Hexagram 12 – Blocked? ‘Blocking it, non-people. Noble one’s constancy bears no fruit. Great goes, small comes.’ Hexagram 12, the Oracle However clearly we understand that there are no ‘bad’ hexagrams, we’re probably not over the moon when we cast Hexagram 12. It’s at least nice to be able to… Read more »Another Yijing Easter egg*
Here’s a whole field of study where (as far as I know) we’ve barely scratched the surface. Each hexagram line ‘points towards’ the hexagram created when it changes, its zhi gua. It’s natural enough to go through the I Ching line by line and see how each one reflects the… Read more »Hexagram relationships
You can learn a lot about moving lines in the Yijing by looking at where they’re headed – that is, the hexagram that would be generated if this line alone were changing. Arguing doesn’t lead to good fortune – unless it’s done in an awareness of being ‘Not Yet Across’.… Read more »Changing lines in groups
If you’ve been working with Yi for a while, you’re probably familiar with the idea of looking at the hexagram each individual moving line would change to on its own, to give you a better context to understand its meaning. You might have heard them referred to as zhi gua,… Read more »Two-line changes
Simple Two lines in Hexagram 7, the Army, talk about carting corpses: line 3: ‘Perhaps the army carts corpses.Pitfall.’ and line 5: ‘The fields have gameFruitful to speak of capture:No mistake.When the elder son leads the army,And younger son carts corpses:Constancy, pitfall.’ The core meaning is surely intuitively obvious: an… Read more »What’s wrong with carting corpses, anyway?
I’m repeating myself here, but never mind – it bears repeating. The Yi is wonderfully made, with mind-boggling depth. One of the ways this manifests is in the relationships between changing lines and their zhi gua, the hexagram that follows from the change. For example, 49.3 changes to Hexagram 17,… Read more »Revolution without entanglement
I’ve written before about looking at groups of changing lines, and seeing how they point towards their changed hexagram – just as a single line would do. (I’ve just added all those posts to a series, so you can find them all easily.) Here’s another for the collection: Hexagram 62,… Read more »Clarity and the flying bird
