Hilary Barrett, I Ching

There’s a much-quoted passage from Wang Bi’s General Remarks on the Zhouyi about concepts and images:

“Images are the means to express ideas. …The images are generated by ideas, thus one can ponder the images and so observe what the ideas are. The ideas are yielded up completely by the images, and the images are made explicit by the words. Thus, since the words are the means to explain the images, once one gets the images, he forgets the words, and, since the images are the means to allow us to concentrate on the ideas, once one gets the ideas, he forgets the images. Similarly, ‘…the fish trap exists for the sake of fish; once one gets the fish, he forgets the trap.’ If this is so, then …the images are traps for the ideas.

…Anything that corresponds analogously to an idea can serve as its image, and any concept that fits with an idea can serve as corroboration of its nature. If the concept involves really has to do with dynamism, why must it only be presented in terms of the horse?”

(From RJ Lynn, Classic of Changes – the complete Yijing with all ten Wings and Wang Bi’s original commentary.)

Now, I know next to nothing about Wang Bi’s thought, and I’m quoting excerpts out of context – and also out of the historical context within which he was writing. I believe he was emphasising that images are metaphors and point beyond themselves, rather than necessarily trying to argue that imagery is basically redundant and can be usefully discarded in favour of abstractions. However, his choice of words (and imagery!) does lend itself to support of that view… so here’s another quotation, in support of an alternative view.

This is from James Hillman, A Blue Fire, talking about dream imagery:

“For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about the anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what that snake is doing [...] The moment you’ve defined the snake, interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it, and then the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality, or my cold black passions or my mother or whatever it is, and you’ve lost the snake. [...] See, the snake’s no longer necessary the moment it’s been interpreted, and you don’t need your dreams any more because they’ve been interpreted.”

So Hillman agrees that once you have the concept, you can discard the image… he just doesn’t see this as such a helpful move. He  continues:

“But I think you need them all the time, you need that very image you had during the night. For example, a policeman, chasing you down the street… you need that image, because that image keeps you in an imaginative possibility … if you say, ‘Oh, my guilt complex is loose again and is chasing me down the street,’ it’s a different feeling, because you’ve taken up the unknown policeman into your ego system of what you know, your guilt. You’ve absorbed the unkown into the known (made the unconscious conscious) and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened, nothing. You’re really safe from that policeman, and you can go to sleep again.”

There are two pages here I could happily quote in their entirety… but just three more sentences:

“The image is always more inclusive, more complex than the concept.”

“The images are where the psyche is.”

“The gift of an image is that it affords a place to watch your soul.”

This corresponds with my own experience from readings with Yi. Its images – made of lines, trigrams, words, deep etymological roots, allusions to myth and legend… – are not reducible to concepts, and not replaceable in the divination process. (This is why I go on endlessly about how vital it is to have a translation that gives you as much access as possible to that original richness of imagery. Even if the author has done a superlative job of expressing the a concept behind the image, this is not the gift.)

It’s one thing to consider how you need better ‘personal boundaries’ when responding to other people’s emotions. It’s something else altogether to be given the image of your self as a mountain with space for a lake. This can become part of your bodily awareness of your emotions, and allows you to change and recreate your sense of self out of this new imagery.

This is next to impossible to describe, but it’s an example from my own experience, receiving Hexagram 31 when asking about empathy, experiencing other people’s emotions as my own, and it did have that effect of reshaping my inner landscape. Perhaps this is how an image Yi offers is a different kind of gift from those that arise in dreams – not only a place to watch your soul, but somehow a place, a shaping force, that allows it to change.

I’ve seen the same truth at work in reading for others. It’s one thing to tell someone they need to be strong and confident (this isn’t, as a rule, news to anyone); quite another to tell them they can become a tiger. (And when a person does become a tiger, this is a remarkable transformation to behold!) What happens here is far beyond anything I might ‘explain’ to the person I’m reading for, or anything that I (or they) might ‘understand’.

Hexagram 10 tells you that you are ‘treading the tail of the tiger.’ The first question to ask yourself about it is always – naturally enough – ‘What tiger? Where?’ There is something here that could devour you; you need to know what it is.

In some readings, the tiger is not hard to identify – ‘What if I ask my boss for a raise?’ for instance. But there are also inner tigers, hungry and fierce, and divination, too, can be tigerish in its intensity.

Following a tiger is not something you generally fall into by accident. Tigers, in old China, could certainly eat you, but they might also grant protection and fertility. You follow close behind the tiger because you are drawn to it: the power, the high, pure energy.

This desire for communion, for a connection with something more, is conveyed through the many layers of Hexagram 10’s imagery: the tiger, the trigrams, the name of the hexagram.

Its component trigrams, dui below qian, show the lake reflecting the sky into its depths, or the youngest daughter whose dances court (and perhaps embody) the immutable power of heaven. The noble one observes this carefully -

‘Heaven above, lake below. Treading.
The noble one differentiates above and below,
And makes a place for the people’s aspiration.’

- and recognises a difference between the heights and the depths that reflect them, and so has a more expansive awareness of dimensions, and finds a place for that aspiration that reaches upward.

The name of the hexagram, lu, Treading, is a complex character showing shoes and footsteps, and also the person who sat as the representative of the deceased ancestor at sacrifices (something that Stephen Karcher evokes here and here). It could be – this is speculative – that when you Tread, it is as if you were stepping into the shoes of an ancestor, embodying their spirit. Again, you would be seeking that connection with spiritual power – and you would need great respect and great skill to walk so closely with ancestors.

Treading is also described as ‘conduct’ – how you make your way in the world. How will you walk your path – and, most importantly, what powers are you walking with? Have you studied their nature and learned how to be with them?

Your studies might have begun in the preceding hexagram: 9, Small Taming. The small farmer watches the skies, sees the dark clouds still not quite raining, and works his plot one weed at a time. This can be a quiet work of (self-)cultivation – but it can also be a frustrating time of not quite reaching fulfilment, not quite managing to contain or channel the powers, not being quite big or strong enough to effect change.

But the noble one here is learning the ways of heaven, shaping himself to its laws as responsively as the wind, ‘cultivating the natural pattern of character’. It’s as if he were serving an apprenticeship -

‘Things are tamed,’ says the Sequence, ‘and then there are the rituals. And so Treading follows.’

Once you have learned the rituals, learned how to relate and interact with the power of heaven, then you may be able to tread, cautiously, behind the tiger.

I’ve been taking a good, long look at the Way of Harmony I Ching software.

It’s designed to encourage that kind of steady, take-your-time approach: it offers you gentle colours, the option of soft background music or sounds, and a simple, uncluttered interface. Some real thought has gone into creating a piece of software that allows for a spacious experience of divination: there are relaxation instructions and audio guides available to use before consulting; there is information on Taoism; divination is introduced as an intuitive, meditative process. It may be a computer program, but it doesn’t reduce divination to a ‘press button, get answer’ process. (Hooray.) Also, it doesn’t dogmatically impose this approach; if you want to open the program and cast a hexagram quickly, you can. (Hooray, again.)

It’s true that this software has been around for a while, and the interface has an old-fashioned feel to it. But it also feels friendly, and there is plenty of good stuff hidden behind its simple initial menu. Under ‘Additional features’ > ‘Insight screen’ there’s consistently lucid, thoughtful advice on approaching and using the oracle (though you’ll want to take the ‘history’ section with a pinch of salt), as well as an introdction to Daoist texts and practice. There’s good information on trigrams with additional hexagram commentary based on their qualities under ‘Additional features’ > ‘Trigram chart’. It’s not always obvious where everything is (for instance, there’s commentary on the significance of each line position under the heading ‘Trigram chart’), but you can explore without getting lost; it’s always easy to get back to the main screen.

Another good thing: there are many helpful suggestions for further reading, including a generous review of the San Shan Yijing software – I think that speaks volumes in itself.

The journal function is easy to use, with a list of past entries to review and edit. The journal is also the place to go to find the commentary on any hexagram, just by clicking on it in the list on this screen – so if you want to chronicle past readings here, or just browse the hexagrams, you can. However, there is no journal search, which is likely to get awkward if you store a lot of readings here.

Still another good thing: in addition to the straightforward three-coin approach, and the option of entering a reading you’ve cast yourself, there are a couple of imaginative approaches to selecting a hexagram. There’s a ‘mirror reading’, where you’re guided through a landscape and component trigrams are selected according to the paths you choose to explore. And there’s intuitive selection: an animation of the hexagram sequence that stops when you click; you can have it whiz past too fast for your conscious mind to follow, and watch and absorb the change – and click to stop it if and when you feel the right moment to do so. (I found I’d stopped it at hexagram 54, the primary hexagram of my reading for the year.)

For the sake of completeness, I should give you the not-so-good things. Firstly, a minor technical glitch in Windows 7: if you use alt+tab to move between open programs, Way of Harmony doesn’t appear on the list. So it’s possible to open the software (which occupies the full screen),  use alt+tab to switch to another program – and then be unable to find your way back. But this isn’t an insurmountable problem: if you reduce any other programs you might need for your consultation to something less than full screen, you can keep Way of Harmony visible and accessible in the background.

You may find this doesn’t bother you at all once you get used to it – download a free trial and see.

Another disadvantage: this won’t work as a sole resource for your readings, as it doesn’t include a full translation – just commentary on/ paraphrase of the Judgement, and an almost-translation of Image and line texts.

The commentary is unique to this software, and it’s good. A couple of examples – just small excerpts from longer commentaries -

Hexagram 1:

“The Creative…  is the
spiritual spark which initiates the creative cycle of nature.
The Receptive responds by providing a vessel to shape
the spirit energy’s potential into energetic form.”

Hexagram 2:

“You are invited to welcome the receptive energies that this
Hexagram represents and to reflect on how its simple, open,
and devoted responsiveness expresses itself in your life. The
time favors relaxed listening, intuitive knowing, and tuning
mind and feeling to the often unconscious rhythms of nature.”

The author regularly uses ‘you are invited’ as an opening phrase, and characterises each hexagram as a time with its own unique qualities.

But that almost-translation, using some but not quite all of the original, inevitably loses some of its specificity and vividness. The horse’s lost yoke-mate in 61.4 becomes ‘you turn away from your companion’. ‘This makes my heart ache’ in 48.3 becomes ‘a sad situation’. The flowing tears of blood in 3.6 become ‘profound wounding’ (though he does then quote the original in the commentary!).

And so on. It’s a shame.

He’s also made some clear choices to change the translation of the Image: the ‘noble one’ is abolished and replaced with the ‘way of heaven’ or ‘way of development’ or ‘way to connect people to heaven’, and so forth. I can understand a desire to avoid the idea of a ‘superior person’, but I don’t think depersonalising the text actually helps. There are more drastic changes at Hexagram 8, where the image of the king investing in his chosen relationships, building cities to connect with his feudal lords, is swapped for a general ideal of universal human fellowship. He explains what he’s doing, and why, but something is lost.

Each hexagram commentary concludes with a poetic reflection on the hexagram, called ‘Beyond the Changes’. Here’s an example from Hexagram 61:

Patiently waiting in the depths of an open heart
is the doorway
to the wondrous mystery of your ultimate nature.

Gently devoted to truth
Perfectly surrendered to the wholeness of the Tao…

Sincere good fortune.

There is an unpretentious, simple approach throughout the commentary and the software as a whole; infused by the author’s Daoist view, it seems designed above all to draw you into the experience of divination. That makes it a good option for beginners; true, it would be a vastly better one if only it included a full translation, but it does recommend good books – and not just tucked away in a ‘further reading’ section, but after the commentary for every hexagram. The author’s very clear that his words are meant just as a ’starting point for your journey’.

A highlight for me is the substantial essay on ‘Creative Consultation’ you can find via the ‘insights screen’. It doesn’t say anything startlingly novel or scintillatingly brilliant – it just gives wise, down-to-earth, lucid advice on approaching the Oracle. For beginners, it lays good, lasting foundations; for others, it contains good, welcome reminders. I’d recommend you download the free trial if only to read it.

I’ve been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and just reached the chapter on the power of expectations to change perception. The introductory example comes from sport: the supporters of two rival teams watch the same key, game-deciding moment, and for one of them the ball (or player, or something – it’s American football, so it’s all Greek to me…) is obviously conspicuously in, and for the other it’s just as obviously out.

“Although both friends were watching the same game, they were doing so through markedly different lenses. One saw the pass as in bounds. The other saw it as out. In sports, such arguments are not particularly damaging – in fact, they can be fun. The problem is that these same biased processes can influence how we experience other aspects of our world. These biased processes are in fact a major source of escalation in almost every conflict…”

This will all sound very familiar to anyone who’s read Hexagram 38, Opposing:

‘Opposing.
Small affairs, good fortune.’

Opposing and Diverging has to do with differences in vision – ‘looking askance’, in LiSe’s translation: watching the same things through different lenses, and seeing something different. This is good fortune in small affairs, such as sport; not good in great affairs, such as international conflicts.

The chapter also describes various experiments designed to show how expectations ‘program’ us to perceive differently – and also, interestingly enough, to discover ways that such programming could be overcome.

For instance, it turns out that the flavour of a certain beer can be improved by the addition of a few drops of balsamic vinegar. Offer people the original and improved versions in a blind taste test, and they tend to prefer the one with vinegar. Tell them in advance that one glass contains vinegar, and they tend to find it revolting. But tell them about the added vinegar after they’ve tried the beer, and they still like it.

So if you remove the context of expectations,  perceptions become clearer. Presumably if the two sports fans had been unable to identify which team was which, they’d have agreed about where the ball (or the player) landed.

I think this casts new light on 38.2 -

‘Meeting a master in the lane.
Not a mistake.’

This line hasn’t overcome the power of expectations to bias vision altogether – that happens in line 6, I think, where defences are lowered and apparent robbers turn out to be potential allies. Instead, it’s removed the context that sets expectations: the lane is a neutral place, nobody’s home ground, free from formalities and rules. This line’s zhi gua (the hexagram it moves to) is 21, Biting Through: it represents the most direct way to overcome the gulf of separation in 38, creating unity and insight. What you encounter here might still be quite different, even alien to you, but in the absence of preconceptions it can be a master and guide.

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?