Hilary Barrett, I Ching

This is just a speculative post, or a starting point for speculation…

I’ve started thinking of the trigram li – fire and light – as being like eyes, particularly when it’s the inner trigram. Then sometimes it seems to look out at the outer trigram, and sometimes it seems to look through the outer trigram, as through a lens or a filter to perception.

Hexagram 49, Radical Change: fire in the lake. I think of the tiger change and leopard change, and the trigrams start to look like the shaman’s eyes shining through the new mask. You could imagine how awareness is radically changed by its new way of relating and being; you could imagine how the way of being and relating (that is, the ‘form of government’ on a personal level) is transformed by a new awareness that lights it up from within.

Hexagram 36, Brightness Hiding: fire hidden away under the earth. It’s night-time; perhaps the eyes are closed, and the light of awareness is earthed up like a charcoal-burner’s fire.You might be hiding the extent of your insight (often what 36 seems to be advising); you might be seeing in an earth-like way: open, receptive, not doing anything to change what you see, just being aware.

Hexagram 63, Already Across: fire under water, the picture of a pot on the boil, and of awareness firmly trained on change, flow and risk. The noble one ‘reflects on distress and prepares to defend against it.’

Hexagram 13, People in Harmony, fire under heaven. I imagine the people gathered round the fire and looking up at the night sky, each tribe identifying one constellation as the image of their own ancestor, seeing how all the different shapes are part of one sky.

Hexagram 22, Beauty: fire under the mountain. The noble one is ‘bringing light to the many standards’, looking at the rules and boundaries, solid as rock, that contain human life. Perhaps she watches the changing patterns of light flickering over the rock, or perhaps she sees the mountain as if from the inside, observing how even this grows and changes. And perhaps she notices how the mountain stands in the way of her vision and limits how far she can see. She ‘does not venture to pass judgement.’

Hexagram 55, Abundance, Feng, the moment of decision: thunder and lightning culminate as one. The world is seen in terms of responsibility, what must be done. Swiftly, decisively, immediately, vision translates into action. (In contrast with Hexagram 21, where the trigrams are reversed, and action and experience translate into understanding.)

Hexagram 37, People the Home, fire inside and wind/wood outside. It could be that the family are looking out through the wooden structure of their home, seeing with the influence and mores of the home as their filter. It also suggests bringing clear awareness to your influence: the noble one’s  ‘words have substance and her actions are consistent.’

Hexagram 30, Clarity, fire within fire and spreading illumination, is harder to write about. I’ve an idea this may be because it refers to a kind of awareness that’s completely outside my experience.

Anyway, that’s one way to interpret li on the inside, as eyes and a place to see from.

(Does it play a similar role on the outside? Certainly in 64 it seems to be the eyes and ears of the fox crossing the river, li above kan…)

There’s a deep humour to the last two hexagrams of the Yijing.

63: Already Across. Already Completed. Every line is in what was traditionally said to be its ‘right place’ – that is, the yang lines are in the odd-numbered positions, 1, 3 and 5, and yin lines sit quietly in the even-numbered places, 2, 4 and 6. So each line is in harmonious relationship with its proper correspondent (1 with 4, 2 with 5, 3 with 6). Likewise, the trigrams show things are as they should be: there is fire below water; the pot is on the boil. Everything is in a good place and in good order; everything works.

The End.

Only, of course, not, since then comes Hexagram 64: Not Yet Across, Not Yet Completed. The pattern of lines is the precise opposite of 63, so every line is in exactly the wrong place; the trigrams are inverted, so water is below fire and not much can be done until things are put back in their proper relationships.

And to cap it all, if you look at the nuclear hexagram, the hidden core and latent seed within Already Across, you find Not Yet Across – while the nuclear hexagram hidden in Not Yet Across is Already Across.

The Book of Change would seem to be having a whole lot of fun with our cherished notions of arriving, finishing and completing.

But in addition to the play of structural elements, there is – as so often with Yi – a story to be told.It seems the book was first brought together and written down in early Zhou times, after the Zhou people had Already Crossed the river successfully, overthrown the Shang dynasty and begun to establish their own rule. The great arc of their story is felt throughout the book (as always, see Marshall’s Mandate of Heaven), and now here we reach the culmination, the completion – The End.

Only, of course, not.

The Zhou were telling a great story of how a dynasty could begin its rule in harmony with Heaven and blessed by its Mandate, and yet fall into corruption and lose all of this, and see the Mandate pass to a new power. This had happened to the first dynasty, the Xia, and they had been replaced by the Shang; and now the Shang had been replaced by the Zhou. The Mandate had been received, the river crossed, the new dynasty founded, order restored to the world.

In Song 255 from the Shijing, King Wen warns the Shang (the Yin) of the consequences of their ways, prefiguring their conquest by his people. Here are its final two stanzas:

‘King Wen said, “Come!
Come, you Yin and Shang!
It is not that God on high did not bless you;
It is that Yin does not follow the old ways.
Even if you have no old men ripe in judgement,
At least you have your statutes and laws.
Why is it that you do not listen,
But upset Heaven’s great charge?”

King Wen said, “Come!
Come, you Yin and Shang!
There is a saying among men:
‘When a towering tree crashes,
The branches and leaves are still unharmed;
It is the trunk that first decays.’
A mirror for Yin is not far off;
It is the times of the Lord of Xia.’

(From The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley – the word he translates as ‘charge’ is ming, Mandate.)

The words of the Song are full of confidence: the wise and upright Wen speaks, and there is no doubt of his moral authority to admonish the Shang, or his insight into the passing of the mandate.

But by the time the Zhou had crossed the river, Wen was already dead, and this story of mandate gained and lost had a new resonance.

The first stanza of that Song reads,

‘Mighty is God on high,
Ruler of his people below;
Swift and terrible is God on high,
His charge has many statutes.
Heaven gives birth to the multitudes of the people,
But its charge [ming] cannot be counted upon.
To begin well is common;
To end well is rare indeed.’

And the Oracle of Hexagram 63 reads,

‘Already across, creating small success.
Constancy bears fruit.
Beginnings, good fortune;
Endings, chaos.’

Perhaps these echoes of the song (which uses the same words as the oracle for ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’) suggest that a mirror for Zhou was also not far off. There’s no triumphalism here – more of a creeping unease implied by story and structure alike. Any teleology is part of a context of turning cycles, and incomplete in itself.

A thought about Hexagram 58, line 5… not yet completely confirmed by experience, just a thought…

Hexagram 58 is Opening, Joy and Communicating: the human figure with the great mouth who seems to dance and sing. This post is about its fifth line – the peak and culmination of the hexagram, as a rule, and its place of greatest choice – which reads, ‘Trusting in stripping away, there is danger.’

A little background should help to show where I’m coming from…

The Shuogua says of the trigram dui that is doubled to make this hexagram:

“Dui is the lake, is the youngest daughter, is the shamaness, is the mouth and tongue, is the deterioration [of plant life] and the breaking-off of what had been attached.”

(RJ Lynn, The Classic of Changes, p124)

There might perhaps be an old association with the Queen Mother of the West (the direction for dui in the Later Heaven bagua), a goddess who lives far, far to the west of human habitation:

“In appearance the Queen Mother of the West is like a human, with a panther’s tail and a tiger’s fangs, and she is a fine whistler. In her tangled hair she wears the sheng crown. She is the official in charge of vile plagues sent from heaven, and of the five dread evils.”

(The Shan Hai Ching, as quoted in Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology)

So she and dui have womanhood, and the West, and ‘deterioration’ of one kind or another in common, and maybe also tigers and leopards (thinking of hexagrams 10 and 49).

All of this is thoroughly vague and inconclusive, and I’m only starting with it to create a context for looking at 58, line 5 – the place of the ruler within the hexagram of Opening. If there is a place for a shamaness or a queen anywhere in the hexagram, this must surely be it: the dancing mediator in authority, ruler in her own domain.

And then precisely in this place of authority, she is connected (by the changing of 58.5) to Hexagram 54, the Marrying Maiden: the young girl, not yet a woman, who becomes only a junior wife and takes second place, where she has no authority at all.

Might Dui, the shamaness, be entering into marriage with the spirits as a junior bride?

To marry is also to ‘come home’ – and Opening to the spirits must needs involve letting go of ‘bringing order’ and relinquishing her personal ‘direction to go’, as the Oracle of Hexagram 54 says.

Then the moving line itself, 58.5, would show what it takes to make such a marriage:

‘Trusting in stripping away,
There is danger.’

This is the same ’stripping away’ as the name of Hexagram 23: the knife that cuts away the surfaces, leaving one feeling flayed, raw and exposed. The normal defences of the personality are stripped away – which is the work done by a shaman’s drugs, drums and dances. Then there is danger – a word that also means there are ghosts and spirits – and no protection to separate the shaman from the spirits.

It’s worth noticing that the line doesn’t actually say that this means misfortune. Sometimes, in the Yijing, it can still be worth going ahead even in the face of danger. Having said that… I can’t remember ever seeing a real-life reading with this line where the trust was well-placed. (I can remember twice seeing it refer to joining pyramid schemes, which is interesting!)

To discover whether this danger is to be braved rather than avoided, you’d need to ask what you are trusting, so that you allow your defences to be stripped from you; what ‘marriage’ you are entering into that warrants accepting the second place and surrendering control; what kind of ‘home’ you are joining. Perhaps a supremely wise and skilled shamaness could trust in stripping away and emerge unscathed?

Do you cast a reading for the year? For many years now, I’ve cast mine on my birthday – I’m lucky to have a birthday in early December, so there’s plenty of time for the reading to start to sink in during the depths of winter. Winter is an utterly natural time for introspection: the authors of the Daxiang for Hexagram 24 knew it -

‘Thunder dwelling in the centre of the earth. Returning.
The ancient kings closed the borders at winter solstice.
Itinerant merchants did not travel,
The prince did not tour the regions.’

- and so do the many people who contact me for readings at this time of year, almost always for the far-ranging, eagle’s-eye-view, ‘where now?’ kind of readings.

The question for an annual reading is a very simple one. James Wells asks what he ‘most needs to know or learn’; I asked for guidance; Sally Anne at ‘Change your life for good’ writes about using the I Ching to put her reflections on resolutions and intentions into perspective, asking for ‘a focal point for the coming year’.  You’re not asking exclusively for either advice or prediction, but for a touchstone to carry with you: what to expect, how to be, what to be aware of.

The question is simple; responding to the answer is less so, as you don’t know what it applies to. Sometimes absolutely no applications for it come to mind at all; occasionally one will be clear, but you can be sure that others will arise during the year that are impossible to anticipate now. I can see a few ways in which I’m like Hexagram 54’s Marrying Maiden (my primary hexagram for the year) – being a diviner, for instance, a mediator whose role is not to direct anything but only to make the relationship with the Oracle easier – but I anticipate a full year of ‘marrying maiden bootcamp’, learning how not to be in the driving seat.

So an annual reading typically comes with no ‘hooks’ to hang it on. You can’t close the loop and complete the process of interpretation, tying it up neatly by saying that this is what it was about. (True, it’s rare to be able to do that with any reading – but the annual reading just makes this a little more obvious.) The process of interpretation is drawn out over the full year, and it stays (and you stay) open for all that time.

Interpreting a reading always calls for a quality of patience – a willingness not to rush into ‘making sense of’ the answer, and allowing it to make sense in its own time. But while some readings require about two seconds of patient contemplation before the message takes shape for you, this one requires about twelve months.

So you explore and live your way into the reading. You have ‘aha!’ moments of connection, and (at least in my experience…) you also have the ‘argh!’ moments of realisation with hindsight. (The practice of keeping a reading in mind with honesty and openness is not easy, or at least I don’t find it so.) There are things that leap out at you just because you’ve become attuned to the reading’s pattern, so you are constantly learning about that way to be.

I suppose this is the basic purpose of an annual reading: to become more awake and aware, not to miss the clear and specific beauty of this time – like taking in the shape of a single snowflake before it melts.

One of the fascinating things about the structure of the Yijing is the way one hexagram in a pair (an odd-numbered hexagram with the even-numbered one that follows it, that is) can point to the other. It might contain it, or imply it, or give you a different perspective on it, like looking at the same scene through a different window. (An obvious example – in Hexagram 51, Shock, someone is not losing the ladle and libation: he represents the qualities of Hexagram 52, Stilling.)

Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, says that it is fruitful to cross the great river. The Tuanzhuan, the Commentary on the Judgement, adds,

‘Fruitful to cross the great river,
Riding a wooden boat’s emptiness.’

Your inner truth will move you to cross into new landscapes, and inner space is the vehicle that will carry you there; it is the boat’s emptiness that lets it float across the river. The shape of the hexagram itself -

- suggests the boat seen from above, or the inner structure of the hollow bamboo poles bound together to create it.

There seem to be echoes of the Daodejing -

‘The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends.’

(Legge’s translation)

The inner space makes you capable of the transition; the conviction of inner truth naturally wants to be translated into steady movement  -

‘Inner Truth means constancy bears fruit,
Hence being in accord with Heaven.’

Much as Hexagram 30 means not just a spark of insight but a steady light, so Inner Truth will translate a momentary awareness (a timeless one, perhaps) into a way of being. The name of the hexagram is strongly ‘vertical’: zhong, ‘inner’ and ‘central’, shows a vertical line bisecting a square, probably representing a pole with a drum mounted on it: 中. And fu, ‘truth’ and ‘confidence’, shows a bird’s claw coming down to cover a young one: 孚. Then the text shows how this vertical axis can be transposed into horizontal movement – the journey across the river, constancy, trustworthiness over time.

And so Hexagram 62 follows
- and the inner space has become inner animation and movement.

Or as the Sequence says,

‘To have trust naturally means acting on it, and so Small Exceeding follows.’

‘Exceeding’ means crossing over a line, making a transition. First you experience a truth inwardly, and then it becomes a message to carry safely out into the world. A flying bird (perhaps not unrelated to the young one in fu or the young crane in 61, line 2) shows you how.

Every now and then, I open a book and the words leap out at me as hexagram commentary – and then ramblings like these result…

Here’s Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, talking about faith.

‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself, that doesn’t need to be proved or demonstrated, that is able to contain uncertainty.’

(I imagine Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, and 孚, fu, truth.)

He encourages a faith that can embrace doubt rather than splitting it off. (Does that suggest a new idea about the ‘other’ of 61, line 1?) Then -

‘Also, if we don’t acknowledge the shadow side of faith, we tend to romanticize our belief and keep it in fantasy, apart from life. Jung tells about a dream of one of his patients, a theologian. In it the dreamer approaches a lake he had long avoided. As he draws near, a wind stirs the waters and makes ripples. He wakes up terrified. In discussing the dream Jung reminded him of the pool of Bethseda in the Gospel, which was stirred by an angel and became a healing water. But the patient was reluctant to respond. He didn’t like that stirring and he didn’t see a connection between theology and life. …To respond trustingly to the challenges of life and to the stirring of the soul’s waters is to bring faith to completion.’

Above the lake is the wind – Inner Truth – and the noble one here will engage in long deliberations to delay executions; he’ll take no firm, irreversible decisions. I suppose this must mean he is never completely certain – he’s always open to be moved, like the lake, and so there is always space for doubt.

Another hexagram-lens to see this through might be 54, the Marrying Maiden: the lake below, and the way it is stirred. The challenge of 54 – one of them, anyway – seems to be to find equilibrium and authenticity in a situation where you cannot ‘bring order’ of your own, or even set your own direction. Change happens to you, you get moved and ‘married’ into a new place, and you must needs grow into it; you don’t have the luxury of adjusting the situation to fit with your pace of growth. The lake is stirred, the vibrations travel through – and then there’s that impossibly lovely, enigmatic and untranslatable Image:

‘Above the lake, there is thunder. The Marrying Maiden.
A noble one through ever-flowing endings
Knows what wears out.’

She gets a clear understanding of what cannot last, what is brittle and susceptible to wearing out, by sensing the quality of flow that complete things have. ’…To respond trustingly to the challenges of life and to the stirring of the soul’s waters is to bring faith to completion.’

And Thomas Moore continues,

‘Belief can be fixed and unchanging, but faith is almost always a response to the presence of the angel, like the one who stirs the waters. Or it could be the angel who appears to the Virgin Mary and demands absurd faith in his message that she is pregnant with a divine child. “Fiat mihi,” she says to the angel, “Let it happen to me even though I don’t understand.” This angel, Gabriel, appears more often than you might think, telling us that we are pregnant with a new form of life that we should accept and trust.’

I’ve never been able to look at the Image of 54 without thinking of Mary – maiden become wife, mother of a future king (like the younger sister in 54, line 5), keeping these things and pondering them in her heart.

Ah – experience. People phone me up to say they’d like an interpretation from someone who has more of the stuff. We gather it in journals (and Change Circle’s WikiWing); it crystallises into a clear inner sense of what lines and hexagrams mean; it’s worth more than any 20 commentaries put together… so naturally I have to be contrary and write about its dangers.

Here’s one danger – after you’ve done a few hundred readings for people, you start to recognise their situations. There are patterns of human behaviour that are very, very recognisable – like, for instance, the man who hangs onto two women by keeping each one believing that, one day, he’ll commit to her alone. So when you hear the seventeenth woman explaining how loveless his relationship with that other woman is, and how he only stays with her because it feels safer, or because she entraps him with guilt, or something… well, you recognise the pattern.

And there lies the giant pitfall: that you (and when I say ‘you’ I mean ‘we’ or just ‘I’) start to read whatever hexagrams are cast through that pattern you already know. The insidious thing is that most of the time you’ll be quite right to recognise the pattern, it’ll lend you easy insight, and people will be delighted with how ‘accurate’ you are. But you are still basically engaged in a pattern-matching game, not in divination.

And here’s another – subtler and more difficult to check, I think. You have a powerful experience or two with a line; this goes into the journal and into your hexagram notes (if you keep such things), and it makes a tremendous impression on you. You come to ‘know’ that this is ‘what the line means’, and for all subsequent readings you will be looking for that same meaning.

Unfortunately, this is a bit like seeing two red cars and then knowing that all cars are red – which is not very helpful when crossing the road.

What’s the answer? It does help to have more examples, to build a real experience-based understanding of a line. Working on the book, I took whatever experience I’d already garnered over the years – and then went off and gathered a further half dozen readings or so for each line to check my ideas. (Interesting!)

But much more important than the collecting is somehow distilling the experience to its essentials. It’s easier to see this process with hexagrams than with individual lines, I think. Take Hexagram 23, Stripping Away: I’ve seen it in readings referring to surgery, and to death. What it means isn’t either of these, though, but something more like having what is no longer viable cut away. So 23 in a reading could just as well indicate that it’s time to shed some part of your self-image, or to replace the staircarpet.

Naturally, with a hexagram, any extreme misconceptions are likely to be corrected quite soon by other readings. With a line, that you might see only once in several years, we need to be that much more wary.

I don’t really have a conclusion for these ruminations beyond the obvious: divination is something that happens quite independently of experience. You create a clear, clean inner space where you can bring together person, question and oracle – a unique meeting – and you watch/sense the connections as they arise. Then experience comes in, to enrich your awareness.