Why look for the stories behind the hexagrams? To start with something uncontentious: the people who wrote the Yi had wisdom and intelligence (as well as mind-boggling genius), and were well-informed, and had good reasons for their choices. One of the things they appear to have been well-informed about is… Read more »Myth and legend in hexagrams
Round about this time of year, I’ve usually given subscribers a pdf anthology of newsletter articles from the last year’s issues. Which makes some kind of sense when those articles are scattered through an archive of newsletters, but a bit less sense (I think) when you can go straight to… Read more »The story of Gun and Yu
Last time I splashed out on books I bought not just the shiny new Ritsema/Sabbadini, but also Sarah Allan’s The Shape of the Turtle. And I am enjoying it no end. She writes about Shang myth, but there are many, many resonances in the Zhouyi. But finding one with the… Read more »More trigrams in the sequence (hexagrams 6, 7 and 8)
Sketchy, impressionistic ideas, these, butI think there’s something behind them…
Looking at the mythical and legendary figures that walk the pages of the Yijing, I can’t help noticing how many pairs of fathers and sons there are. And the overarching theme seems to be the responsibility of the sons to take over their fathers’ work and either complete what they began, or redeem their failures.
