Medical readings

It’s only natural that we should turn to the Yijing with medical questions: we’re vulnerable, uncertain and out of our depth, facing the unknown, so of course we want to consult the oracle. Or if we encounter someone else dealing with a medical crisis who asks for a reading, of course we want to help. Only… is this wise? Would a reading actually help at all?

There’s no right answer to this question, of course. All I can do is to share my own experiences and reflections – and the reasons why I don’t do medical readings for others myself. (I’ve still attempted medical readings of my own occasionally, so that gives me some experiences to draw on for this post.)

First of all, I am not going to start writing about what the Yijing can and cannot do. That would be… unwise. And this isn’t about the Yi’s limits; it’s about ours.

Interpreting readings depends on recognition. If you’ve done readings for other people, you’ll already know that this can be hard in a way that reading for yourself is not. With your own reading, you may well recognise the answer immediately – you can tell it’s speaking to you. With someone else’s reading, you need first to understand the background to the question: the person’s situation, their habitual ways of thinking and imagining it, the choices open to them. Only then can you start to recognise what their reading is saying and how it applies.

Unless you have spent half a dozen years of your life working impossibly hard to gain a medical degree (and maybe not even then), you do not understand the background to a medical question. This means you can’t reliably recognise what the reading is saying – and you’re not qualified to interpret medical readings.

(And by ‘you’ I mean ‘we’. This is the biggest reason why I don’t offer medical readings. What I could offer is just not all that useful – see the examples that follow! – while the harm I could do by misinterpreting is immeasurable.)

This is equally true of any realm of human expertise, of course: if you can’t understand the question, you won’t get on too well with the answer. This is why we consult with experts for advice.

And… we always have done. Here’s an excerpt from the Shujing, the Book of History:

‘If you have doubts about any great matter, consult with your own heart; consult with your nobles and officers; consult with the masses of the people; consult the tortoise and milfoil. If you, the tortoise, the milfoil, the nobles and officers and the common people all consent to a course, this is what is called a great concord, and the result will be the welfare of your person and good fortune to your descendants.’

Shujing, Legge translation

What strikes me about this text is that the oracles are never considered as alternatives to consulting with other people – or with your own heart.

Or think of Hexagram 57, line 2, when it’s good fortune to consult with both diviners and historians:

‘Subtly penetrating under the bed,
Using historians and diviners of many kinds.
Good fortune, no mistake.’

Hexagram 57 line 2

An oracle is not, and never has been, a substitute for human expertise.

What can you learn from a medical reading?

On a purely practical level… is it possible to learn factual medical information by consulting the Yi? Yes, I think it is. Is it possible to have full confidence in what you learn this way? Not so much.

An example. I asked what was causing my mother-in-law’s persistent pain after a fall – we were wondering whether she needed more medical attention – and received Hexagram 30 with line 6 changing:

The first thing I thought, looking at the shape of the hexagram, was that this looked like an X ray, and perhaps the moving line might show a fracture at the top of her pelvic girdle.

This turned out to be true – the fracture was in her sacrum.

And… I know this because she had an X ray. From the reading, I could only make guesses about fractures and (from the line text) referred pain. (How would you go about deciding whether a moving line represented a broken bone or bruising, for instance?)

Most medical questions are a whole lot more complex than a broken bone, of course, which makes what we can see in a reading still less useful. If you identify 48.2…

‘In the well’s depths they shoot fish.
The jug is cracked and leaking.’

Hexagram 48, line 2

….as a faulty heart valve (I’ve seen it represent that), what next? Which valve? What kind of problem? Would you recommend surgery?

Those are both examples of successful, accurate interpretation of medical readings – and yet they are really of no practical use at all, because they lack precision or certainty. Is Hexagram 22, with its trigrams showing fire under the mountain, illustrating an infection in the root of a tooth? Perhaps, but there are more reliable ways to find out.

I may be belabouring the absurdly obvious here. Still… I have seen people try to advise on cancer treatments on the basis of readings, so perhaps it needs saying.

I can imagine a doctor finding such readings useful, and being able to glean much more detailed information from them than I can – but on the whole, wouldn’t you rather know your doctor was ordering a blood test?

Issues of scale and perspective

So far, so obvious: you might get it wrong; even if you turn out to have got it right, this is a whole lot less useful than you’d want it to be. And then there are less obvious issues.

For instance, the hexagrams don’t come with a scale: this is something we have to provide as interpreters, using our common sense and background knowledge. I wrote once before about the issue of scale and Hexagram 23 and gave some examples of the different ‘sizes’ of Stripping Away it might mean. I could have given nothing but medical examples: I’ve seen Stripping Away mean death, and minor surgery (when the querent was afraid of something more serious), and a dental extraction.

I wrote then,

Pragmatically, we usually know the scale from our question. Hexagram 23 for a new computer? You might lose your data. Hexagram 23 for a new business venture? You might lose your house – or your belief in your own competence – or both, of course.

But if you’ve just found a lump, the scale of the issue is exactly what you do not know. To find out, you need a doctor, not an oracle.

This can be further complicated by Yi’s own perspective. I’ve come to understand that something deeply kind and compassionate speaks through the Yi – and also, that this voice is not human. It’s not always, automatically, going to describe death as misfortune. Given time, I think we’re able to understand such readings, absorb their perspective; often, this is going to mean that predictive medical readings help afterwards, with hindsight.

When my beloved mother-in-law was hospitalised for what turned out to be the last time, I asked what to expect, and received Hexagram 50, the Vessel, changing at lines 3 and 4 to 4, Not Knowing. Here are the moving lines:

‘The vessel’s ears are radically changed,
Its action blocked.
Rich pheasant fat goes uneaten.
Rain on all sides lessens regrets,
In the end, good fortune.’
‘The vessel’s legs break off,
The prince’s stew is upset,
Dignity soiled.
Pitfall.’

Hexagram 50, the Vessel, lines 3 and 4

Good fortune in the end, yet also pitfall.

With hindsight, I think both lines were telling the same story, of physical breakdown and death. One shows physical collapse, and the other shows transformation and relief. Both were true.

Another example: if my friend goes to this cancer treatment centre, what will it give her? 52, Stilling, changing at line 4 to 56, Travelling.

‘Stilling your self,
No mistake.’

Hexagram 52, line 4

She died there – peacefully, I believe, and unafraid. I think that line is recognisable, with hindsight, as her way of going: a kind of stilling that’s also travelling.

With hindsight, I could understand these readings, and I was glad to have them. What would it have taken to have understood them confidently when I cast them? Not a medical degree, this time (though there were diagnostic hints in the lines of the Vessel), but perhaps a sage-like level of wisdom.

Better questions?

So far, I’ve talked about the limits of interpretation in readings for diagnosis or prognosis in serious cases. There are better questions to ask, though, or situations where it might make more sense to enlist the oracle’s help.

If you’re choosing between doctors or treatments when medical opinion is divided, for instance, then a ‘What if I…?’ reading would be worth doing. (If, that is, opinion really is divided, and you’re not being deceived by a false equivalence between qualified experts and vampiric charlatans.)

I’ve found the oracle helpful, up to a point, for my minor ailments or decisions that are too small to bother a professional. Three examples:

I had itchy, swollen, painful spots all over the fingers of my right hand. What caused them? 28.2.6 to 33: Great Exceeding, Retreating. They were chilblains caused by ‘excessively retreating’ circulation. (I only understood that one with hindsight.)

What should I do about this painful wisdom tooth? (A question of visit the dentist or wait and see.) 23.6: Stripping Away, with its one solid line being taken away, turning a mountain trigram to earth. That wasn’t so hard to interpret; I went and had it extracted. (In practice, the tooth was its own oracle anyway…)

A rare moment of perfect clarity: I had heart palpitations, and also a big untreated cavity (probably the same one that ended up at 23.6), and I just wondered whether there might be a connection. ‘What effect does my dental health have on my overall health?’ 31.6 to 33 neatly summed up the limit of its influence and stopped me fretting:

‘Influence in your jaws, cheeks and tongue.’

Hexagram 31, line 6

Different questions

So Yi is not a substitute for doctors. But then again, nor are doctors a substitute for Yi. It comes into its own answering the questions the medical profession has no tools (not to mention no time) to engage with.

How can I be reconciled with my new identity as a patient?
How can I help my friend who is ill?
What to hold in mind today as I visit her in hospital?

These are the readings that have helped (me and other people) through such times. The temptation to jump straight to ‘What’s wrong?’ and ‘What will happen?’ is still strong, sometimes overpowering, but I do know that Yi helps when I let it engage with all the uncertainty and fear directly, in the moment – where am I? how to cope? how to be with this?

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