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For reading shapes in any type of questions to I Ching.
In the book referring to motion, changes and interdependences, judgements, comments and images always come after the answer, just because the answer are six strokes.
If lacking of memory, displaying the performance in a graphical form is a good way to express and record chi’s shape and qualities of the circumstances. Drawing the six lines of a hexagram may also be useful if we want to tell later other people the answer we got.
Besides, it’s better for an easy understanding: order and structure are just for communicating and sharing answers by using the same way to do it, just for that.
Understanding also depends on the very composing trigrams. They include a design from the beginning, and provide a shape to a situation that is at rest or in motion in a higher or lesser degree. The situation and the future might be represented in different ways but I Ching is a textbook, so written characters are the way to try to transliterate the characteristics and structure of situations. The book does so by assigning multiple meanings and associations to trigrams and hexagrams.
All of their names refer to ideograms, which are not reduced to any specific term, of course. But even though, we usually name Ta Kuo as Great Exceeding, or just call it number 28, which is the order of the sign in the sequence of natural phenomena. It’s a way to identify it for communicational purposes although any single term is not accurate enough to include the wideness any answer provides.
Groups of strokes indicate genesis and nature’s phenomena. Then, they are seen in any area, subject, object or role that displays similar attributes to those of genetic processes and products of nature.
These considerations show two paradoxes:
Hexagrams are currently read as a vertical structure, a fixed representation providing a much more common language. Several comments and other extensions were included in the book later but ideograms cannot be perceived in any specific judgement since they’re not in written characters.
For the same reasons, I Ching becomes one of the most accurate and deep oracles at the time of finding details and searching for concrete specifications. Lists of available chances, enumerations, examples and reflexions seem always poor and, sometimes, it is better not to mention them to not limitate the real extent of practical associations.
At the same time, different translators provide singular perspectives, so it’s not easy to choose an only author whose comments might be easily considered for all of the different subjects I Ching is asked about.
Among them, LiSe Heyboer in his book I Ching: book of the moon shows a way to understand ideograms by moving away from simplified literal meanings, a way much closer to ancient graphism of names. So he reveals the meanings in the roots of the shapes we’re acquainted with nowadays.
PI (8). Solidarity. Union. Holding Together.
“The character represents two people standing or walking behind each other. (2): a person turned to the left, he is a man. (3 y 4: deceased mother): a person turned to the right, is a symbol for female. (5): North, is two people standing back to back - or a man and a woman. The middle between East and West?”
Original meaning: to juxtapose. Later, close, come to, to be neighbours, several together, compare, equal, metaphor, similar, combine, accord with, to form a clique, aid, thanks to, in advance, unite, to be intimate with, go together with, follow, on behalf of, take part of, sectarian, successive, continuation, arranged orderly, accomplish one’s task, according to expectation, dense, tight, put under patronage, classified correctly, category, like preceding cases, as equation (math), before one’s turn.
Graphism of hexagram 8 and cite from I Ching: book of the moon, by LiSe Heyboer
TA KUO (28). The Preponderance of the Great. Great Exceeding. Critical mass.
“The character 1 represents a man: a big one. The second character is a pass in a mountain, also meaning the completion of an action. 2 the steps, 3 the foot, together the crossing. 4 is a skeleton. In guo there is a mouth added; one of its other meanings is a distorted or wry mouth, or with a cleft palate: the opening between the mountains, a pass”.
Graphism of hexagram 28 and cite from the same book
Ta Kuo’s graphism even refers to the break produced when Men increase their actioning (middle bigram, lines 3 and 4), specifically as a cleft in the area of the mouth (nuclear trigrams would change towards Li if changing any of both strokes).
There are many other ways to represent I Ching’s signs. Heyboer gave us original letter graphics but other people preferred mostly corporal forms, like in T’ai Chi Chuan, and other ones are inclined to mostly visual ones, like Wang Dongling in his calligraphic drawings, and Barry Fishman and Denise Weaver Ross in their paintings.
Letter graphics displayed by Heyboer, T’ai Chi’s forms and Dongling’s strokes are also out of the typical confusion involving yin-yang, especially when using the classic forms of discontinuous and continuous strokes.
Those are opposite characteristics but yin-yang are not opposite qualities, not even in excessive expressions. It means that real and true changes indicated by I Ching are not coming from outer influences or forces. For instance: Fu (24) Return shows up after a yin hemicycle has progressed, and is drawn with a single yang stroke in the first position (lower Chen and upper Kun).
About this particular hexagram, yang is usually considered as entering from the base of the situation when, in fact, there’s no enter or exit! Maybe it is so if thinking of a seed when growing from under the surface but even what emerges from the soil and all other visible phenomena come from the relations of a contracting darkness (kun), an expansive opening (chien) and electricity awakening life (chen).
The growing seed has no essence: there are only interactions and products from those interactions. Yang is yin, is in yin, if it’s possible to consider something is yang and something is yin or something is here and something is over there…
Relations and time passing by are what makes yang emerge in yin, and vice-versa
That alternation is usually called mutation in readings, although is just a change of expression and shape, and may mostly happen as an inner or outer experience.
“Outside” and “inside” concepts are relative ideas here, since the empty is what allows real and genuine changes to take place. Even influences only become effective forces if finding an opening… In these cases, inner yin awakens, inner yang rests, and outer yang predominates. From inner-outer interactions, the opening needed by the influence to be shows up.
Change in qualities is an awakening and a resting experience, at the same time. It always happens in the empty because, when something starts to rest, is offering a chance for another expression to be, which is the own but alternating. From inner interactions, all personal phenomena emerge.
Describing a stroke as a continuous or discontiunous line might not be the best option, although considering there are complete lines and broken lines is worst. This type of error is really placing the querent out of I Ching’s worldview!
Maybe the concept of strength has remained associated to ink being poured into a path and lasting, to a continous form, but where is that continuation happening? The space, the opening translating that an action is taking place, and in which body and mind are concentrated on drawing, is yin. So, strength is yin-yang.
It might also happen that the classic visual shape of yin strokes (discontinuous) had associated the weak to what is not kept, is cut or interrupted. But the stroke doesn’t have two separate ink components and, instead, is a single stroke that includes a central expression of openness.
A yin line shows yin-yang interaction: a space has been opened. A yang line displays the same interaction: a space in motion. The empty is non-form, so nothing is broken in a discontinuous line, and nothing is filled in a continuous line.
As it happens when words try to set a definition for an ideogram but only go around and never catch it, sometimes visual forms may also be quite inaccurate if the eye of the watcher is out of I Ching’s worldview.
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