Hexagram 37, People in the Home, defines a safe space. Within it we can find our place with one another, and become confident enough in our own identities that we can eventually reach out beyond its walls.
The first line of the hexagram sets up those all-important walls:
‘With barriers, there is a home.
Regrets vanish.’
It’s a very clear line: walls create a home; they separate ‘inside’ from ‘outside’, so there can be a secure, close-knit group within. In readings, this line very often points to the need to set limits, to have ground rules, without which there can be no mutual understanding. Fences, as Wu Jing Nuan comments on this line, make good neighbours.
When the ‘boundaries’ – the first and last line – of a hexagram are ignored, you can build its nuclear hexagram from the core lines: 234,345. (Here’s an illustrated explanation of this.) Do this with 37 and you find its core is Hexagram 64, Not Yet Across. Which might seem odd: how come the core of People in the Home unfolds into this state of flux, where nothing is in its place and everything is still to be done?
Maybe this points to the same truth as does this quotation from Deepak Chopra (part of a longer excerpt from his The Book of Secrets at the Cygnus review :
‘Imagine a house with four walls and a roof. If the house burns down, the walls and roof collapse. But the space inside isn’t affected. You can hire an architect to design a new house, and after you build it, the space inside still hasn’t been affected. By building a house you are only dividing unbounded space into inside and outside. This division is an illusion. The ancient sages said that your body is like that house. It’s built at birth and burns down when you die, yet the Akasha, or soul space, remains unchanged; it remains unbounded.’
From the universal perspecitive:
flipping the top and bottom lines of any hexagram will give you the skeletal form of that hexagram, and so an empty space in need of filling – even if there are no walls, only POTENTIALS, so the empty space is still present. This is the ’27-ness’ of a hexagram. The 27-ness of 37 is described by analogy to characteristics of 39 – a focus on something/someone ‘sticking out’ and going against the mindless flow – and for being a haven for those caught in the mindless flow (the ‘negative’ side is where what is sticking out is obstructive and so we bypass it by flowing around it)
The rigidity of 37 reflects the perfect ordering in a ‘family’ where all have their correct positions (and so there is no competition and within is a tension-releasing environment that is IMPLICIT in nature – as compared to the explicit tension release of 40)
Family as such represents any collective, small or large. Using XOR we can come up with the 64-ness of 37. This is represented by analogy to the characteristics of 43.
010101
101011
———-
111110
Chris.
I can see the translation of xian to “barriers” and how that makes sense.
However xian in 26.3 means “practicing” or “familiarizing,” and it can similarly mean “familiar.” In 37.1
“Familiar is the home” or
“Familiar is the family”
also makes sense to me, highlighting the “close-knit” aspect.
Ewald
26.3 is a pig to translate, but I think ‘xian’ there can also be understood as ‘barriers’. ‘Daily making fences, making carts, patrolling.’ (LiSe).
But for that translation I’d expect a character for “making,” and there isn’t one…
Ewald
Can you imagine it as a ‘to do’ list? Like ‘Daily: emails, monitor forum, try to think up new blog posts.’ Only involving more horses.
That’s indeed a way to do away with the verb, and keep close to the meaning of xian as the original picture. It could be checking fences for breaches. But is it necessary for xian to keep to that meaning? Is it impossible that it can mean “practicing?”
With translating xian as “practicing” the meaning of the line is a bit more within the theme of the hexagram of restraint and cultivation, imo. And practicing seems more a kind of hardship (jian) then going through a to do list.
Then there’s of course the horse, is it chased, or does it chase or perhaps follow? I think that “a good horse chases” and to get it do so, daily practicing is needed.
Ewald