Speculations on relations between hexagrams: the Sequence, patterns of trigrams, nuclear hexagrams, etc
Chinese tigers Tigers have been prowling through Chinese thought and folklore for many thousands of years. Their meaning is interesting: not just wildness and danger, though of course they might eat you, but also courage and protection against evil – from the wild boar that would eat your crops, and… Read more »Three tigers
A story in three parts? I’ve mentioned before that there’s a pattern in the Zhouyi of concepts or images showing up in threes: three pots, three almost-full moons, three raids that are marital allies, not robbers, and so on. And there are also three zhang 章: in lines 2.3, 44.5… Read more »The mysterious ‘thing of beauty’
Following on from a previous post… Hexagram 20, Seeing Hexagram 20 has xun, wind and wood, over earth; its Oracle text suggests earth’s open, available quality: ‘Seeing. Washing hands, and not making the offering.There is truth and confidence like a presence.’ Earth will not act, but allows: the ritual provides… Read more »Earth inside (part 2)
Earth inside The easiest way to get to grips with the first two hexagrams, for me, is always to think how much they’re not each other. Qian, the creative force of heaven: nothing but solid lines, like the paths of sun, moon and stars across the sky. It moves without… Read more »Earth inside (part 1)
I’ve been working on a post on the trigram kun, earth, as inner trigram. That one will come soon – this is just something I wondered about along the way. I started going through the sequence of hexagrams, looking at the Image texts for the ones with earth inside… ‘Above… Read more »Ancient kings and their trigrams
Looking at a reading the other day, I found myself revisiting (after a gap of ten years) the idea of qian, heaven – the name of Hexagram 1 – as a central axis. It’s a concept that shows up in many ways… What does qian mean? The character qian is… Read more »Qian as the axis
Half an idea about the third line of Hexagram 49, Radical Change – ‘Setting out to bring order means a pitfall,Constancy means danger.As words of radical change draw near three times,There is truth and confidence.’ Overall, this is telling us that radical change isn’t something you get at once, like… Read more »Words of Radical Change
