Speculations on relations between hexagrams: the Sequence, patterns of trigrams, nuclear hexagrams, etc
From its first appearance in the first words of the Yi, the creative flow through the four characters yuan heng li zhen is tangible. Its power is felt in the other five hexagrams with the whole, uninterrupted formula. But the natural cohesion of the four-word formula can also be felt… Read more »Theme and variations
Hexagram 1 says yuan heng li zhen – from the source, creating success, constancy bears fruit. Hexagram 2 says yuan heng li pinma zhi zhen – from the source, creating success, a mare’s constancy bears fruit The remaining hexagrams can be seen as ‘children’ of these two – 62 ways of blending… Read more »Yuan heng li zhen
Complementary hexagrams are paradoxical things. On the one hand, there is no hexagram more different from 21, Biting Through than 48, the Well: Every line is changed, so they have nothing in common. If it’s time to bite through, then it is exactly not time for well-maintenance. And on the other… Read more »A shared dao of 21 and 48
A thoroughly useful guiding principle for both diviners and translators: this means something. For diviners with/ translators of the Yijing, the principle needs elaborating: this means something, whether or not I have the faintest glimmerings of a clue what it means. That should really be inscribed in every Yijing book and… Read more »This means something
The Sequence – for all the remarkable patterns it contains – is about the simplest ‘tool’ you can add to your interpretive repertoire. No complicated operations are required to find the preceding hexagram, and no concept more profound than steps along the road: ‘You pass through this to reach here.’… Read more »Hexagram 57 in the Sequence
The King Wen Sequence of hexagrams (who knows who really created it or how old it might be?) is a source of endless fascination. People keep on finding patterns in it. The first to catch my interest was Danny Van den Berghe’s discovery of a ‘landscape’ of trigrams (download the… Read more »A Hidden Pattern in the Sequence of hexagrams
Where you find the noble one We mostly come across the junzi, the ‘noble one’, in the Image Wing of the Yi. But he also features in many oracles and lines of the original text. Here’s the whole list: 1.3, 2.0, 3.3, 9.6, 12.0, 13.0, 15.0, 15.1, 15.3, 20.1, 20.5,… Read more »The noble one’s story
