The second chapter of David Pankenier’s lovely book, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China – Conforming Earth to Heaven – rejoices in the title, ‘Watching for dragons.’ In it he talks in detail about the dragon of Hexagram 1, and also proposes a whole new idea about why the dragons are fighting in 2.6.… Read more »Why dragons fight in hexagram 2
También disponible en español Hexagram 23 is called Stripping Away. The old character shows a knife, and a less-clear component that might be a well winch or a bag for filtering wine, separating the wine from the dregs. As LiSe shows, that blends into the meaning of the whole. But the knife component… Read more »Could Stripping Away be painless?
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
The more closely I look at the Image – the Daxiang wing, I mean – the more I think whoever wrote it was a sage. One tiny example… you know how most of the hexagrams’ Images tell you what the ‘noble one’ would do? And then there are three that… Read more »The Image of Stripping Away
I’m enjoying reading Stephen Field’s Ancient Chinese Divination, especially the insight into the early understanding of qi and how it flows. I’m just reading his description of Form School fengshui. While its earliest written description is (in Yijing terms) relatively young (the Tang dynasty Book of Burial), the fundamental idea… Read more »Trigram topography?
Cutting through hexagram 23 – Harmen’s Dagboek. One of those splendidly detailed articles from Harmen I need to read over and over again. One thing that leaps to the eye: he mentions that one component of the hexagram name (as it appears in the received text) is itself used as… Read more »Harmen cuts through Hexagram 23
My personal ‘hexagram for the week’: 23, unchanging. Eek. Not so long ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. I know many people are nervous of the ‘bad’ hexagrams and anticipate disasters whenever they receive hexagrams 23, 44 or 12 (the three most often labelled as ‘bad’). I’ve… Read more »Hexagram 23? Now what?
