If you’ve studied Stephen Karcher’s Total I Ching or listened to How to make Change a working part of your life, you’ll be familiar with the idea that the I Ching’s hexagrams come in Pairs, and that these Pairs are units of meaning in themselves. If you receive Hexagram 6,… Read more »Looking at hexagram pairs
The Useless Tree: Friday I Ching: Hurricanes and the Mandate of Heaven Sam Crane has found quite a question to ask this time: “What does this second hurricane suggest for President Bush’s hold on the Mandate of Heaven?” Sam’s understanding of the Mandate is that it “is rooted in how… Read more »Friday I Ching: Hurricanes and the Mandate of Heaven
I write a lot about trying to recover the original meanings of some of the I Ching’s key phrases. Which may be of academic interest, but why bother with China circa 1000BC when asking about Western life in 2005 AD?
Well, not to get to the One True Authentic Original Oracle. That doesn’t exist, and any claims otherwise deserve short shrift. No – it’s about trying for an imaginative grasp on the ideas and interrelationships in the old text.
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 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.
Harmen Mesker has added some entries in English to his blog. One is a critique of Robert Benson’s ‘I Ching for a New Age’, which I didn’t buy when I picked it up in a local bookstore. The general ‘everyone sucks but me’ attitude is feeble, I think, and the basic approach to the text is depressing:
