Hexagram 7, the Army – and being within it. Hexagram 8, Seeking Union – looking at the terrain from outside to see where you belong. The general and the king.

Hexagram 17, Following – being within the flow. Hexagram 18, Corruption – examining and changing the flow from outside.

Hexagram 27, Nourishment – a containing structure. Hexagram 28, Great Exceeding – ‘the noble one stands alone without fear…’ (Daxiang). Incubating and hatching.

Hexagram 37, People in the Home. Hexagram 38, Opposing. ‘Opposing means outside. People in the Home means inside.’ (Zagua) Two different points of view on the same structure.

Hexagram 47, Confined, the view from inside an enclosed, oppressive space. Hexagram 48, the Well, reaching down into a dark, enclosed space from above to draw out the water.

Hexagram 57, Subtly Penetrating (into). Hexagram 58, Opening. ‘Opening: seeing. Subtly Penetrating: hidden away.’ (Zagua) These two begin to feel like a simple ‘key’ that unlocks the whole sequence.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing – inside and outside? (And if so, is there anything half so clear for other pairs?)

Here’s an article from Bri Saussy about sin. Now I’ve learned that the original Greek, hamartia, means missing the mark, I can’t help thinking of Hexagram 40, Release.

The theme of Release includes forgiveness. The Image, bringing things to a human level, shows how the noble one can do the ‘untying’ work of the hexagram and allow the simple and complete freedom of movement the Oracle describes:

‘Thunder and rain do their work. Release.
A noble one pardons transgressions and forgives crimes.’

Bri writes that

In the story of Christ as in the older stories that follow the same path, there is a moment where all sin is redeemed, forgiven, washed away and cleansed.

– impossible not to think of thunder and rain doing their work. We all know in a simple, literal way how the clear air feels after a storm, and that gives life to the metaphor.

Bri continues:

By analogy, our vision is cleared, our aim is steadied, our target still, waiting, and available.

And in the final line of Hexagram 40 – which is very much the ‘apotheosis’ kind of line 6 –

‘A prince uses this to shoot a hawk, on the top of the high ramparts.
He gets it. Nothing that does not bear fruit.’

Eep.

Why? Erm, let me give you the short version. My Mum-in-law was admitted to hospital as an emergency (this is not the same admission I wrote about before). That was all very intense and dramatic… and it was not the hard part. The hard part is that although she’s physically recovered, she is left very depressed and anxious and has needed my care, so I’ve been staying with her for some of the time. Also, when not staying with her I’ve still been finding it extremely difficult to concentrate on anything else.

So… here I am quietly at my desk, hoping my mind and nerves will presently get the ‘no current crisis, settle down to some work now’ memo, and mulling how Yi has helped me over the past month or so.

Two days after Mum-in-law was discharged, one day after I’d come to stay with her, I cast my reading for the week – and received Hexagram 39, Limping, changing at line 2 to 48, the Well. This reading really set me up to come through the whole thing in one piece. There I was as the sole support for someone suffering from acute anxiety, something of which I have (lucky me) no personal experience at all. And it was all down to me…

… well, you can see how Hexagram 39 was what I needed. I’m very, very familiar with the practical message of this one: THIS IS HARD, SO GET SOME HELP. No, there are no prizes for doing it all by yourself. If this is an impossible uphill struggle, that’s probably because you are going in the wrong direction. Turn round.

And there was also the Well, the reminder of resources that are ever-present – you just have to put in the work to keep access to them. And the moving line – the Well-moment of Limping – which I reckon has to do with appreciating that there is a larger context and most especially seeing that it is not all about me.

I didn’t have internet access, but I could make brief trips out to the local library with my laptop and get online there. I simply sat down, opened the email and started writing messages asking friends for help. Some who would have useful advice, some I could just vent to. And my friends responded, bless them. Paula even replied so fast that I had her invaluable, much-needed EFT advice to take back with me after just the one session at the library.

Wasn’t that just common sense, asking for help, and wouldn’t I have done it anyway? Well… no. I mean, yes, it is probably common sense, but not any that I possess. Knowing me, I would have spent any available time researching Things To Do. (In fact I did that, too. Read up on panic and what to do about it, and took notes of a whole list of useful suggestions.)

So I spent that whole first week thinking repeatedly about what help was available, for both of us, and how I could reach and draw on that help. Friends, EFT, meditation, music – oh, and not least essential oils. (I created a blend and used it to provide a nightly foot-rub.) I am convinced that essential oils are a Well. They offer direct, clear access to the many-layered healing power of the plants – and just as powerfully, they opened the channel to allow a direct, clear flow of love that overwhelmed all my stuttering frustrations.

That was the foundation. Later in the same week, I asked for ‘advice for me’ and received 41, Decrease, changing at lines 1 and 2 to 23, Stripping Away. I was a bit slow on the uptake with this one in practice (members of Change Circle helped me to get the message, for which thank you), but it did help me to understand and learn as I went along. My presence helped. My ‘things to do’ (from that lovely list I’d compiled of oh-so-helpful suggestions!) did not. Yi nudged and prodded me to counteract my natural tendency to do stuff to make things better.

(I’ve had hexagram 25, line 5 since then, and 41 again this week. The tendency in question takes quite some nudging.)

Readings… gave me much-needed advice, and helped me develop some insight into what I was doing. They work in synergy with the wise advice of other people – basically, they make it possible for me to hear what’s being said. (There’s some magic in the combination of familiar gua with new ideas and advice.)

Yi is the opposite of the joke about the rustic type who, asked for directions, begins by saying, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here.’ It gives me some understanding of where I am – and some permission to be here, which I need – and then just as many directions as I can take in, delivered in very simple terms. 39. 40. 41. Get help. Let go. Do less.

Also and in the longer term, beyond the surviving-the-crisis part, it lets me learn from experience. I actually cast a reading on ‘what do I learn from this?’ which I think will help me to take in what I’ve learned. (Another tendency of mine: ‘learning’ something, only to forget it until shortly after remembering it would have helped.) That’s an unusual question for me, though (and maybe it shouldn’t be): generally the weekly reading does the job, because it points up patterns I might otherwise have missed.

That’s another way readings help: they nudge/shove/kick, they provide insight and support, and they also point.

Which reminds me… though that would be a neat and tidy place to end this post, I must tell you about the stock. Last week’s reading, as I tried to get back to work: 25.5.6 to 51. The 25 was not hard to see; nor was the line 5. (See tendency #1, above.) And line 6 I could see as having to do with re-engaging with the spirit of my work – with people, with Yi, with the reasons why I do this. To be called away from work for a while is one thing, but to drift along in a detached way so that ‘giving myself some time’ merges seamlessly into ‘where did the week go?’ is something else.

So that made sense in an intellectual sort of way. And then… well, I put the stock ingredients in the slow cooker on Thursday. I took them out on Saturday morning, strained the stock and set it boiling in a pan on the stove to reduce from about 4 pints to about 2, for storage. Then I sat down and played a computer game.

‘Without entanglement. Acting brings blunders.
No direction bears fruit.’

You can imagine, I suppose, the kitchen-full of smoke. What you certainly can’t imagine, unless you’ve met it personally, is what results from boiling stock down to a stage between jelly and carbon. Something gelatinous, bubbled, brown-black and gloopy slithers thoughtfully out of the pan. (It has moved to the compost, where I hope it will be very happy.)

When she first became ill, last month, I asked Yi… well, I wish I could say I asked for advice first, but in fact I started out by asking for a prognosis for her. I received Hexagram 8 unchanging, and got the strong feeling this was no prognosis, but was referring me back to my ‘source of oracle-consulting’: why had I asked? And how about starting over from there? So I did, and asked for my own role or place in all this as it unfolds.

I received Hexagram 19, Nearing, with no changing lines. I needed to step up, to watch over my family – to be the one with the overview, the carer.

‘Above the lake is earth. Nearing.
A noble one teaches and reflects untiringly,
Accepts and protects the ordinary people without limit.’

This does make sense to me – not so much because not a blood relative, as she feels like a mother to me anyway, but because I’ve ‘been here before’: my mother spent a long time going in and out of hospital.

So I’m to be Nearing: always oriented towards the others, moving towards them, being aware of the whole situation. Being emotionally present and as available as the water that wells up under the earth. Not, for instance, shutting down or running the other way, as I might easily have been inclined to do…

And here I must pause for an aside about 19 in general, before I tell you about the ancestors who Neared.

‘Nearing.
Creating success from the source, constancy bears fruit.
Arrival at the eighth month means a pitfall.’

(I know… this is not the same translation as in my book. After a lot of research yesterday, I think I got the translation wrong – it simply can’t mean ‘reaching an end in’. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to change the interpretation so much.)

The old character for ‘arrival’ shows an arrow that has struck the ground. It’s arrived: it isn’t nearing any more. Nearing means yuan heng li zhen, success from the source, harvest in constancy: a huge positive potential tending towards realisation. Nearing is a state of potential, of tension; if I arrive at the 8th month, harvest time, and set out to reap results, I lose that potential. When the arrow lands, the energy of the bowstring has been discharged and lost, and the movement of its ‘Nearing’ flight has ended. Or in more pragmatic terms, if I scythe through the grain stalks, they won’t be growing any more.

So if 19 happens when you need results, you’re out of luck. And if in a 19 time you let your overview collapse down to a focus on results, you’re sunk. Probably the results will be bad, but in any case something much larger will be lost – and in several readings in my journal, that was empathy and relationship.

For me in the hospital there were no ‘results’ to be had – no way of influencing outcomes, nothing to get hold of – so I just kept on Nearing. I carried the hexagram with me (and sometimes I think Yi provides unchanging readings just so they’re ‘portable’ in this way) day after day.

But Hexagram 19 is also interpreted as the Nearing of a benevolent ancestor. I remembered this as we were driving down to the hospital one morning, and began thinking of ancestors whose help I could use. My father, certainly – a very patient, very calm man. And my mother, with her powers of organisation and ‘getting it done’ – and the very moment I thought of calling on her, I could hear her asking, ‘What can I do?’

That’s exactly what she would say, and so from there I became more involved in the idea. By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was joined by parents, grandparents, many wise and indomitable old friends from the Willows (a day centre for the elderly where I was lucky enough to volunteer for a decade), a powerfully shrewd and determined friend of my mother’s, and even a couple of dogs. An unstoppable, inexhaustible force! I drew on them throughout the day, and always had enough.

Next day I found an initial reluctance in myself to do the same again, as if that would be asking a bit much. Fortunately a couple of Willows people who were never slow to laugh at my absurdities pointed out that this was nonsense, and my crowd of ancestors and I went into the hospital together. Some of them brought strengths well-suited to eliciting a helpful response from the medical staff. Some of them brought endless reserves of patience for caring. Some brought experience of showing some nasty diseases who was boss.

I want to be clear that in my experience this was not just a matter of imagination and memory; I wasn’t just letting myself be inspired by these people’s example. I do that a lot – but this was different: they were there. At one especially fraught point I started to wonder what my father would have said – only to realise, in a moment of extraordinary clarity, that it was exactly, word for word, what I (he) had just been saying. He was already Nearing.

It’s said that Hexagram 19 can mean you are the one who nears, or that some benevolent power is nearing you. On the face of it, that seems unsatisfactory: yes, but which does it mean? Are you nearing or neared? It turns out that it really does mean both at once, and for the past few days for me it could not have been otherwise. I could not possibly have been the one Nearing for so long if my ancestors hadn’t also drawn near. The resource really is as inexhaustible as the lake within the earth.

With thanks to Mum and Dad, Grannie and Grandad, Daphne, Kitty, Rhoda, Dorothy, Vi, Joan, Candy, Meg…

First, the new reading features:

• instead of showing all the text of both hexagrams, leaving you to pick out the relevant parts, this displays only the hexagrams and lines that are part of your reading. (Some people mentioned on the forum that they prefer to see everything – you can still do so by following the link in the right-hand menu to the old-style reading.)
• the whole reading is displayed on a single page that you can save
• you can also save, send or share a link to the reading (just copy and paste from your browser’s address bar)
• and there’s a ‘download as pdf’ button
• It also comes with helpful links: at the foot of the reading page, you’ll find a link to start a new thread in Shared Readings, and one to the hexagram search results for your reading.

Many thanks to Ewald Berkers for all this excellence. (Any bugs you find will be the result of my fiddling about with the styling after he’d finished.)

And then the oracle’s sense of humour. As I was saying – unchanged.

There was the time when we seemed to have finished, so I visited the online reading and did a test cast. ‘How are we getting on?’ or words to that effect. The answer was an unchanging hexagram, and revealed a bug with unchanging hexagrams – the text was repeated. And the reading? 56, the Traveller. Still on our way, not there yet.

It’s nice to work with a programmer who will not only fix the bug within minutes, but also get the joke.

Then when Ewald really had finished, I was working on fitting the reading into this site’s template and styling. I am not particularly knowledgeable about these things, so it’s all trial and error. Try copying and pasting something, save, upload, refresh the page, see what’s broken. Back to the source code, try to guess what I broke, edit, save, upload, refresh. Fixed this, broke something else. Edit, save, upload, refresh. And so on, for about an hour. Gradually it comes together.

I did all this with another test reading; this time for the question I just typed in ‘test’. The answer: Hexagram 26, Great Taming, changing at line 3 to 41, Decrease or Offering.

‘A fine horse for pursuit.
Constancy in hardship bears fruit.
Daily training, chariot driving, protecting.
Fruitful to have a direction to go.’

I’ve embarked on Clare Josa’s excellent 28 day meditation challenge. The guided meditation she recorded for the first week began with roots and branches. You ‘grow’ roots into the earth and branches up, then follow a steady pattern of inhaling through roots, exhaling through branches, inhaling through branches, exhaling through roots. I’ve found I feel the quality of the energy changing, and the opening at the tips of roots and branches: inhaling earth-strength, growing branches, inhaling light, spreading and transmuting into roots…

And then, because my monkey mind is also full of hexagrams, this reminded me of xun

and dui.

Xun is the trigram of roots: open and sensitive to what’s below. And the branches mirror that: they’re sky-roots, open above, like dui. So the two trigrams together make a kind of energy diagram of a tree and its relationship to everything around it, open below and above:

And then isn’t it funny how this hexagram, 28, turns out to be the one that mentions the growth of trees?

28.2:
‘Withered willow sprouts a shoot,
Venerable man gets a young wife.
Nothing that does not bear fruit.’
28.5:
‘Withered willow sprouts flowers,
Venerable woman gets an upright husband.
No blame, no praise.’

And the rejuvenation of the tree even parallels the way humans come back to life through relationship.

And… lines 2 and 5 are each just at the interface between solid and open, where what’s absorbed through the open roots and leaf-surfaces can be felt as part of your self.

A brief note about this post: after someone let me know he was unsubscribing because he hadn’t been able to understand any of my posts, I’ve aimed for a mix of generally-intelligible things and pure Yeekery. Yeekery is that which is only intelligible to Yeeks; a Yeek is someone who sees hexagrams everywhere, might say they are having a horribly 39 day, for whom it’s old news that hexagrams 63 and 64 are one another’s nuclears, and who can’t even remember a time when they didn’t know that the expression ‘regrets vanish’ only appears in the Lower Canon. (OK, maybe allow for a little exaggeration for effect, but you know who you are.)

This post is Yeekery.

I’ve just started working on some new entries for my ‘Words of Change’ glossary – a nice, simple, non-Yeeky little book. I started looking at ming, mandate, and when that appears in the various layers of the text:

Zhouyi: 6.4, 7.2, 7.6, 11.6, 12.4, 49.4, 56.5

I notice that there’s a predominance of line 4, which makes sense to me. Line 4 is the minister’s line, the muscle-flexing, ‘what can I do here? what work is there for me?’ line – a good moment to learn about mandate.

I can’t see any patterns with the zhi gua, but there may be the glimmering of one in the trigrams: qian becomes xun twice, kun becomes gen twice, kan becomes kun and li becomes qian, and dui becomes kan. When qian becomes xun (6.4, 12.4), the mandate feels like something to work with in a time when you cannot bring about immediate change. And when kun becomes gen (7.6, 11.6), these are rulers’ mandates – received at the summit of the mountain – that mark the beginning of a time to build.

I get the sense there is a story being told, from a mandate that’s an alternative to fighting the status quo, through orders, building and labour, through the immensely long gap between 12.4 and 49.4 when mandate finally changes, and then the moment when ming is simply the work you have to do, your own quiet haven within the order of things. This is the first and only time ming reaches line 5, where it can be wholly identified with individual will and intention, and it does seem to be a symmetrical reflection of 7.2 in meaning as well as the changing of trigrams. It’s certainly come a long way from 6.4 to reach its zhong, ‘in the end’, in 56.5.

Here is the part where I wonder if I’m seeing a real pattern or a coincidence:

The mandate is mentioned in the Daxiang in hexagrams 14, 44, 47, 50 and 57. Hexagram 14 has qian below li; 56.5 changes li to qian. 44 has xun below qian, and 6.4 and 12.4 change qian to xun. And 47 has kan below dui, and 49.4 changes dui to kan.

Then the pattern, if there is one, breaks down: 50′s component trigrams differ by two lines, and 57′s not at all, so neither could represent a single line change. (All that can really be said for them is that 50 follows 49 and 57 follows 56, the last two Zhouyi mentions of mandate. But maybe this is a little weak, even for me.) And despite 7.6 and 11.6, there is no mention of mandate in the Daxiang of 15.

Probably my imagination, then. Only… there does seem to be at least a resonance in meaning between the line texts and ‘their’ Images.

‘Fire dwells above heaven. Great possession.
The noble one ends hatred and spreads the good,
She yields to heaven and rests in her mandate.’
…with the Traveller’s Retreat…

‘Below heaven is the wind. Coupling.
The prince sends out mandates and commands to the four corners of the earth.’
…with the times when there’s mandated work to be done even though you cannot master the argument, cannot set the world right, cannot achieve great or lasting things… cannot take the woman because such a match would not last…

‘Lake without water, Confined.
A noble one carries out the mandate, fulfils her aspiration.’
…with the moment of truth and confidence when time and will flow together and the mandate changes…

What do you think? Am I imagining things, or might the writers of the Daxiang have had something like this in mind?

The book in brief: what you get

• An intriguing, thoughtful introduction.
• A translation that blends the received version of the Zhouyi with emendations taken from the Mawangdui (MWD)manuscript. (With just one exception, she doesn’t tell you which is which – but she does give you page references to Wilhelm/Baynes, Lynn and Shaughnessy’s Mawangdui translation for each hexagram, and the Chinese text she’s using in an appendix.)
• A translation of the Image. (Oh, except for hexagram 36, where it’s replaced by an excerpt from the Tuanzhuan. Odd.)
• Commentary on just eight of the line texts – but there are occasional interpolated glosses throughout offering a starting point for interpretation, like ‘matters affecting many people’ for ‘king’s business’ or ‘eliminating all your defences’ for the walls collapsing into the moat.
• An original, helpful commentary on each hexagram as a whole, based largely on the trigram imagery, blended with natural imagery from the Zhouyi and insights into Chinese thought and history.

Issues…

To be clear – I do like this book very much; I’ve been enjoying reading it, and I fully expect to be using it in readings. But there are a couple of issues that could get in the way of both enjoyment and use for you, so let me get those out of the way before I move on to the good stuff…

It’s described on the front cover as ‘The Original I Ching’ and on the back cover as ‘based on the core text created during the first centuries of the Zhou dynasty.’ Only there’s a basic problem with going looking for an ‘original I Ching’: it’s not like researching the work of a single modern author, where if you go far enough back the variant texts will resolve themselves into a single original. Travel far enough back through Yi’s history, and you will find not a single source, but multiple tributaries. Where is the ‘original’, and how are you to know when you’ve found it?

Margaret has chosen to use a blend of the Mawangdui (MWD) manuscript, which is the most complete but not the oldest of the early versions we have, with the received text, creating a truly ‘original I Ching’. There’s nothing wrong with that, nor with choosing the MWD as a source and deciding not to look at the more fragmentary, earlier texts discovered more recently. Learning and discoveries never stop with the Yi, so if anything is ever going to get into print there has to come a point where the translator says ‘enough’.

What I don’t like, though, is that she only mentions these earlier texts in a little footnote in the introduction, and then in her commentary on hexagram 18 implies that the received meaning of corruption and the ancestral curse is altogether superseded by the ‘earlier’ MWD meaning of ‘branching out’. So all the richness of imagery that comes with the ancestral curse is lost, while she pretends that it never meant more than ‘saving insect-infested food’!

Argh, somewhat. I like working with hexagram 18 – it’s one that speaks particularly clearly and eloquently and works inner magic for people. (By the way, it seems the oldest manuscript does have it as the gu curse.) And in general, I’d rather have Margaret’s translation of the whole of the received version – partly so I could more easily compare like with like, putting her work alongside other translators’, and partly because the received version is what I use in readings, and it just isn’t practical suddenly to switch to a whole different text and turn 18 into ‘Branching Out’ or 19 into ‘The Forest’.

The second issue is also a good thing, in a way. Margaret has that essential scholar’s honesty that refuses to invent meanings to fill in gaps: she even says in her introduction that her book ‘aims to be as clear or as vague as the text itself.’ The unpretentiousness of her translation is appealing – ‘You should’ for the junzi of the Image, for instance, or ‘crossing the great river will work out’ or ‘impeded’/'on foot’ for 39. She offers lucid, intelligent explanations of recurrent phrases (like crossing the great river and yuan heng, li zhen) in her introduction.

However, when she comes to something unclear, it remains quite authentically unclear. 37.3, for instance, she translates,

‘The family goes “shyow-shyow”. Remorse and danger, but good fortune. Wife and children go “shee-shee”. In the end, distress.’

and adds a footnote,

‘It is unclear which emotions were associated with these sounds. The first may indicate anger or joy; the second may be happy.’

This is refreshingly open and completely without that irritating ‘I know what this means and I’ll make it mean it, damn it!’ translator’s attitude. However, it does often leave the reader without much of a starting point.

There’s next to no interpretation offered of line texts in general – some italicised commentary on eight of the 384, the occasional gloss in parentheses – so that often you’re left on your own to work with something like,

‘Sincerity. In peeling, danger.’ (58.5)

That’s fair enough. But at times it seems there is just no attempt to make sense in the translation itself:

‘Reversing the jaws. Gnashing at the warp at the north. Going on a campaign would bring misfortune.’ (27.2)

‘Jaws reversed: good fortune. The tiger gazes “dan-dan” (his eyes down], his face “didi” (flute-like). No blame.’ (27.4)

And for 29.4, here is all you get:

‘Six in the fourth place: (this line has to do with the bronze containers used in sacrificial rituals, replacing them with earthenware pots, and with either a wine ladle or angelica coming from a window. The one clear statement is: ) In the end, no danger [or blame].’

I can sympathise absolutely with the feeling behind this kind of note. It arises after a few weeks or years spent looking at every meaning, usage and variant of every character in a line, parsing it every which way, maybe looking at a small mountain of sample readings and consulting the Yi to ask it what it means for good measure, and still being all at sea. (Come to think of it, hexagram 29 is an apt place for that to happen, isn’t it?) But seeing this note in place of a translation still makes me feel as though an early draft went to the printers by mistake. I feel the same way about flute-like tiger faces – oh, and the standard of proof-reading, which is really not good at all.

Good things

Let me move on to the things I particularly like about the book.

The introduction makes interesting reading. It’s permeated by an awareness that this is and has always been an oracle, not just a foundational philosophical/metaphysical text. So towards the beginning she says,

‘Over the centuries, many have found that consulting the Changes can encourage thoughtful decision-makers to see aspects of situations to which they had been blind. The natural images in the Changes, when considered as analogous to recurring human situations, can provide fruitful images for meditation as people search for ways through – or out of – their particular dilemmas.’

and

‘It is best used as part of a thoughtful process involving repeated meditation, journaling, and the advice of others. It was not intended to replace moral dicta but to assist those determined to act responsibly. It can prod us toward a deeper, more informed view of the world and our actions within it.’

And towards the end, when she offers two example readings, one is modern and the other dates from the second century – a fact she doesn’t mention until after walking you through the reading. So the reader is left with a sense of Yi’s powerful history as an oracle – which is good.

I also especially like her advice on how to divine, something she regards as being part of a process of decision-making that includes information-gathering and talking to people. (Since a classic and painful mistake is for people to use divination as an alternative to these things, this is a Good Thing.)

Her ideas for questions are reasonable, if weirdly limited – why only decision-making and no asking for advice or insight? – and she seems stuck on the idea that second hexagram equals future results (not that that’s unusual). But then she suggests that you write down your response to the reading, journal before bed, sleep on it, write more the following morning, talk with a friend for advice, keep coming back to your reading for a few days and meditate on the Image. That’s far, far more true-to-life than your average, ‘cast coins, add up values, look up hexagram, get answer’ kind of account. ‘Expect to find wisdom though not clarity,’ she says. ‘If the answer seems clear, be sure to read all sections again, carefully.’

You can tell this is the voice of someone who has consulted the oracle, not just treated it as the object of study. She even mentions in passing, in the Acknowledgements, having introduced students to the oracle and had them write essays about their reading experiences. Hooray!

There’s also intriguing insight here into Margaret’s approach to translation. She explains how the concepts of yin and yang were introduced long after the Zhouyi was written. Instead of merely mentioning this, though, she has taken care to avoid the casual conflation of solid lines with yang and open with yin (I only have to look at my own book’s introduction for a handy example of that ), remove this conceptual layer from her thinking about the text, and explore what is revealed behind it. (And she includes a lovely interpretation in passing of 61.2 and its mention of ‘yin’.) And there’s a good account here of her take on Hexagram 44 – the accounts of 44 in Karcher’s Total I Ching and my book both owe a lot to her original article on this.

The commentary on each hexagram is original, sometimes surprising (24 as an earthquake?) and often insightful. It’s mostly based on the Image, and you can tell that, as she says in the Introduction, this arises from personal daily reflections:

‘I have lived with these words for many years, writing down the characters in the morning and carrying them throughout the day, memorising them, and writing the characters over and over when I could…’

(And I do very much like the fact that she’s included the Image because it speaks to her, and never mind historical authenticity.)

She uses her background knowledge of ancient Chinese life and thought to provide a context that makes things more accessible. There are little references to Confucius and Mencius; there’s an explanation of the setting-right of the calendar in 49 and this at the end of Hexagram 56:

‘A further note: In early China, fire was used to clear mountainous land and prepare it for cultivation or easier access by humans. So for them it was a civilizing, fructifying act, not one of long-term destruction. In th same way, in being wanderers (or pilgrims), we must leave behind many ties and almost all physical possessions. But by acceding to this emptiness and vulnerability, we open ourselves to new worlds, some of which may be far more fruitful for us than our current homes.’

Margaret writes in a plain, direct style that encourages you simply to contemplate the natural imagery – the scenery of the trigrams (had you thought of 26 as ‘the skies that lie among mountain peaks’?) and also the imagery of the original. Here is the bamboo in the name of Hexagram 60:

‘Bamboo is a rapidly growing grass with hollow stems. Each hollow tube terminates in a woody membrane that blocks the hollow. These solid portions have two functions: they give strength to the plant and they are the loci for branching and other growth. Without the joints, bamboo would collapse easily, and never grow into sturdy tree-tall plants.’

She goes on to compare this to a university course being just a term long to support the development of skills and the making of better long-term choices, and to simple, frugal living. We might already know all this about bamboo plants, but I find that to have it presented to me explicitly like this keeps me from skimming past the imagery and encourages the kind of slowing down and contemplating that makes for readings that work. Without being plunged into a sea of imagery and associations (no mythic or legendary dimension here), you’re nonetheless quietly guided into a meditative approach. And this is why I expect to be picking this book up quite often, to see if it can take me back to beginner’s mind again and out of my ‘I-know-what-this-one’s-about’-ism.

Who it’s for

I don’t think this is a beginner’s book, or not on its own, because of that lack of interpretation I mentioned, and the way it sometimes extends into the translation. But alongside a book that’s more inclined to ‘tell you what it means’ line by line, this would be a good addition: an alternative perspective, a common sense approach without moralising, and a reminder that the more prolix commentator didn’t really know what it meant, either.

I think it’ll be especially useful for non-beginners who have a store of their own ideas and could do with coming back to basics. And it would also appeal to anyone who’s averse to over-complication and drawn to the natural imagery of the trigrams.

You’ll find it at Amazon.com, and in Canada and the UK.

A variation on this ‘just an oracle’ idea (…I think this post is going to become an all-purpose rant…) is that since divination is so self-evidently shallow, the wise ancients couldn’t possibly have been interested in it. So it’s said or implied that the Yi isn’t really an oracle, or at all events not merely for divination.

Well… brief review of the history… the Yi was written as an oracle. Texts were joined with hexagrams because hexagrams are something you can cast – something that directly emerges from the quality of the time and embodies it.

I believe this is why people have been fascinated with the book for the past few millennia: not so much because of any ancient concepts it contains as because a cast hexagram, or the relationship and tension between two hexagrams, has this power to describe and embody present truth. (And because of this it has a unique power to breathe life into concepts we come up with long after it was originally written – not least the pairing of yin and yang.)

Yi, the oracle called Change, is still doing what it has been doing for 3,000 years or so: helping people to see reality. It helps ordinary people to see and think differently as they navigate their ordinary lives.

My most recent reading is a pretty good example of that. For a while now, I’ve been trying to build some relationships with other bloggers and practitioners online. I’ve been searching out people to follow and trying to think of something worthwhile to say in response to their posts, and I haven’t really created any momentum at all. So I asked Yi for advice, and received hexagram 1, line 3:

‘Noble one creates and creates to the end of the day,
At nightfall on the alert, as if in danger.
No mistake.’

From this I can glean a couple of practical hints: work harder, and be on the alert later in the day (which makes sense, because nightfall for me is prime working hours for the American people I want to connect with). It also completely reverses my whole idea of what this is about: following and trying to respond is the stuff of hexagram 2 – Earth, the Receptive – and I’ve received hexagram 1, the Creative. Create, create!

So here I am this morning writing a post instead of searching for a place to comment… and you might be thinking that when writing a rant about the non-trivial nature of divination, I could have found a better reading to use as illustration. Well, yes… and no.

This is not the obviously life-changing kind of reading. Most readings most people do are not. They just allow us to understand ourselves and one another a little better, to see things from another point of view, to notice the current of things so we can spend a little less effort struggling against it, to liberate a little more of our potential. We might end up choosing a better car or having a more skilful conversation with a colleague.

There is something disconcerting about this, isn’t there?

From the Dazhuan as translated by Richard Rutt:

“Yi, being aligned with heaven and earth,
can wholly set forth the dao of heaven and earth.
Yi looks up to observe the patterns of heaven,
and looks down to examine the veins of earth.
Thus:
it knows the causes of darkness and light,
origins and ends;
it comprehends the meaning of birth and death,
how form and essence fuse in an entity,
lasting till the soul departs in alternation.
Thus:
it knows the condition of spirits and souls.
Being in accord with heaven and earth,
it does not go contrary to them;
its knowledge embraces all things,
and its dao assists all under heaven.
Thus it does not err.”

And Yi is also really helpful when I need to rethink my approach to social media.

This is not an easy gulf to bridge, between the greatness of the Yi and the trivia of readings. Only… if I divine about trivia, does that make divination trivial?

Here is what I have found still more powerful in readings than the help and insight they offer: the immediate experience of connection, of being part of the whole. You ask a question, you do something wholly random… and suddenly, something is speaking directly to you. You find you are seen and acknowledged; you might burst into laughter or tears in response. There’s a sense of wonder and belonging at the same time. Just an oracle.

What I came to love about volunteering was how great things arose from such simplicity. You see what someone needs, and you provide it, spontaneously and without thought. The things you do may all be very small, and often the things the people around you do are also small, but when a whole group of people with this same motive force comes together, something great emerges and lives are changed.

Last week I had 14 as part of my weekly reading. My re-application forms for volunteering arrived (I’m changing volunteer placement, which means more government checks – more 47 than 14, those…) and I was on the alert for 14-ish things.

When I was coming home on Thursday night, I found myself short of money for the ’bus fare. Before I even had time to be embarrassed, much less to worry how I was going to travel the 10 miles to the train station, the man I’d been chatting to at the stop stepped forward to pay the difference for me. We were perfect strangers with nothing in common, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever see him again. He saw a need and – in the same moment – acted to fill it.

Later in the same trip, I was cycling home from the station and had a slight mishap with the back of a parked car. Someone showed up to move my bike off the road, check I was OK, and wait with me in the rain until my husband arrived. When we’d assured him I was fine and there was nothing else he could do, he quietly went home.

A couple of days later, a forum I just joined organised their first group phone call. There is no leader running this group. Someone has created a private forum for us; someone has an account with a free teleconference provider and volunteered to lead the call; someone else collected up our email addresses and sent out reminders with the details; someone else provided download space for the call recording. The call happened, and it was good.

All this is 14 in action: Great Possession that arises because people see needs and fill them, and because we co-operate.

Where is this to be found in Hexagram 14 – besides in experience, that is?

There’s the name of the hexagram: Great Possession. The word for ‘Possession’, which also means ‘being’, shows an open hand. According to LiSe, “Later a piece of meat was added, to emphasize possessing.” You can see as much on the Chinese Etymology site – except that, on reflection, you cannot tell whether the hand is holding the meat or offering it.

(While you are enjoying the wealth of information on the Chinese etymology page, you may notice that – wholly in the spirit of Hexagram 14 – it has a ‘Paypal donate’ button towards the top right. Please use it!)

Also… 14 follows from 13; Great Possession arises from People in Harmony. In fact, since these two hexagrams are an inverted pair, you can say that Great Possession is the same thing, the same pattern of energies, as People in Harmony, just seen from a different angle. (And if you read about the ‘gift economy’, as I’ve just begun doing, this makes wonderful sense.)

And most simply of all: the pattern of the lines of hexagram 14 -

- shows five strong, solid, yang lines gathered around a single, open yin line in the fifth place. This is the place of vision and choice, and it is the ruling line. The guiding principle of this hexagram is the yin: what is open, responsive and (as Karcher says of hexagram 2) willing to provide what is needed. It creates the upper trigram li – fire, light and vision. Seeing what is needed, responding spontaneously to provide it, Great Possession comes into being and we are wealthy.