The Inner Structure Of The I Ching : The Book O... __LINK__
Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal. Such certainty alone gives that light which leads to success. This leads to the perseverance that brings good fortune and bestows power to cross the great water. One is faced with a danger that has to be overcome. Weakness and impatience can do nothing. Only a strong man can stand up to his fate, for his inner security enables him to endure to the end.This strength shows itself in uncompromising truthfulness [with himself].It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are,without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that a light will developout of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. This recognitionmust be followed by resolute and persevering action. For only the man whogoes to meet his fate resolutely is equipped to deal with it adequately.Then he will be able to cross the great water--that is to say, he will becapable of making the necessary decision and of surmounting the danger.
The inner structure of the I Ching : the book o...
Here the isolation is due to misunderstanding; it is brought about not by outer circumstances but by inner conditions. A man misjudges his best friends, taking them to be as unclean as a dirty pig in and as dangerous as a wagon full of devils. He adopts an attitude of defense. But in the end, realizing his mistake, he lays aside the bow, perceiving that theother is approaching with the best intentions for the purpose of close union.Thus the tension is relieved. The union resolves the tension, just as falling rain relieves the sultriness preceding a thunderstorm. All goes well,for just when opposition reaches its climax it changes over to its antithesis.
While THE WELL relates to the social foundation of our life, and this foundation is likened to the water that serves to nourish growing wood, the present hexagram refers to the cultural superstructure of society.Here it is the wood that serves as nourishment for the flame, the spirit.All that is visible must grow beyond itself, extend into the realm of theinvisible. Thereby it receives its true consecration and clarity and takesfirm root in the cosmic order. Here we see civilization as it reachesits culmination in religion. The ting serves in offering sacrifice toGod. The highest earthly values must be sacrificed to the divine. But thetruly divine does not manifest itself apart from man. The supreme revelationof God appears in prophets and holy men. To venerate them is true venerationof God. The will of God, as revealed through them, should be accepted inhumility; this brings inner enlightenment and true understanding of theworld, and this leads to great good fortune and success.
The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves. The hexagram consists of firm lines above and below, while it is open in the center. This indicates a heart free of prejudices and therefore open to truth. On the otherhand, each of the two trigrams has a firm line in the middle; this indicates the force of inner truth in the influences they present. The attributes of the two trigrams are: above, gentleness, forbearance toward inferiors; below, joyousness in obeying superiors. Such conditions create the basis of a mutual confidence that makes achievements possible. The character of fu ("truth") is actually the picture of a bird's foot over a fledgling. It suggests the idea of brooding. An egg is hollow. The light-giving power must work to quicken it from outside, but there must be a germ of lifewithin, if life is to be awakened. Far-reaching speculations can be linkedwith these ideas.
This refers to the involuntary influence of a man's inner being upon persons of kindred spirit. The crane need not show itself on a high hill. It may be quite hidden when it sounds its call; yet its young will hear its not, will recognize it and give answer. Where there is a joyous mood, there a comrade will appear to share a glass of wine. This is the echo awakened in men through spiritual attraction. Whenever a feeling is voiced with truth and frankness, whenever a deed is the clear expression of sentiment, a mysterious and far-reaching influence is exerted. At first it acts onthose who are inwardly receptive. But the circle grows larger and larger.The root of all influence lies in one's own inner being: given true and vigorousexpression in word and deed, its effect is great. The effect is but the reflectionof something that emanates from one's own heart. Any deliberate intentionof an effect would only destroy the possibility of producing it. Confuciussays about this line:
In the second part I offer a few notes on books about the I Ching. On the whole, the standard here is higher, the selection smaller, 27 books being covered. These are the kind of books that should be being published. The trouble is that the mass market for I Ching books is not at this level, so few publishers are willing to take on manuscripts of a high calibre as they see little return, preferring to cater over and over again for beginners in the form of yet another version of the I Ching, which in turn fosters the false impression that Wilhelm is too austere.
Although beginners often feel that Wilhelm is too complicated and seek a simpler version to start with, what I would recommend is that they get Wilhelm as early as they can and just use Book I initially, ignoring Book II (The Great Treatise) and Book III (Commentaries) until they feel more confident to tackle them (all three books are published in one volume). Only Wilhelm has the necessary depth for a reliable interpretation. While it is true there are a few passages in need of revision, these are far fewer than in any other translation, and in general Wilhelm manages to convey the essential meaning via his summaries of the Neo-Confucian commentary material, which is without equal in any other version. In using Wilhelm over a long period, gradually one becomes aware of a deeper purpose underlying events, which surpasses simple divination.
'The Other Way' is not nearly as interesting as her other work. A book of meditational visions and dreams based on the I Ching. The third book contains a psychoanalysis of the inner dynamics of the love relationship, based on principles drawn from the I Ching. I can identify with a lot of what she says. The hexagrams are referred to throughout.
Over the ages this oracular text has helped Chinese Emperors and simple citizens make life decisions and understand the world around them. It has been used by men and women at all levels of Chinese society, from the peasant trudging to the Temple Fair to have his or her fortune told, to the general calculating his next move on the battlefield; from the poet searching for an archetypal image, to the landscape painter depicting man at one with cosmos - a tiny individual reading the I Ching in some remote hermitage, set amidst vast mountains and waterfalls; from the arcane philosopher-alchemist conjuring with potent abstractions, to the skilled traditional physician striving to cure his patients through an understanding of their inner Yin-Yang dynamic.
The process of consultation itself is relatively simple and can take place in any humble room. The fall of three coins or of the stalks of the yarrow plant guides the reader directly to one of sixty-four Hexagrams. These six-line diagrams are made up of broken (Yin) and unbroken (Yang) lines. Their structure presents a "scan" of the potential dynamic of the given situation, and of the forces at work within it, while the attached texts analyze that inner dynamic in terms of images and the interplay of Yin and Yang (feminine and masculine, yielding and firm, negative and positive). The advice offered often counsels the individual to live and act with caution and moderation, in accordance with the flow of the underlying situation, thereby avoiding futile conflict and achieving benign harmony. Around the nexus of 64 Hexagrams and the infinite number of Chinese commentaries, whole systems of thought have evolved, from the esoteric to the more plainly strategic and practical. But they all have to do with the central idea of Self Cultivation, the training of the Heart-and-Mind through practices such as yoga, meditation and self-reflection. Self Cultivation through the I Ching enables the individual to attune his or her life to the greater rhythm and resonance of the cosmos -- a hugely ambitious aspiration. But after all, as Dylan and Cheng Yi claimed, the book is "the only thing that is amazingly true, period;" it provides "everything."
Some would say that the power descends from its ancient magical origins. As the Anglo-Chinese novelist Timothy Mo has written, "It is a cable that disappears into the abyss of a darker time. In it the Bronze Age predicts to the Information Age the shadow of what is to come." This may be part of the truth. But as I see it, the key to the efficacy of any I Ching consultation is the extent to which the dialogue between individual and text is imbued with the twin spiritual qualities of Sincerity and Good Faith. The person approaching the oracle must bring to his or her consultation a total honesty, an inner mind free of deceit and delusion. Once this has been achieved, the book acts as a penetrating mirror, a true spiritual friend opening the individual's range of vision to possibilities undreamed of hitherto. It talks back from the deeper mind. often bringing a potent liberation from the static and paralyzing indecisions that render the individual incapable of making creative choices.
When this new edition was being prepared, the editors gave much thought to the question whether a rearrangement of the contents of the Book might facilitate its use for the non-Chinese reader. The final decision was to leave unchanged the arrangement which my father had chosen. This decision was based not only on the conviction that books, too, are organisms which should undergo incisive operations only in dire emergencies; the more important consideration was that the present arrangement is the most meaningful and the easiest to handle. In the traditional Chinese editions the presentation of the text is not uniform. The problem of arrangement pertains particularly to the text of certain of the Ten Wings which might either be divided up among the hexagrams or be read as a continuous text. The second alternative has points in its favor. One of the Wings, the book Tsa Kua (Miscellaneous Notes on the Hexagrams), which discusses the hexagrams one by one (or rather in pairs), does not coincide in sequence with the hexagrams in the main text. The particular curve of development thus gets lost when this book is divided up among the hexagrams. Nor is this all. The Tsa Kua, when read in its own sequence, is an accomplished poem with a firm prosodic structure and a consistent rhyme system. The same is true of the Small Images, the commentaries on the line texts, found in the third book of this translation. Thus here we have early examples of didactic Chinese poetry the features of which are lost when these texts are divided up among the hexagrams. 041b061a72
