Hilary Barrett, I Ching

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 [...]

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 [...]

There’s something about writing on the Yijing – it’s not like other books, that just sit there mutely and allow themselves to be translated. I think people who’ve worked through the hexagram-by-hexagram threads over the years have had similar experiences, as the line of the day just happens to show up in their experience. There [...]

Hexagram 14, Great Possession, says at line 4, 匪其彭。无咎。 - Not your (or its) peng, no mistake. Peng means power and dominance – Wu Jing Nuan translates with his usual succinctness, ‘Not his to be strong’  - and the old character shows a drum with three strokes next to it, perhaps representing the sound of the [...]