Skip to content

I Ching

New I Ching site

I Ching – InterTao Ely Britto has created an English version of her I Ching website. It’s an excellent, very clear account of how to approach the I Ching through the traditional Chinese system of trigrams and line relationships.

I Ching Clock

A novel online reading – an I Ching clock that tells the Time. When I tried it, it gave me the hexagram I should be interpreting for a client right now. Good point.

Helping to find the question

GreenOwl wrote:

“Ideally you need to allow a good half hour to talk with (or rather listen to) your querent and arrive at the right question for them.”

Any chance you could do a post (y’know, sometime) that walks through an example of that process? Or, if you’ve already written about it and I’m forgetting, just point in the right direction. Thanks!

That’s tricky, as I promise clients complete confidentiality – no discussion of their situation, question or answer, even anonymously. So I can’t go through a specific real-life example. But I can talk about general experiences that I’ve had with a few hundred customers – why not?

Another thought on Hexagram 14

The name of Hexagram 14 is Great Possession, and the character for ‘possessing’ also means ‘offering’ – suggesting that the two ideas are not so far apart as they might seem.

Interpreting this one, I’m often reminded of Molière’s play, The Miser. (Or was this in Plautus’s original, The Pot of Gold?) The miser has kept a pot of gold buried in his garden for years, sneaking off to gloat over it when no-one’s looking. Of course one day someone is looking, and the hoard is stolen, and he bewails his fate. Some witty character offers the consolation that he still has a dank hole in the ground to gaze down, so what has he really lost?

Back to basics

I write a lot about trying to recover the original meanings of some of the I Ching’s key phrases. Which may be of academic interest, but why bother with China circa 1000BC when asking about Western life in 2005 AD?

Well, not to get to the One True Authentic Original Oracle. That doesn’t exist, and any claims otherwise deserve short shrift. No – it’s about trying for an imaginative grasp on the ideas and interrelationships in the old text.