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Blog post: I don’t know the first thing about the Yi

hilary

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Sequel: Hexagrams as pictures

Well, here I am getting started teaching week 1 of the I Ching Foundations Class, so it’s hard to think of a better title for a blog post…

Oh, I know quite a few things about Yi. I know some of its history and the stories behind its words, and how its components work together, and how to interpret what it has to say. Ask me what connects 48.3 to hexagram 29 in particular, or what to make of a reading where you receive it along with lines 1 and 5, and I could probably give you a sensible answer. Ask me about all the structural-interpretive tools I enjoy using, and I could probably write a book.

The first thing about Yi, the one I don’t know: why these words with this line?

Some millennia ago, some people somehow took patterns of lines and oral traditions of myth, history and omens, and put them together. They could look at

48.gif

and know that this meant ‘Well’.

They somehow brought about a confluence of many streams of wisdom, and so they created something between a great work of art and a force of nature.

I play in orchestras, and I have trouble imagining how someone like Sibelius or Mahler conceives of new worlds of sound, never heard before, in his mind’s ear. But the mind that did this? I haven’t the beginnings of an inkling; I do not think I have the right kind of thinking apparatus. If I were in the least inclined to believe in visiting aliens, they’d come in very handy here.

As an aside – yes, I’ve read Wilhelm Book III and much more along similar lines, purporting to explain the line texts in light of line correspondences, trigrams and nuclear trigrams. This is a tremendously ingenious post-hoc patchwork of explanations: there is a wheel in 9.3 because the trigram qian is round; there is a wheel in 63.1 because wheels are associated with kan. The horse of 26.3 is there because of qian, the horse of 59.1 is there because of kan – and so on. Marvellously thorough and detailed work, but not (remotely) the answer to my question, ‘How was this made? How did they know to put these words with this line?’

We can imagine words and traditions gradually coalescing around lines. An obvious example would be the threads of Zhou history that found their way into the book – but which do look, pretty clearly, like threads woven into an existing fabric. Perhaps someone cast those lines at those moments and the divination stories became part of the tradition. We do something like this nowadays, after all, sharing and remembering the more vivid stories of our experiences with the lines. But this is still a long way from perceiving for the first time that

54.gif

is the Marrying Maiden.

How is that done? I thought I would ask Yi. (Really, can you think of any other source to ask?)

I didn’t want to ask this one sitting at my desk – I took the beads outside so I could stand on the ground under the sky and ask.

Yi, what happened at this confluence of myth, tradition and gua? How were you made?

11.gif

Flow.
Small goes, great comes.
Good fortune, creating success.’​
(A bird started singing as I reached line 4.)
 

Liselle

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*Ask me*about all the structural-interpretive tools I enjoy using, and I could probably write a book.

What a marvelous idea! When can we expect it, I ask innocently. :D
 

Liselle

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(You did sort of leave yourself wide open there :D. I'm actually surprised it took two hours and 22 minutes for one of us to jump all over that...)
 

Liselle

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More seriously, I'm struck by your use of the phrase "force of nature" in your post. Might 11 be seen as the hexagram of forces of nature? It would be interesting to know what astrological forces were in play when the Yi was created. (I realize we don't know exactly when that was.) You used the word "confluence" - maybe it was some confluence of planetary forces and their effect on certain people who lived at a particular spot on Earth, and it grew from there?

(The same questions could be asked about astrology, probably - how does it work, what caused people to notice it, etc. The I Ching does seem much more like an actual human creation, though. Astrology might seem more like discovering something that was already there, and then systematizing it.)
 

hilary

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Well, I'm more likely to create a class to start with. That's basically cheating :mischief:, as it means I get a whole group of brilliant people to help me work out what needs to be included and how it can best be presented and explained.

With 'confluence' I was thinking of rivers. It's an either liberating or exasperating thing about the Yi's (pre)history, depending on how you look at things. With all the literature I'd studied before, there might be variant versions of the text around nowadays, but if you went back in time far enough you could trace your way up the various prongs of the fork, as it were, and find a single original. Even if the original didn't physically exist now, you knew it had existed. Whereas with Yi, it's the other way round. Nowadays there's one text, but the further up-river you walk towards its source, the more multiple and diverse it becomes, breaking up into lots of little tributaries and divergent variant manuscripts - and if we went far enough back, we'd find a host of tributary oral traditions rising out of the bedrock.

So... yes, that kind of confluence, especially of River Gua and River Myth.

Something I didn't mention in the post and probably should have done: the traditional account that King Wen thought of putting trigrams together and writing associated texts, and his son added line texts. Maybe it did happen something like that.

11 - forces of nature, yes, but specifically nature as the expression of spiritual power. 11 as immanence. And see the related posts... ah, except that you can't see them on the forum, of course. This was the one I thought made an interesting comparison.
 

Liselle

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Thank you for the reminder about the related posts - I made a big sad fuss about their disappearance, and then forgot to look at them after you added them back :duh:.
 

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