This word can clear up a number of points. Let us use the word situation to talk about what happens inside a hexagram. A situation is far from indivisible, quite the opposite: it is a fence which holds together all of the related moments of an event, which are seen as a whole. This word, shi, is used in different expressions to talk about seasons, times zones, chances, opportunities. It is the son of the past and the father of the future. The Chinese have a totally different concept for the moment. We tend to think of this as the smallest such unit (at least in common language – it is obvious that some sciences use extremely short units of time to measure events). But what is a moment, both for the Chinese and for us westerners? For Westerners it is “a short period of time”, an indivisible, ephemeral unit of time. When the Chinese talk of the idea behind a hexagram they talk of a shi, which is often translated by “moment”. But this word only describes a physical or visual object, it does not explain what a hexagram is, just what it looks like. This word can be defined as a “pile of divinatory information”. This sort of multidisciplinary approach, which has the advantage of examining things from the outside, will allow us to answer the question, with almost total certainty – what is a hexagram?įirst of all, what do the Chinese think about this? A hexagram, just like a trigram, is called a gua. Different, seemingly unrelated fields, such as linguistics and psychology, can give us new insights into some aspects of this question. Many people have written about interpreting the Yi Jing, often by explaining the importance of the lines, trigrams, nuclear hexagrams, and the other permutations that arise when casting a hexagram, but I do not think anyone has clearly explained exactly what a hexagram is, which is the key to understanding any interpretation of the Yi Jing. We need to examine this problem if we truly want to understand the Yi Jing. Unfortunately, time has gone by, and we do not have this knowledge, this information that they transmitted orally and never put down in black and white. This must be the case, because their diviners knew this system perfectly, and did not need to explain the obvious. It is as if the Chinese of the Han Dynasty did not need a user’s manual to use the book, that the mere words used to describe the situation presented in the hexagram were sufficient. These 64 figures, made up only of solid and broken lines, are the foundation of this book which has come to us through more than two millennia, but nowhere in the book is there an explanation of what these hexagrams really represent. The main elements of the Yi Jing, or I Ching, are its hexagrams.
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