Hilary Barrett, I Ching

It’s a worthwhile exercise to look through the Sequence of hexagrams and see how it occasionally uses trigrams to tell stories - not just in its larger landscapes, but on a small scale. I’ve written about this quite a few times before, but I just noticed one that I’d missed out: the presence [...]

And I thought I wrote about trigrams in the Sequence. Heh. Here’s Frank Kegan doing a very complete and insightful job of it. He sees the Sequence in groups of ten (which I’ve found works startlingly well - you might think that more patterns would emerge if you took it in eights, but that [...]

The other day, after a series of readings circulating between hexagrams 58, 47, 48, 57, I noticed another little nugget of patterns within the Sequence of hexagrams.
Hexagram 37 describes life inside the home, defined by its boundaries (37.1). Hexagram 38 is outside the walls: opposed, seeing differently, alien.
Hexagram 47 describes life trapped inside walls. [...]

Every hexagram of the I Ching has its complement: the hexagram created by changing every line to its opposite. The complement of hexagram 1 is hexagram 2 -

and the complement of hexagram 63 is hexagram 64 -
[...]

J.M. Berger has been working on the King Wen Sequence of the hexagrams (that’s the traditional sequence), approaching it from an angle I hadn’t thought of or seen elsewhere. He looks at the line changes necessary to change each hexagram into the next: changing all the lines of hexagram 1 to give 2, 2.1.5 [...]

Every hexagram can be said to have a ‘nuclear hexagram’, formed by taking its inner lines and ‘unfolding’ them. From the original hexagram’s lines 123,456, you build a new hexagram with 234,345. The effect is like a seed germinating, and the nuclear hexagram’s often interpreted as a latent potential within the original. Here’s what [...]

The more I look into the King Wen sequence, the more depths I discover. Take the two hexagrams that describe grand, historic events of legendary proportions: 49, Radical Change, and 55, Abundance. Hexagram 49 describes the time of revolution, when the Zhou people overthrew the Shang. And hexagram 55 has been identified with a [...]