Some hexagrams – like 29 – seem to derive much of their meaning from their component trigrams. Some – like 27 – seem to derive it in the first place from the picture made by the lines themselves. Hexagram 27 looks like jaws; Hexagram 21 looks as though an obstacle’s been placed between the teeth for Biting Through. Brad Hatcher’s pointed out that hexagrams with a large yin ‘space’ contained within yang lines (27, 41, 42) mention the carapace of a turtle.
So if the authors of the Daxiang could go on to find deep significance in the trigrams of all 64 hexagrams, mightn’t it be possible to do the same with the line-pictures, and describe every hexagram as a picture?
Thomas Hood (Pocossin here at the I Ching Community) would certainly say so. His Aardvark I Ching sees a fox in hexagram 63, a baby in Hexagram 35 and a cap in Hexagram 40 – as well as more ‘obvious’ pictures like 27’s Jaws or 50’s Vessel. You don’t have to consider the text ‘unnecessary and uninformative’, as he does, to find some new interpretive ideas here.
Now Sakis Totlis has, independently, produced a more detailed work, available from Amazon as The True Eye of The Tiger , and also generously available on this page and as a pdf download. He suggests one hexagram can represent many visual ideas: hexagram 27 can be a road uphill and the tiger’s eye as well as the eponymous Jaws. He doesn’t find a baby at Hexagram 35, but he does find the sun over the earth (for him, the trigrams are pictorial as well), and a horse, and a rodent tunnelling.
Because Sakis suggests constant meanings for particular elements (like an upturned carriage for the bigram with a broken line above a solid one), it seems that his system might be one you could pick up and use, whether or not you can readily see what he sees.
People have been trying to explain the text in its totality in terms of line structures (trigrams and nuclear trigrams, as well as correctness and correspondence) for a long, long time. It seems to me that this image-rich, imaginative approach might give a new lease of life to that endeavour.
Thank you for posting this. I was unawre of Totlis’s work.
Tom
Hi Tom,
I don’t think he was aware of yours, either. Connections are good!
Hi, to both
Thank you Hillary for a fair post.
I wasn’t aware of Tom’s work. If he came to the same visual interpretation, I am glad. As a matter of fact, I still don’t know his work and I am curious to read it. I will. Connections ARE good and thank you for that, too.
I came to my interpreting approach of the I Ching not reading or studying other works, but because the last decades I have done quite a heavy work on esthetics and “pictures” (and not only “images”). I have a dream interpreting method based on comparing point to point the audio-visual pictures of dream with audio-visual pictures of the preceding awakefulness (yesterday usually).
It works fine and it has an undeniable clarity for the mind. Two and a half thousand years ago Aristotle said that “the mind cannot think without a picture”. It can’t.
Be well and thanks again
Of course, as soon as the Chinese wrote down the words of the Zhouyi, it was pretty much made of pictures. Sometimes you can find currents of meaning that don’t show up in translations by looking at common elements between Chinese characters.
I wonder what either of you makes of the way you tend to see different pictures from one another in the gua?
Oh Hilary! Now you’ve set me off. There were no words
in the original Zhouyi. In his prison cell King Wen
interpreted and sequenced the hexagrams in his head
— much as I do 🙂
If only I-Ching persons could escape their chains
in the Cave of Words and turn toward the beautiful
light of the pure hexagrams….
Sakis and I do not, I think, differ in approach or
interpretation. I find his eye of the tiger in 27
and burrowing rodent in 35 most admirable. King
Wen and the compilers of the appended text were
different persons with different purposes, and
naturally we would expect their visual
interpretations of the hexagrams to differ.
Tom
Hm… we could start this debate again, or on the other hand we might not. I’m inclined not to, on the whole. 🙂 Just couldn’t resist the temptation to prod you a little about you and Sakis finding completely different pictures. Shutting up now.
For me, words without pictures are horses without bridles, marching without itinerary.
I am only willing to talk matters over with those willing to use their own eyes. Otherwise I would prefer to shut off, too.
The very last words of the Tao Te Ching (I’ve rendered into Greek) say:
“Heaven always promotes, never discords.
The sensible man completes works beneficial to all, versus nobody”.
You may all be well!…
Sakis
Hilary, both links to Sakis’ and Tom’s books are broken links
Rats. Tom, where has yours gone? (And are you in touch with Sakis, by any chance?)