Mono no aware 物の哀れ
– the pathos of things
The Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, takes change and transformation as ultimate reality and truth. This of course bespeaks of the uniqueness and essential importance of Yijing and its philosophy
– Chung-Ying Cheng, The Philosophy of Change
It’s worth remembering that I Ching means The Book of Changes. It’s one of the things which attracted me when I first heard of it, after finding the Tao Te Ching. I bought my first copy of both as an undergraduate. I still have them alongside different versions I’ve acquired and they are still probably the best, by Gia-Fu Feng and Wilhelm. The I Ching is a book about change. There are three kinds of change described as non-change, cyclic change, and sequent change. I explain this below.
Wilhelm’s book is distinctive, but wider reading is valuable. I found Stephen Karcher a few years ago, and he makes an interesting contribution with a Depth Psychology perspective. He’s a Jungian, working at the meeting ground of ancient book and contemporary understanding. That sometimes becomes reductionist, where Taoist ideas are reconfigured as archetypes not transcendent reality. Sigmund Freud famously said a cigar is sometimes a cigar. The Tao is sometimes the Tao and not part of the Jungian system.
When Jung retreated to his tower beside Lake Zurich, he wasn’t meditating for ten hours a day as a Taoist might do on a mountain. He was painting, reading, writing, and practicing a visualisation process which is essentially playing with imagery. Buddhist philosophy is a useful resource and they describe five skandhas which are aggregates of illusion:
– Form, matter, body
– Sensation, sensory experience
– Perception, mental process
– Mental formations, imprint, conditioning
– Consciousness, discrimination, discernment
Jung’s visualisation process, which he called Active Imagination, fits the category of mental formation. Tibetan Buddhism in particular (despite skandha philosophy) has a similar practice, where deities and theological regions are visualised. But an image is not the thing, just as the Tao that can be told is not the real Tao.
This is the problem with a Jungian I Ching approach, although it doesn’t mean there’s no value to it. There’s substantial value, and it’s worth reading Jung’s foreword to Wilhelm’s book where he summarises the I Ching as “psychological phenomenology.” Karcher writes poetically incorporating the I Ching into his archetypal world, some of which is dubious but Total I Ching: Myths for Change is worth reading. In his book Ta Chuan The Great Treatise, he writes about this important part of the Confucian Ten Wings. On the matter of change, he says “The power and virtue of Change is both round, which invites the spirit, and square, which grounds knowledge.”
The differentiation between spirit and knowledge is interesting, the circle suggesting a process which is not fixed while the square rests solidly. We encounter material facts which can’t be dismissed and must be negotiated with knowledge. Simultaneously, as Logan Roy expresses it unexpectedly in the television series Succession: “The future is real, the past is all made up. Everything everywhere is always moving forever.” It’s a strange context but they are fine words. Compare them to lines from the Ta Chuan: “The past contracts. The future expands. Contraction and expansion act upon each other; hereby arises that which furthers.”
In the Ta Chuan we read “What is easy, is easy to know; what is simple, is easy to follow” referring to the first two hexagrams. Taoist action inserts into the grain of a piece of wood not against it, and there’s a specific application here with emotions and psychology. Depressed people are often told pull yourself out of it and similar, as a widespread and lamentable social attitude. It doesn’t help, spoken internally oneself or from others, but there is a sophisticated Taoist understanding with reference to the black and white yin yang symbol. The connecting line of change is S curved not straight. Yin doesn’t usually change to yang without gentle intermediary stages. This falls into categories of negative and positive yin, and negative and positive yang.
Sadness is negative yin which needs not yang but positive yin. This means encouragement, support, and kindness; building up not cutting down seeing the unhappy person as a problematic projection. Negative yang is aggression and anger which needs positive yang not yin. An unpleasant person perceives yin as weakness and encouragement. The first case will eventually change to yang when they feel greater confidence; the second will realise they can’t impose and must change to yin. This has reference to male psychology where firmness and positive role modelling generates trust, which is yin, which leads to positive yang meaning confidence so they no longer impose for reasons of self elevation.
Sadness can more easily change into compassion, which leads to gratitude, and then joy. Anger can more easily change into confidence, before the final stage of compassion. Fear can readily become awareness, leading to confidence, then competence. The direct change from one opposite to another is unlikely. The Taoist approach emphasises process, not goal, and we read in the Ta Chuan how this occur with the hexagrams: “As the firm and the yielding lines displace one another, change and transformation arise.”
There is such a thing as shocking and drastic change where we read “The influences are in actual conflict, and the forces combat each other like fire and water (lake), each trying to destroy the other” for hexagram 49 called Revolution. But this is not how we operate in normal circumstances. Sociologically, Revolution is a time of Copernicus and conflict. Something new arrives and someone disagrees with it.
The fear example of change is interesting, where a person unused to self assertion can learn new techniques (awareness) which facilitate a sense of power and control. The demonstrative martial art for this psychology is Japanese Aikido where practitioners are taught not to fight directly, but redirect then respond on the paradoxical basis of accepting hostile intent. The instinctive reaction is oppose and object to it. A more sophisticated reaction is accept it exists – they want to hurt you – but don’t stand in a location, physically or psychologically, where that succeeds. The implication is profound. There is good in the universe, but also evil, as part of unavoidable reality. The founder of Aikido, Morehei Ueshiba, may have found inspiration for his art in Chinese Bagua: the martial art of the eight I Ching trigrams.
Wilhelm clarifies the three forms of change with emphasis on the first: “In the Book of Changes a distinction is made between three kinds of change: non-change, cyclic change, and sequent change. Non-change is the background, as it were, against which change is made possible. For in regard to any change there must be some fixed point to which the change can be referred; otherwise there can be no definite order and everything is dissolved in chaotic movement. This point of reference must be established, and this always requires a choice and a decision. It makes possible a system of co-ordinates into which everything else can be fitted.”
The co-ordinates involve what Chung-Ying Cheng describes as “unity in plurality and plurality in unity” (The Philosophy of Change). There seems to be a contradiction between the two but it is resolved (Cheng doesn’t actually say this) because one encompasses the other. Change and multiplicity obviously and evidently exist. But perhaps, and the idea is expanded in the Tao Te Ching, there is another way of being which doesn’t interrupt material nature but is found above it. This displays in the I Ching with separate but interconnected hexagrams, one state changing to another but with common origin. The visible and explicit is the yang, the invisible and implicit is the yin.
We ask ordinary questions of the I Ching but the system is ultimately based on notions of emptiness and stillness within which change occurs. Wilhelm’s teacher was Confucian and his book is considered part of that tradition. There is however a Taoist component in his book consistent with Wilhelm’s spiritual interests. He explains this in the Ten Wings, makes it poetic with the hexagrams, and this is why his book is popular. You don’t immediately understand it, but sense something which is deeply meaningful.
Change never stops, both linear and circular, but non-change underlies it. The result is order not chaos. The Ta Chuan explains “Heaven is high, the earth is low; thus the Creative and the Receptive are determined. In correspondence with this difference between low and high, inferior and superior places are established.” Psychologically, a problem is relegated to an inferior place so it doesn’t override life. Sociologically, stillness and personal value is the same for everyone but in the mechanics of change a Sage is at the top line while a manual worker is below. The first generates autonomous meaning while the second operates within dictated circumstances. The I Ching describes this as the field of action.
The third I Ching hexagram Wilhelm calls Difficulty at the Beginning. Karcher calls it Sprouting and describes it as “Begin, establish, found; seek a bride; birth pains, massing soldiers; gather your strength to surmount difficulties.” Wilhelm describes the encounter of yang with yin from the preceding hexagrams. The principles are established, then one meets the other. Alfred Huang in The Complete I Ching disagrees with the idea of difficulty, and prefers to call it Beginning. Difficulty does not however have negative connotations as such. It means life itself is difficult when we incarnate, as the Buddhists say; when we exist in a system of change as the Taoists describe.
Karcher, Huang, and other I Ching writers describe the third hexagram in mundane terms. Even a psychological beginning is mundane, not metaphysical. Difficulty means the beginning stage of a project, like grass pushing up from earth but still dwelling in the earth. I Ching meaning is ultimately deeper than any project. The first three hexagrams are where you find the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence, suffering, and the beginning of enquiry.
After heaven and earth have come into existence, individual beings develop. It is these individual beings that fill the space between heaven and earth
– Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning
I write like this is a magazine column. With research, references, and a lot of time. If you like it, perhaps you would support me.