I write a lot about trying to recover the original meanings of some of the I Ching’s key phrases. Which may be of academic interest, but why bother with China circa 1000BC when asking about Western life in 2005 AD?
Well, not to get to the One True Authentic Original Oracle. That doesn’t exist, and any claims otherwise deserve short shrift. No – it’s about trying for an imaginative grasp on the ideas and interrelationships in the old text.
Receiving horses in an answer, we can imagine knowing them as the fastest thing in the world. Receiving ‘cross the great river’, we don’t have to perform some global find-and-replace exercise to slot in sterile abstractions like ‘take risk and make commitment’. We can get a sense of the excitement of the spring festivals, or the trepidation and awareness of history in the making in Wu’s army.
I’ve noticed a couple of ways in which some knowledge of the old Chinese world can make a significant difference to readings.
One is when it points your imagination in the right direction. For instance, a matched horse team is for a war chariot or a hopeful suitor, but not likely to be doing something as prosaic as pulling a plough. Or imagine someone wanting to start a new project, not sure whether to launch straight into it or whether to settle other things first. If he receives a line about firing arrows, should he think of standing still first to aim straight? It would make a difference to know that in hunting and warfare alike, Zhou archers shot from moving chariots.
And another way lies not in adding knowledge, but in taking it away. Before anyone thought of yin and yang, let alone started theorising about them, before anyone had arranged the trigrams, the oracle already made perfect sense in its own terms. We have the option of viewing it through those traditional lenses – and also of connecting directly with its simpler layers.
So yin/yang theory, for instance, is an optional light on a reading – not ‘just what it says’, the be-all and end-all. When Dr Margaret Pearson talked to us about the origins of the idea of yin (which was a) not negative and b) not female!) , my overwhelming impression was of a weight being lifted from the hexagrams, leaving space for them to breathe and come to life. (The recording of her talk is available for download here, and one of the three free excerpts on the page is her introduction to ‘yin’.)
You can cross rivers to a business contract or an engagement or a new idea. The bronze chariot in 47.4 can be a feeling of awkward formality, or some slightly clunky webinar software. ‘Setting out to bring order’ (another journey image) might be putting your foot down with a teenager who’s ‘out of order’, or writing a marketing plan, or it might even be me tidying my desk (unlikely though that seems). It’s when you start getting to grips with these images on their own terms, that they also come to life as images of 2005AD.