Hilary Barrett, I Ching

Archive for March, 2011

Great Possession as Offering

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Just one more of those moving-line-related connections that makes it look for all the world as if the people who wrote this oracle knew what they were doing – Start with Hexagram 14, Great Possession – ‘Activate’ its third and fourth lines – change them by opening them out from yang into yin, solid into [...]

Additive hexagrams?

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

OK, here’s the off-the-wall idea for the day. What if you could add two hexagrams together? Not changing lines to move from one hexagram to another, but ‘adding’ them, on the basis that yin + yin = yin, but yang + yin = yang, because you imagine the yang line ‘filling’ the empty yin space. [...]

Already Crossing?

Saturday, March 5th, 2011

On the one hand, ‘Already Across’ is certainly a good, literal translation of the name of Hexagram 63. The old character for ‘already’ shows someone turned away from a food pot, implying a completed action. The historical resonances of the book as a whole imply that this is the moment when the Zhou have already [...]