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Poor Marrying Maiden

pocossin

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Chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching is based on hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden. Most translators agree that chapter 71 is about disease (Hatcher: bing4), although terms vary slightly. Waley's version is:

"To know when one does not know is best.
To think one knows when one does not know is a dire disease.
Only he who recognizes this disease as a disease
Can cure himself of the disease.
The sage's way of curing disease
Also consists in making people recognize their diseases as diseases and thus ceasing to be diseased."

Where in hexagram 54 is all this disease?

In Whincup's translation, the maiden walks "with a limp" (line 1), "sees dimly" (line 2), and "offers a box that is empty" -- that is, she is barren -- (line 6). In sum, the poor maiden is lame, half blind, and infertile. Lao Tzu apparently took these disabilities as indications of disease.

As an excerise in Chinese-like textual togetherness, I also considered the Sawyers' Ling Ch'i Ching and Michael Nylan's Tai Hsuan Ching (tai xuan jing).

The first 64 trigraphs of the Ling Ch'i Ching allude to the hexagrams in King Wen's sequence. The verses of trigraph 54 begin:

"It's unnecessary to discuss poverty or success,
Instead, worry about acute illness."

So hexagram 54 also put the author of the Han era Ling Ch'i Ching in mind of disease.

The 81 tetragrams of the Tai Hsuan Ching are explicitly related to the hexagrams through the hexagram calendar. However, the 81 tetragrams relate to the 81 chapters of the Tao Te Ching one for one.

Tetragram 65 Inner is derived from the Marrying Maiden and rather moralistically comments on her chastity. Appraisal 1:

"Careful about consorts:
To be chaste at first
Makes for later peace."

I find no mention of disease in this tetragram. However, for tetragram 71 Stoppage, Appraisal 3 reads:

"Closing his gates and doors,
By this he stops ku madness."

Nylan's commentary says: "Ku indicates a variety of virulent poisons associated with sexual indulgence [thus hexagram 54] and black magic. The pictorgraph shows three insects, worms, or reptiles in a bowl...." On page 304, Nylan gives a nice picture of "Ku poison being expelled by an exorcist from a victim."

I Ching persons are already familiar with ku poisoning since Ku (pinyin gu) is the title of hexagram 18. Whincup translates this title as "Illness."

Tom
 

pocossin

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Rickets, maybe?

Rickets is a failure of the proper development (mineralization) of growing bone (view photo). It is probably present in 100% of all children adopted from China, even when it is not apparent to the observer. The predominant cause of rickets in orphanages abroad is nutritional deficiency of vitamin D due either to inadequate direct exposure to ultraviolet rays in sunlight or to inadequate intake of vitamin D, or both. Sunlight is necessary for the formation of vitamin D in the human body and vitamin D is necessary to make bone in the human body. Inadequate calcium and phosphorus in a child's diet also contributes to the development of rickets.
http://www.orphandoctor.com/medical/commondiseases/dietary/ricketschinese.html

Mortality/Morbidity: Skeletal deformity and short stature may occur. Severe rickets causing pelvic distortion in women may preclude vaginal delivery.
http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic2014.htm
 
M

mrlizardo

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A couple of thoughts.

One is, for people who are pretty granular with the grammar of the EOC text, is "The Blind" and "The Lame" really, or at least possibly, modifying "The marrying maiden"?

I thought it wasn't the case when I was geeking out with this line. (I'm radically open to the idea my readings are wrong, but I'm not very open to parsings that don't follow a simple SVO grammar.)

The second is, if the maiden is blind or lame, do blindness and lameness = "injury"? And what might all these be figures for? See 44.0.

A final thought is that as a student of poetry, I find the image of a desparately ill princess (rickets perhaps!) sad and lovely and evocative, and I hate dismissing it.
 
C

candid

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I think it is more "dis-eased", as in "out of place", not fully ones self. To know it is not ones true self is to no longer be diseased.
 

lightofdarkness

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From a universal pespective, 54 covers the release of energy 'early', be it by basic immaturity or by necessity - the latter meaning being put in a situation you cannot get out of and so must 'grow up' quickly.

Immaturity allows for over-confidence (as we find in the mindset of adolescents etc) and can be interpreted as a 'disease' when one fails to 'grow up' ;-)

54 has its roots described by the under-exaggerated qualities of 64, misequencing, trying to complete too soon etc.

For the full set of its 'genetic code' see the line position section in:

http://www.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/lofting/x001011.html

Chris
 

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