Comments on whole hexagrams, individual lines and so on
‘…and now the conclusion.’ So as I was saying… trigrams, in Hexagram 63. On the inside, li, fire and light: vision, awareness, lucidity. As an inner trigram, li tends to mean insight into the nature of the time. On the outside, kan, dark depths and unceasingly moving waters that can… Read more »Hexagram 63 continued
63 seems a good choice of hexagram to write about at the turn of the year, with its theme of endings-and-beginnings. Hexagrams 63 and 64, of course, stand at the very end of the Yijing, and they deal with themes of completion and arrival – or not. Their very order… Read more »Hexagram 63, Already Across (a beginning)
Image © Freeteo I’ve taken to thinking just about the position of a changing line, as a starting point for looking at its imagery and connections – and it’s surprising how often this provides the key to a reading. Line 6, for instance. We’ve passed line 5 – the… Read more »The distance of line 6
A couple of months ago I wrote about ‘Essentials for Yijing readings‘ and included that old favourite hobby horse of mine: the commentary is not the answer, along with some examples of commentary – Wilhelm’s, Karcher’s and mine – that was decidedly not what the oracle said. All three examples I came up with were from… Read more »When Yi is neutral
I’m just coming to the end of the ‘omens’ section as I revise and enlarge ‘Words of Change’, my Yijing glossary. This involves testing out ideas by looking at every instance of each omen, along with all the example readings I can find. Since I’m going into more detail this time… Read more »Danger – good fortune?
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
Hexagram 9 says, ‘Small taming, creating success. Dense clouds without rain Come from my Western altars.’ The dense clouds without rain suggest that what we need is tantalisingly close, just not quite here yet. Those ‘Western altars’ are probably a subtle reference to the Zhou, people of the West. Before… Read more »The clouds of Hexagram 9
