‘Not yet across, creating success.The small fox, almost across,Soaks its tail:No direction bears fruit.’ There are ten places where the Yi says that ‘no direction bears fruit’, or (in the Wilhelm/Baynes version) ‘nothing furthers’: 4.3, 19.3, 25.6, 27.3, 32.1, 34.6, 45.3, 54.0, 54.6, and finally 64.0. It’s easy to see… Read more »No direction bears fruit
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
‘Above the mountain, there is water. Limping.Noble one turns himself around to renew his character.’ Hexagram 39, the Image When the Image authors talked of ‘turning oneself around’ in Hexagram 39, they were picking up on a theme in the older layers of text. To start with, the Oracle says… Read more »Limping disentangled
Hexagram 1 says yuan heng li zhen – from the source, creating success, constancy bears fruit. Hexagram 2 says yuan heng li pinma zhi zhen – from the source, creating success, a mare’s constancy bears fruit The remaining hexagrams can be seen as ‘children’ of these two – 62 ways of blending… Read more »Yuan heng li zhen
Four years ago 😯 , I posted about my first encounters with shadow hexagrams. And last week I was reminded of them again when a friend asked me to look at his connected-hexagrams-generating script that included Ideal and Shadow, along with many more of the creations from Stephen Karcher’s divination-laboratory.… Read more »Shadow hexagrams revisited
Warning: this post is pure, unadulterated gleeful Yeekery. I’ve been reading about how the ancient Chinese bronze vessels were made. Here’s a fascinating pdf on the subject (right click and choose ‘save as’ to download), with images of the finished vessels and also the moulds used in the casting, and… Read more »Casting the Vessel
I see I have made no posts here for over a month. Eep. Why? Erm, let me give you the short version. My Mum-in-law was admitted to hospital as an emergency (this is not the same admission I wrote about before). That was all very intense and dramatic… and it… Read more »Yi and times of crisis
