Question: “What advice can be offered for more effectively providing meditative peace and healing through playing Shakuhachi flute music?” Answer: Great Vigour in Flow. changing to A Yeeky thing I mentioned during this reading: the idea of a dabagua, or ‘big trigram’ hexagram. If you take the trigram dui, lake…… Read more »Creating peace through music
‘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
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of a ‘culture hero’: A culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. Chinese mythology seems to be especially full of these: people who are recognised as heroic because they invented millet farming,… Read more »Hexagrams as culture heroes
Introducing the Zagua The Yi became the Yijing, a Classic book, as it grew its Ten Wings: ten bodies of commentary and reflections on the oracle and its hexagrams. The Zagua, ‘Mixed hexagrams’, is the tenth and last of these: a short, simple, rhyming description of the hexagrams in pairs.… Read more »A patchwork of hexagrams
The person who emailed me this question found the expression ‘superior man’ quite off-putting. I can see why: arranging half of humanity into superiors and inferiors, inviting the reader to identify not just as a good person but as someone better than the rest… none of this feels sympathetic to me,… Read more »Who is the ‘superior man’?
It’s a common source of confusion and frustration with I Ching readings: ‘My answer has multiple moving lines, and they contradict one another. How am I supposed to make sense of this?’ Here’s an article to help you with that. Why ‘revisited’? Many years ago now, I wrote a rambling… Read more »Multiple moving lines, revisited
The fourth kind of Yijing story I mentioned when I first called it a ‘Book of Stories’ was the huge narrative arcs of the Sequence – ‘you are here’ on the grand scale. Which is an easy bullet-point to write, but not so easy to expand on. Also, I’m no longer… Read more »Book of (very big) stories
