The biggest story arc of the Yijing is the Conquest story: how the Zhou people inherited the mandate of heaven and overthrew the Shang dynasty. It’s a great narrative of Change: the decay of the Shang; the preparations of the good Zhou ruler Wen, making his people worthy of the… Read more »Fathers and sons II: carting corpses
Horses in ancient China http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~baojie/history/chinese/2002-12-02_horse.en.htm A nice, long article on the role of horses, basically in the military, from pre-Shang to post-Zhou times. Why would we be interested? It casts new light on why horses are so important in the Yi: why Prince Kang would be especially honoured by a… Read more »Horses in ancient China
I imagine anyone who’s consulted with Yi must have had the experience. Ask question; receive answer; say ‘Huh??’
And this is where it’s easy to go wrong – where the desire that caused us to ask in the first place won’t accept this lack of clarity, and we find a reason to ask another question, quick. (I touched on this in my post on ‘How long does a reading last?‘ – in response to which Steve Marshall pointed out that answers to big questions can last ten years and more.)
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.
Here’s a very-frequently asked question. This relationship may have been going ecstatically well or this project may have been an intolerable risk yesterday/ last week/ last month, but is that still the case? How long does a reading apply for?
There’s a phrase in the Judgements of hexagrams 31 and 44, along with 4, line 2: ‘taking a woman’. Its usual interpretation is ‘taking to wife’, though it’s the same word used to mean ‘take by force’ or ‘capture an animal’. What are we to make of the phrase? And does it mean something different in readings for men and women? And what have translators and commentators made of it?
I often get emails asking what the I Ching is and how to get started. And while there is enough to reflect on in the I Ching and its traditions to keep anyone engrossed for several lifetimes, getting started with it is absurdly simple.
