Weekly readings are a blessing and a joy. I’m finding that the richest rewards come from asking an open-ended question every weekend, and keeping this separate from my readings about whatever pressing issues have come up. Stephen Karcher wrote that the basic question we ask oracles – the question behind… Read more »Weekly I Ching readings
I’ ve been wondering and delighting in this reading for a year now – it seems a good time to share it. I had a Christian upbringing, and as I started reflecting for myself, I never quite saw the point of the Incarnation. God is here, of course – where… Read more »Christmas I Ching
Very interesting email from Donato: “Dear Hilary, I have been consulting I-Ching for many years, during crisis mainly and therefore for really important matters, as well for less decisive problems. In many cases the answers seemed coherent with the question, in some quite ‘to the point’, in many others they… Read more »Wrong answers?
I first met Margaret Pearson at a talk she was giving in Clare Hall, Cambridge, about the Yijing and her upcoming translation. She handed out excerpts from her first drafts, including Hexagram 11, and I started reading with great interest. Simple, fluent translation… a couple of ‘why did I never realise that?’ moments… A gently lucid commentary that I can see myself quoting in readings in future.
Then I looked at the Image – and there, instead of the usual ‘ruler’ or ‘prince’, was the queen, ‘guid[ing] the natural forces of both sky and earth’. Oh dear, I thought. She’s just arbitrarily converting the male to the female, I thought. After all, this character means a male ruler, right?
Um. It ain’t necessarily so.
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
