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Margaret Pearson webinar update

Two quick news bulletins:

First, I’ve finally got the recording and transcript online. It’s only £4 for the downloadable version or £9 to get the CD posted to you – that’s in the region of $16 US. You can get your copy here. I’ve also put some free excerpts online as Flash files, for you to get a flavour of the event: the section on yin (possibly my personal favourite), part of what she had to say about Hexagram 44, and the discussion on lines 2 and 5 of hexagram 28. Click here to go straight to the free clips.

Link of the year

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

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

Yi’s recommended reading

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?

Women in the I Ching: webinar review

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:

Learning from the tennis again

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.