The serpent, however, and the eagle, when they found him silent in such wise, respected the great stillness around him
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
The I Ching states that Tai Chi gives birth to the two aspects of yin and yang. When yin reaches its peak, it produces yang; when yang reaches its peak, it produces yin. The dynamic processes of hard and soft, movement and stasis, are all based on these peaks
– Cheng Man-ching, Thirteen Chapters on Tai Chi Chuan
The I Ching is a book you never wholly understand. The same applies with accomplished poetry, which is why we read it repeatedly. Meaning and value lie within the implied and suggested as much as the stated. This is why literary exegesis has limited importance. It matters what the old Chinese says or we might go seriously wrong, but it’s not the final knowledge. The I Ching we read is a poetic not a technical text.
One of the questions beginners ask is which book should I buy. It’s personal, and opinions vary, just as some people like poet Phillip Larkin and others T.S. Eliot. They’re very different. Larkin is flippant and sometimes amusing, but there’s a hidden depth in his art which for Eliot is immediately apparent. The epigraph to The Wasteland is a Latin reference to the Sibyl of Cumae, a prophetess in service to Apollo whom he gives eternal life but not eternal youth. She withers, shrinks, and wants to die. The power of prophecy is subject to paradoxical limits.
Wilhelm’s book doesn’t suit everyone but is the most important I Ching. It’s understood as part of the Confucian Meaning and Principle tradition. This emphasises philosophical wisdom more than technical construction. But the lines and their placements, trigrams and their symbolism, inform the text. The result is a book describing ordinary predicaments as the subject of typical questions, but in an elevated context. Eliot does the same in The Wasteland. The line “Hurry up please it’s time” is the call of a publican before closing. Time is a repeating theme and found in other poems such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
Prufrock is an abbreviated version of The Wasteland insofar as it depicts the need for meaning in a shallow world. Time and change are integral to the I Ching; it’s no surprise such deep subjects are explored elsewhere. Eliot was criticised for his intellectualism, like it was a ploy for selective readership. But if you speak of Dante, the Fisher King, Vedanta, this is a level you reach with effort not expect to be easy. The same applies with the I Ching.
There are easier versions because they are simpler and less poetic. The I Ching Workbook by R.L. Wing is a popular example. If you find Wilhelm difficult, it’s a good alternative. The book goes deeper, that’s the point; but it depends what you want. I like The Taoist I Ching translated by Thomas Cleary because of the specialised emphasis. It’s not the version I would choose if I were confined to one book, but I’ll provide an example and explain the meaning.
For hexagram 3 we read “Generally speaking, in the course of operating the fire advancing yang, it is necessary to know the proper timing. By knowing the time to take the medicine, using the temporal to restore the primordial, one can get out of difficulty.” Yang is the positive force of light, opposing yin darkness. Gender correlation is not what it means, although this occurs in religion. Timing is critical in the I Ching, so you may receive advice not for immediate deployment. The temporal and primordial refer to passing time in relation to underlying singularity. The meaning is spiritual as the answer to both incarnation and, with a similar principle of advance, in regard to real situations. I will explain the word “medicine” below.
There are different methods of learning the I Ching. The Meaning and Principle tradition is regarded as a contrary approach to the Image and Number school. It is true Wilhelm favoured the former but his book contains the latter. It’s a question of emphasis and, separate from scholasticism, whatever you find useful. In the Ta Chuan, Wilhelm advises both: “First take up the words / Ponder their meaning / Then the fixed rules reveal themselves.” The “fixed rules” are the technical construction of lines and trigrams.
The written text reading is the most popularly used method. Few people learn the structure of the book and it’s not necessary if you find value in the words of Wilhelm, Cleary, Legge, Karcher, Huang, Wing, or whatever text you prefer. The “fixed rules” are fundamental because the I Ching is not arbitrary writing. If your book of choice expresses those rules, and you connect to the corresponding words, that’s a good book for you.
I Ching hexagrams have a structure where for example the upper line is rarefied and free floating, while the lower line is materially trapped. If you ask a question about work, lines translate into the hierarchy of an organisation. The sixth line is the CEO while the first is the factory worker. If the second line corresponds to the fifth above, one yang and the other yin in harmonious relationship, this means an organisation where upper and lower have different interests but work together. The second and fifth lines are central to lower and upper trigrams and correspondingly important. If they are good lines, strong supporting weak or weak softening strong, they are said to be “correct.”
The deeper meaning of the I Ching lies beyond its particular answers; how it reflects psychology, society, and metaphysics. The Tao is sometimes used as an idea to rejuvenate Western malaise. There’s a story where a Tai Chi teacher is with Alan Watts, who wrote a book about Taoism, and he recounts how Watts made a few moves then exclaimed ecstatically, this is the Tao: moving, free, relaxed. Al Huang, the teacher, is known for a dance-like version of the form commonly found in Europe and America.
The essence of Tai Chi lies not with waving arms around but in sophisticated methods described by Bruce Frantzis in The Power of Internal Martial Arts. He describes opening and closing the joints, verticality, expanding, contracting, spiralling and body-mind mechanics subtly apparent if you watch a skilled practitioner. The martial art of Ba gua expresses I Ching principles in bodily form:
Ba gua is based on the idea of being able to smoothly and appropriately change from one situation to another. Awareness and adaptability to the natural flux of situations is its basic guideline. Unlike tai chi and hsing-i, the art of ba gua does not have a hard or soft philosophy, although it uses the strategies of both when useful. Change and the seeking of naturalness in all its actions is its prime directive. Ba gua uses all sixty four psychological and spiritual paradigms of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching without becoming fixated on any of them.
Tai Chi, Hsing I and Ba gua are connected but different arts. I had a small number of Ba gua lessons with Rose Li, renowned for an exceptional training in China beginning when she was eight years old. I had lessons with several Tai Chi teachers including Paul Crompton, comparably experienced to Frantzis, and here he reads an instructional poem consistent with the I Ching: “Be sensitive to the changes, the slightest shift from full to empty.”
Wilhelm advises “first take up the words” of the I Ching then “the fixed rules” become apparent. This compares to learning the external shape of the Tai Chi form then progressing to the level of subtle mechanics. We need a container before we can work with content. It is possible however to approach this differently, building small parts into a greater whole, which for the I Ching means concentrating on the meaning of trigrams and lines.
The achievement of Wilhelm’s book consists of several factors. It sits within the Meaning and Principle tradition, includes the humanism of Confucius, but also Image and Number methodology and Taoist naturalism. He was an unusual person interested in spiritual subjects not confined to religious tradition, and he worked with an authentic I Ching expert for ten years. Without Wilhelm’s book, we wouldn’t have a coherent I Ching in the West.
In his back garden, Crompton put his hands on my chest saying “I can push you halfway up that wall if I want to.” The term for this is “uprooting” where you break connection with the earth. I felt it. There was nothing I could do. My normal connection with the ground disappeared as if weight and gravity were meaningless. This seems contrary to physics like a small child, which I was not, potentially pushed by a strong adult, which Crompton was not. Not that is, in a normal muscular sense.
Connection with earth appears in Greek mythology in the form of Antaeus who can only be defeated when he is lifted from the ground. For the I Ching, earth corresponds to the trigram Kun and is one of the five phases. It is created by fire, generates metal, and undermined with wood. These phases, and some of the I Ching hexagrams, correspond to Tai Chi movements. The eight trigrams connect with the Ba gua martial art which has similar health and meditative benefits.
In his book Walking Meditation, Crompton correlates hexagram lines with body areas, trigrams with animal qualities. Chinese martial arts do this to describe an attitude or style of movement. Pondering the meaning of animals he says:
On a simple physical level we can say that a person has to be able to evince great strength, self confidence and power, like a wolf, together with playfulness, softness and innocence, like a lamb; to display the lithe, sinuous, flickering movements of the snake, as well as the lumbering force of the bear, and so on, through combination after combination.
One of the effects of an I Ching reading is the changing of mood, outlook, or strategy like a shift from one trigram to another. There’s never a fixed position just a flow of patterns and shapes. A situation, or a problem, looks different from another perspective. This is the meaning of the word “medicine” in The Taoist I Ching, a tradition where “elixir” means spiritual discovery.
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.