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sequence

sand running through fingers

Lost property

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 shape of Hexagram 23

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Hexagram 23

In a little post on hexagrams and scale I wrote,­ Just on this blog, I found three readings I’d shared with Hexagram 23. They were, in order: auspices for using a certain technology during a webinar. (I persuaded myself I could use it anyway, and it failed impressively.) foreshadowing my… Read more »The shape of Hexagram 23

A baton being passed from one hand to the next

Book of stories: what follows

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Book of Stories

A few posts ago, I tried to list all Yi’s ways of telling stories:

  • those little one-line vignettes
  • allusions to the culture’s big stories – both history and myth
  • the individual steps of the Sequence of Hexagrams (‘Here’s how you reach this place.’)
  • the huge narrative arcs of the Sequence – ‘you are here’ on the grand scale
  • multiple moving line readings that unfold one line at a time
  • the ‘nuclear story’ within each hexagram
  • the stories told through the connections between readings

So I’ve written about the vignettes and the mythical allusions, and now we come to individual steps through the Sequence.

This means something

A thoroughly useful guiding principle for both diviners and translators: this means something. For diviners with/ translators of the Yijing, the principle needs elaborating: this means something, whether or not I have the faintest glimmerings of a clue what it means. That should really be inscribed in every Yijing book and… Read more »This means something

Hexagram 57 in the Sequence

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Hexagram 57

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