Starting the I Ching

[sdi]

My first deep dive into spirituality came fourteen years ago or so when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching in a bookstore. This was a balm for the injuries sustained in my abusive, fundamentalist upbringing, and I spent the next few years studying Taoism as deeply as I could. For some reason, even though I read quite a bit, I never came around to studying the I Ching—I just wasn't ready for it, I guess, since it took most of a decade for me to open up enough to take up the tarot (which didn't work out very well) and geomancy (which did).

The I Ching has just sorta been sitting there in the background, quietly waiting for me. My family is presently in the middle of moving to Colorado, and my copy of the I Ching is stuffed away in a box somewhere, so I figured it wasn't the time to try taking up anything new... but I suppose there's something in the air, here, since when we visited here last autumn, I was led to a Taoist Feng Shui book; and just yesterday a copy of The Fortune Teller's I Ching jumped out at me at the local library's annual book sale. I took this as a hint that I should go ahead and play with it: not really for anything serious, since I can use geomancy for important questions, but more as an avenue for exploring Taoism more deeply once again.

So I thought I'd start putting the oracle through it's paces by asking the obvious question: "How can I expect my study of the I Ching to proceed?"

䷬

45: To Collect. Success. The king approaches the temple. It is good to see the great man. There will be success. It is good to behave properly. The use of large offerings brings good fortune. To move forward in any direction will also bring good fortune.

Top six moves. He sighs and weeps floods of tears. There will be no mistakes.

I am disciplined, I am committed to the work, and the path before me is easy. I will have success, but what comes easily doesn't last.

Do you know the story of the man who lost his horse? It's an old and famous parable from the Huainanzi, written a bit over two millennia ago. It's about a farmer who has various things happen to him, and the apparently good things turn out to be bad, and the apparently bad things turn out to be good. He simply does his best in the moment, and is successful in a way, since he never suffers any harm... but, on the other hand, neither does he see any material benefit from the "good" things that happen. His true success is the perspective he has to see through the illusion of each occurrence. This reading feels a bit like that to me: what success is to be found is abstract, rather than concrete. Studying geomancy required a lot of effort, and granted rewards commensurate with that effort; but since I've already put in all that work, studying the I Ching will go much easier but not really move the needle in my life, since I already have the tools I need.

Still, though, it's fun. Why not play a game with my angel?

Comments

[sdi]

It should probably go without saying, but I am brand new to the I Ching and my interpretations are green. I would welcome input from those more experienced than myself!

[temporaryreality]

Haha, I started out typing this very straightforwardly, but it's turned into kind of an enthusiastic run-on. Don't take this as pressure to go any deeper with this than you want to... but the I Ching is a rich ground and a deep dive if you want it. :)
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I have such fond regard for the I Ching - but its ever-so-many possible answers (exact amount figure-outable by math geeks) mean that I have never developed my own interpretations, per se, of any of those possibilities except at the the moment of a reading in which I interpret its relevance to the situation.

It's very much a conversation with someone VERY old with a vast frame of reference.

I recommend getting several translations and reading for fundamental tone, or flavor, or essence. Wilhelm is... stuffier? than others, but functionally correct, Deng Ming Dao is liberal and poetic... and those were the two I had for a while until I got Karcher's "Total I Ching: Myths for Change" which is deep, mystical, magical, and somehow connected to the trance-roots and shamanic rituals that are at the heart of the *characters* used. I turn to his translation first, now, then look at the others for a kind of common-understanding-as-windsock. Of course relying on multiple translations means every reading takes time, and so I tend to not ask a reading of the I Ching all that often for that reason.

Definitely consider reading up on the history of the text and the commentaries - I didn't get, for a long time, the implications of a Taoist text being worked on or commented on by Confucianists, but it's something to be aware of. (and since I tend toward the Taoist side of things, I favor Karcher who works to pry under the Confucian and later Buddhist layers).

Who is to say if any one translator is accurate - I think the I/Yi makes the translations it wants.

I presume that the first people who contacted it (the Yi, the great change), working at the foundational level of the ideograms, actually imbued the trigrams and hexagrams with memorized/absorbed meaning, but eventually of course those meanings were written down in other contexts (inscriptions on bronzes, the oracle bone writing, seal script, etc.) until we get to the written Chinese language as we know it, which is decidedly different in appearance, perhaps in pronunciation, and in what each character *means* today. But the ancient meanings are there, deep under the surface (and this is one reason mastery of Chinese is so hard for foreigners - there are implied meanings, contexts, links to idioms and sayings, embedded in EVERY SINGLE WORD). For this reason, I also find Karcher's I Ching concordance very helpful because it shows a lot of what each character holds.

I've been kind of daydreaming lately of approaching the Tao te Ching with that concordance and seeing what it yields, but it'll have to stay a daydream for a while.
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And... Colorado! That's exciting!

[sdi]

Thanks, temporaryreality, and apologies for taking a few days to get back to you! (Things are a bit crazy right now.)


its ever-so-many possible answers (exact amount figure-outable by math geeks)

Did somebody call for a math geek? I happen to be one! :D

So, of course there are 64 hexagrams. If you ignore moving lines, there are only those 64 possibilities. If you allow any line to be moving, there are 64×2^6=4096 possibilities. The book I got at the library uses a scheme where exactly one line is always moving, which means there are 64×6=384 possibilities.

What surprised me is how far it carries these. A geomancy reading has 2^16=65536 possibilities, which seems like a lot until you realize that a 3-card tarot reading has 78×77×76=456456 possibilities! I've only done a few readings with the I Ching so far but it's been astonishingly precise so far given that it's only got a few hundred cases.


I recommend getting several translations and reading for fundamental tone, or flavor, or essence.

I appreciate the perspective, and tend to agree—that was the approach I took when studying the Tao Te Ching! I still have the book you recommended, though it's in a box right now... I plan to dig it out when I have a bookshelf again. :)


I presume that the first people who contacted it (the Yi, the great change), working at the foundational level of the ideograms, actually imbued the trigrams and hexagrams with memorized/absorbed meaning

I think this is true, and it the tack I'm trying to take as I study the oracle, myself. (It helps that the trigrams are a lot like the geomantic figures, and a hexagram is a a lot like the summary part of a geomantic reading (the "court"), so it's a model I'm sorta habituated to, already.) A few of the trigrams are fairly intuitive to me, but it'll be a while before I've got a more solid sense of the whole...


Colorado! That's exciting!

We're hopeful!