I’ve been browsing with growing fascination through the Takashima Ekidan. Published in 1893 in Tokyo, this is an English translation by Shigetake Sugiura of an original Yijing translation by Kaemon Takashima, a successful serial entrepreneur and respected diviner. (‘Eki’ is the Japanese name for the Yi, and I believe ‘dan’… Read more »Yi in 19th Century Japan
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
I’ve written before about looking at groups of changing lines, and seeing how they point towards their changed hexagram – just as a single line would do. (I’ve just added all those posts to a series, so you can find them all easily.) Here’s another for the collection: Hexagram 62,… Read more »Clarity and the flying bird
Integrating trigram imagery into a full reading is sometimes tricky: we don’t, after all, know what the trigrams represented to the people who first wrote the book. So attempting to justify text in terms of trigrams can get one tied up in all sorts of over-elaborate knots. However… those original… Read more »Drums in the lake
A thought on Hexagram 4. We think of Not Knowing as a default state, a starting position: children don’t know at first, so they learn; we start off not knowing, so then we consult the oracle. (Though preferably not for a second and third time…) In today’s news, the BBC announces the… Read more »A spring of doubt
Each year on my birthday, I ask Yi for guidance for the coming year. Then over the course of the year I revisit the reading, finding guidance and gleaning understanding as I go. At least, such is the theory. Last year’s reading, cast on 7th December 2015, was Hexagram 55,… Read more »Meeting the Yi lord
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
