very popular(and expensive) system lately in there is Tie Ban Shen Shu 铁板神术 .

Basically, this turns the bazi chart of a person to Trigrams and from there it makes sentences. There is a sentence for each year of their life and for every 10 year period and other stuff.

So the person pays a lot of $ then waits 2-3 months while the master makes the sentences that has relevance to him/her.
Since the different pillars get different values when they are made to Trigrams, there are many possible combination and at the end the whole text with every possible sentence contains 13,000 lines. From there 150 will be taken to apply for the specific chart.
The whole thing is translated in English in the Five Arts forums, but it need a lot of posts there to see it.


I made app from it as some of the calculations are difficult to do manually... We tested, it isn't usable by itself in my humble opinion, as it needs to know at least few other systems to practice it.

Anyway, my idea was that in the places around China there is overflowing of systems like that. No idea the specific one that was viewed here before, but there are countless more. : )
 
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Freedda

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Yi Lin or Forest of Changes.
Thanks Bradford. That's it, and the version I know about is by Christopher Gait. I was able to download a sample of the Kindle edition, which includes a lot of the book's intro material and the divination verses for the first five hexagrams - so I have enough to get started and to get a sense of this particular Forest.
 
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charly

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LiSe would know best, but I think she translated the Shén Shù” - the Spirit Numbers of Zhuge Liang and not the Yilin. https://www.yijing.nl/shenshu/index.html

However, I did find this page on her site about the Yilin, and it references and links to Gait's book on Amazon - which I mentioned above.

D.
Hi, David:

The user's name of Chris Gait here is «cgait», some of whose posts appeared in this thread:

LiSe had a page in her site with parcial translations from an old collective project that I believe didn't progress and maybe was retired when Chris published his complete although temporary translation.

Chris made available some samples of his work in Academia.edu if I remember well.

All the best,

Charly
 
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