Hilary Barrett, I Ching

The Vessel, ding, is the name of hexagram 50. It refers to a particularly beautiful and sacred bronze vessel, fit for food to be shared with the ancestors, strong enough to inaugurate a dynasty.
You move your ding by inserting a carrying handle through its ‘ears’, loops on its rim. Hexagram 50, line 6, says that [...]

Hexagram 30, Clarity, has a lot to say about understanding transience. The fourth line is especially emphatic:
‘Sudden,
Comes,
Burns,
Dies,
Thrown out.’
Here is something that flares up brightly, but dies away for lack of fuel. Wilhelm sees someone who ‘rises quickly to prominence but produces no lasting effects.’ Stephen Karcher sees ‘an omen of what must be cast out.’ [...]

I’ve been revisiting the idea of the ‘non-people’ in hexagram 12. The most helpful way to understand them, most of the time, is as people we regard, for whatever reason, as not quite ‘like us’ enough to be real. Most of the time, the problem is with the labelling and consequent failure of communication, not [...]

Following on from a post on hexagram 53, line 1…
‘Wild geese gradually advance to the shore.
The small child, danger,
There are words,
No mistake.’
The obvious question about this line - and I always like to ask the most obvious question - is ‘Why is the small child in danger?’
I believe it’s because we’re at the very beginning [...]

Brad Hatcher points out that 14 out of 64 hexagrams’ first lines mention feet. I wonder whether there isn’t a fifteenth implied at 49.1:
‘For binding use yellow cowhide’
What might you bind with yellow cowhide? It could be a tethered animal, of course, as Rutt suggests. But looking at the fan yao -
‘Influence in your big [...]

In the Words of Change glossary (coming up within the next week or two) I’ve written this about constancy, zhen:
“…We have a vision of the future - not what’s inevitably going to happen, but what it is right for us to bring into being. You can conceive of this as a call from the spirits [...]

There’s a lot going on in the first line of Hexagram 53:
‘Wild geese gradually advance to the shore.
The small child, danger,
There are words,
No mistake.’
This is the first stage in the journey of the wild geese as they gradually draw close to their natural home. Now they are just reaching the border and coming into their [...]