Thirteen lessons in the I Ching
Step by step: first the symbols, then how to read a hexagram, finally how to cast and interpret. About five minutes each.
What Is the Yi?
The original text fills barely twenty pages. So why did generations of scholars, Confucius among them, keep reading it until the bindings wore through?
02The Eight Trigrams
Eight figures of three lines each, older than writing, that stand for heaven and earth, a whole family, the human body and the shapes of character.
03The Six Line Positions
A hexagram is the situation you are in; a line is where you stand within it. Even the best hexagram has a hard seat, and even the hardest has a good one.
04One Gua, Many Layers: Family, Ranks, Nature and Related Gua
Read the same line through another layer and it gains another meaning. This lesson gives you five keys: the family, the ranks, nature and animals, related gua, and the path the six lines take from bottom to top.
05How to Read a Hexagram
There is a fixed route from a hexagram's name to its lesson for life. Walk it once through Modesty and you will know how to read any of the sixty-four.
06Auspicious, Ominous, Regret, Distress, No Blame
The last word of a line statement seems to settle good or bad. What these words really describe is the direction your mind is moving.
07The Ruling Line
Find a hexagram's ruling line and the whole figure gains a spine; the fortunes of the other five lines depend largely on how they relate to it.
08Hexagram Relations: Inverse, Reversed, Nuclear
The sixty-four are not sixty-four islands. Flip a hexagram, turn it upside down or look inside it, and it leads to others.
09The Twelve Waxing and Waning Hexagrams
Twelve hexagrams make a year: yang grows from a single line at the winter solstice to six lines in summer, and then yin grows back from a single line at the summer solstice.
10The Sequence: The Storyline of the Sixty-Four
From the opening of heaven and earth to a matter that is never quite finished, the Sequence strings the sixty-four into one story that spirals upward.
11The Way of Casting
The method itself is not hard. The hard part is asking the right question, and then letting your hands give up control of the result.
12Interpreting: The Original and the Resulting Hexagram
Six numbers are on the paper. Which sentence do you read? Zhu Xi's rules make the answer land in one definite place.
13The Inner Discipline of Interpretation
Casting is easy, interpreting is hard; and the hardest part is not the text but the mind that receives it.