The biggest story arc of the Yijing is the Conquest story: how the Zhou people inherited the mandate of heaven and overthrew the Shang dynasty. It’s a great narrative of Change: the decay of the Shang; the preparations of the good Zhou ruler Wen, making his people worthy of the… Read more »Fathers and sons II: carting corpses
Look at this! http://www.appositive.net/oysterbay/ichingtitle.html I’ve barely started reading, but I feel like a child in a sweetshop already. Very, very good work on the Sequence, on trigrams, and individual hexagrams. Saving the whole lot to my computer now.
Horses in ancient China http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~baojie/history/chinese/2002-12-02_horse.en.htm A nice, long article on the role of horses, basically in the military, from pre-Shang to post-Zhou times. Why would we be interested? It casts new light on why horses are so important in the Yi: why Prince Kang would be especially honoured by a… Read more »Horses in ancient China
I dropped into Oxford today on the way home from a friend’s, and found my way into Blackwell’s – the university bookshop. And down to the Chinese history section, where I came across an intimidating-looking tome called To become a god: cosmology, sacrifice and self-divinisation in Early China. And with about 7 minutes to closing time, took it over to the desk to find out what it cost. £17. Hmmm. On the one hand the chapter headings are fascinating: ‘Transforming the spirits: sacrifice in the Shang’; ‘A moral cosmos: Zhou sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven’; ‘Spirits within humans: the issue of shamanism in early China and early Greece.’ On the other hand, these are 300 very dense and scholarly pages, and what are my chances of getting through them without getting lost?
I had hoped to be posting now with news that I’d got the transcript and recording ready for you. But I’m sorry to say I’m not quite there yet: I was out on Saturday playing in a rehearsal and concert, and I still have a bunch of editing work to do. Almost there, though.
To whet your appetite for when I do get this finished – and it really shouldn’t be long now – here’s what we talked about:
I used to play around trying to predict the outcome of tennis games with Yi. I still find it fascinating as a way of learning more about hexagrams. Big singles tennis matches are huge contests between two people – everything each individual has goes into it. And then they’re much analysed and talked-about, occasionally even by people who know, and the players give interviews afterwards… human character and ability (and luck) under the magnifying glass.
I imagine anyone who’s consulted with Yi must have had the experience. Ask question; receive answer; say ‘Huh??’
And this is where it’s easy to go wrong – where the desire that caused us to ask in the first place won’t accept this lack of clarity, and we find a reason to ask another question, quick. (I touched on this in my post on ‘How long does a reading last?‘ – in response to which Steve Marshall pointed out that answers to big questions can last ten years and more.)
