Hilary Barrett, I Ching

Archive for the 'Connecting hexagrams' Category

A trigram sequence vignette

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

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 [...]

The Sequence in trigrams - and decades

Friday, March 21st, 2008

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 [...]

Inside and outside

Friday, January 25th, 2008

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. [...]

Patterns of complementary hexagrams

Monday, November 26th, 2007

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 -
[...]

More patterns in the Sequence of hexagrams

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

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 [...]

The family of Hexagram 37

Monday, May 7th, 2007

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 [...]

Layers of story

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

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 [...]