What is Jie 介 ? The character jie 介 occurs three times in the Yi: 16.2 ‘Boundaries of stone,Not for a whole day.Constancy, good fortune.’ 35.2 ‘Now advancing, now apprehensive.Constancy, good fortune.Accepting this armour blessing from your ancestral mother.’ 58.4 ‘Negotiating opening, not yet at rest.Containing the affliction brings rejoicing.’ As… Read more »Borders and boundaries
A short story In typical Yi style, this is a very short story: ‘Traveller in a place to stay, Gains property and an axe. My heart is not glad.’ ‘Subtly penetrating under the bed, Losing your property and axe. Constancy, pitfall.’ These are lines 56.4 and 57.6, and they have… Read more »Lost property
The Sequence – for all the remarkable patterns it contains – is about the simplest ‘tool’ you can add to your interpretive repertoire. No complicated operations are required to find the preceding hexagram, and no concept more profound than steps along the road: ‘You pass through this to reach here.’… Read more »Hexagram 57 in the Sequence
(Continuing a series on hexagram 57, because it makes sense to approach this hexagram of all hexagrams incrementally!) What does Subtly Penetrating mean in readings? Well… like any hexagram, it means what it says and what it is, and no amount of commentary changes that. But I have noticed a… Read more »Hexagram 57 in readings
‘No one can tell me, Nobody knows, Where the wind comes from, Where the wind goes.’ AA Milne, ‘Wind on the Hill’ Xun has to be the most elusive hexagram. It’s awkward to translate (you need one word that means penetrating, interpenetrating, subtly, imperceptibly, gently, submitting…) and really tricky to… Read more »The elusive hexagram 57
I’m sure I must have mentioned these before, so let me start with a quick recap before I get to something I just noticed about 57.5… A ‘line pathway’ is my name for what LiSe calls ‘line squares’ and Stephen Karcher calls ‘crossline omens’. (LiSe and Stephen are the ones… Read more »A line pathway
The other day, after a series of readings circulating between hexagrams 58, 47, 48, 57, I noticed another little nugget of patterns within the Sequence of hexagrams. Hexagram 37 describes life inside the home, defined by its boundaries (37.1). Hexagram 38 is outside the walls: opposed, seeing differently, alien. Hexagram… Read more »Inside and outside
