Yijing Ethics, by Xing De

Introducing the book

Johan Hausen has kindly sent me a review copy of his book, Yijing Ethics. It’s a transcription of the oral teachings of Xing De, also called Li Shifu, a Daoist renunciant who is deeply immersed and skilled in traditional Daoist arts. (He is a healer as well as a Yijing practitioner.) So Xing De is a link in a long, long chain of transmitted teaching – and I wasn’t far into the book before I realised how different his mental landscape is from mine, not least in its concept of ethics.

The book is tiny: sixty-odd well spaced pages, plus another twenty of Hausen’s explanatory end notes, which are essential and very much worth reading. Its contents:

The Introduction – introducing the Yi to newcomers (from a traditional rather than an academic perspective) and laying out Li Shifu’s basic approach.

The Yi Jing Virtues and Karma – going into more depth on the world view behind the practice.

Yijing Requirements – describing the full ritual surrounding readings.

Legends and Stories – lively tales of real-life readings, and an intriguing glimpse into divinations to locate lost objects with the properties of a single trigram.

And then come the endnotes. (I can recommend reading with a second bookmark in the endnotes so you can look all of them up.)

Yijing Ethics is the ‘prequel’ to a bigger volume on using the Yijing for healing. We’ll have to wait for that volume for an explanation of how Li Shifu does readings – apparently with a textless method that uses the theory of five phases.

First reactions…

In a nutshell, this little book gives me a glimpse of a whole different world of divination.

My first reaction was funny in an embarrassing sort of way: oh, I already know this. I already know there’s a traditional approach to the Yijing that uses incense and altars; I know that in this traditional view, the oracle is not to be consulted in trivial matters. I also already know I don’t agree with the necessity of incense or the interdiction of small questions.

Reading a little further, it dawned on me that there’s a difference between knowing about something, and knowing it. I don’t know the traditional approach of ritual before divination, because I’ve never undertaken it as a regular practice; this has never been my way of expressing the reverence and gratitude I feel for the Yi. Yijing Ethics comes from someone who knows this practice in his bones. It’s not so much food for thought as an invitation to experience.

Ethics?

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that ‘Yijing ethics’ means something very different for Li Shifu. There are some fundamentals we have in common: not consulting for excessive riches or power (not directly with your own readings, nor as a practitioner); being guided by reverence and gratitude for the oracle. But questions I might consider to be ‘Yijing ethics’ (like ‘When is it OK to divine about another person?’) aren’t here at all. And the way the book opens is quite disconcerting…

In his introduction, he explains the questions you can ask the Yi – and almost every single one of them is asking for a prediction, like ‘Will I win the competition or not?’ There are no questions at all about choosing your path, no requests for advice. That doesn’t necessarily mean he would never consider such questions, of course, it’s just startling to me that he doesn’t mention any.

There’s just one exception: he also mentions asking for medical diagnosis – which is something that I would never get into for other people, precisely for ethical reasons! ‘When healing through the Yijing,’ he says, ‘there is no need to prescribe medicine.’

Like I said, this is all disconcerting. But as I reflect some more, a bit of light begins to dawn.

Why would it be unethical for me to use the Yijing to diagnose people’s medical issues? Because I’ve discovered that I can’t do it very well – but the medical profession can. Li Shifu’s experience is not necessarily the same.

Why would you think of the Yi as a means of prediction, and in medical cases of description, but not as a source of wise counsel? It depends on what you consider to be a worthy goal – of any human endeavour, divination included. More on that below, under ‘desire’.

So what are ‘Yijing ethics’?

The essentials

Everyone reading this will have their own habitual patterns of approaching Yi, some with more ‘ritual’ elements than others. In my world, this is just a matter of what works best for each person to help us to focus.

But this book comes from a different world. Here, traditional spiritual practices are absolutely, inseparably part of reverence and sincerity in divination. Gratitude to the oracle entails reciting a certain prayer. ‘Yijing ethics’ means ritual – not exclusively, but inseparably.

So divination requires music, incense and prayer. It requires purification for three days before consulting, during which time, ‘you must not think about anything bad or harmful, such as relationship issues or sexual matters.’

Also, it’s based on the practice of sitting meditation to cultivate the inner qualities needed. In support of this comes a quotation from the Dazhuan – part 1, chapter 10:

寂然不動，感而遂通
‘Quiet and unmoving, perceive it and succeed in communion.’

I went and looked this up, as that’s not the translation I remembered. And sure enough, in Wilhelm/Baynes this passage comes out as, ‘The Changes… are quiescent and do not move. But if they are stimulated, they penetrate all situations.’ For Wilhelm (and other translators I’ve seen), this passage describes qualities of the book – how it does nothing until activated by a questioner. But for Li Shifu, these are the necessary qualities and practice of a diviner.

Divination and desire

This is where the complete difference in world view really comes into focus.

At first, what Li Shifu says about desire seemed to fall into that comfortable basket of ‘things I already know’. He does not want the Yi to be connected with materialism: practitioners should not be driven by their ‘need’ for another Rolls or private jet, nor yet for ‘fame and reputation’. Readings should not be used for excessive gain, either. (Though doing readings for others in return for a subsistence living is fine.)

But the basic idea is far more radical than that. From the Introduction:

‘Humans always act, too readily, from the place of their own needs and desires. The Yi Jing came to lead us out of that.’

And later:

‘It is not possible to impart the Yi Jing and its practice to someone who pursues their desires with it, even if only in dreams.’

Now, it’s possible that by ‘desire’ he means only rampant materialism, and not the desire for community, or to create, or to be of service – the kind of desire I would think of as divine guidance. But he never hints at such a distinction.

And if he in fact means all desires, then that might explain why his idea of divination is asking for a prediction. ‘How can I attain this thing I desire?’ would be a completely wrong-headed question; ‘Will this thing I desire happen?’ would be more acceptable, because it doesn’t involve the reading in pursuing the desire.

He goes one step further:

‘There is no need to cast oracles to avoid bad things happening, and we should endure the bad along with the good.’

One of those excellent end notes explains Li Shifu’s assertion that ‘to consult the Yi Jing excessively will affect one’s karma’:

‘This effect on one’s karma will be either as the creation of a karmic attachment to controlling one’s future or because one misses out on lessons in the cultivation of virtue (such as learning forbearance) by shunning any negative experiences.’

I would agree that readings should not be used as a way to avoid the fullness of experience, but this goes one step further. If you need bad experiences to learn from, then using readings to avoid bad experiences is completely counter-productive.

The primary objective for Li Shifu is not to change your experience, but to grow in understanding. This is why readings to restore physical health are acceptable, because the body is a necessary vehicle for spiritual cultivation. Readings about anything that isn’t such a necessity – like material comfort – are less so.

He even says that if a reading predicts you will lose all your wealth from a choice, you should not use this reading to change course and avoid the loss. Instead, you should learn from the experience of loss. When you have learned, then perhaps you can change the causes and hence the effects.

Conclusions?

I find this book a fascinating glimpse into a whole different world of divination. I don’t want to move there, but I do want to understand it better.

And amidst all the difference, the points of contact and shared experience are all the more striking. He gives the example of approaching the oracle with sincerity, making a correct forecast – and then months later, finding he’d had the wrong hexagram. ‘The fourth and fifth dimensions,’ he says, ‘are full of mischievous spirits.’ Even in our different worlds, I think we’ve met some of the same spirits.