I often get emails asking what the I Ching is and how to get started. And while there is enough to reflect on in the I Ching and its traditions to keep anyone engrossed for several lifetimes, getting started with it is absurdly simple.
Last time I splashed out on books I bought not just the shiny new Ritsema/Sabbadini, but also Sarah Allan’s The Shape of the Turtle. And I am enjoying it no end. She writes about Shang myth, but there are many, many resonances in the Zhouyi. But finding one with the… Read more »More trigrams in the sequence (hexagrams 6, 7 and 8)
JerryD thought to ask the I Ching, ‘What is a Universal Truth?’ (capital U, capital T) Yi answered with Hexagram 13, unchanging: People in Harmony. Well, different people have different takes on this, but it sounds to me as though Yi’s saying that a ‘Universal Truth’ is just whatever people… Read more »I Ching Community: What is a Universal Truth
The Original I Ching Oracle is Ritsema’s revised version of the Eranos Yijing, first published in 1994 with Stephen Karcher, as ‘I Ching, the Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, the First Complete Translation with Concordance.’ I owe a huge amount to that book: it first gave me license to absorb the words, internalise a reading, without being told what it meant or what to do. Without that initial freedom, I doubt I would ever have been drawn to the Yi at all. So I really have Ritsema and Karcher to thank for this website and my work.
James Lewis describes what I know as the yang, ‘inspiring’ pattern of change as the Key Hexagram: If you consider that lines that do not change are yin, and that lines that do change are yang, then you can write down a third hexagram. This is what I call the… Read more »A simpler take on ‘pattern of change’ hexagrams
The more I look at the Sequence of hexagrams, the more it seems obvious that the trigrams are an intrinsic part of its logic. The patterns are there to be found. (Here’s a handy colour-coded trigram chart that makes it easier.) For an outstanding analysis of the large-scale patterns, the… Read more »Trigrams in the Sequence of Hexagrams
I first learned from Nina Correa of Your Dao De Jing that in the first lines of the Daodejing –
‘The dao that can be told of is not the constant dao,
The name that can be named is not the constant name’
– the word ‘constant’ in the Mawangdui version is heng – the name of Hexagram 32.
