Re: Hexagrams [was Re: hypothetical Yangshao calendar (early China)]

From: Comm (tjsrno_at_spampost.com)
Date: 03/05/05 

Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 21:18:42 GMT

<a.manansala@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:1109914544.223246.291120@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
> What do you mean it is misleading.
>
> What do the trigrams represent then?
>
I can't draw hexagrams on here, but here goes:

QUOTE
I Ching inquiry regarding LING - which is the ability to read the hexagrams
as they are in motion.

Hexagrams are pictograms, i.e., pictures. Some hexagrams can be many
different pictures. There are trigrams within hexagrams, not just the two
that books mention that the hexagrams are built on. There are also 4 and 5
line diagrams within hexagrams. In other words, take 1 2 3 4 5 6

This is not just two trigrams 1 2 3 and 4 5 6 one atop the other. It's more
complex.

With 6 lines, 1 2 3 4 5 6, you actually have this:

Inner trigrams:

1 2 3, 2 3 4, 3 4 5, 4 5 6.

Inner 4-line diagrams:

1 2 3 4, 2 3 4 5, 3 4 5 6.

Inner 5-line diagrams:

1 2 3 4 5, 2 3 4 5 6

Which ones are "over" and "under" which ones, and line correspondences.
This knowledge is required to be able to READ the diagrams, and from ALL
angles, not just the straight on pictures you see in books.

Does reading the hexagrams depend on the "magic." Well, are words also
magic? Let's take the word "dog" as we write and read that in English and
imagine a person unfamiliar with English is reading these sentences.

That German Shepherd is a beautiful dog.

That woman is a real dog.

Why do you dog my footsteps?

I want a hot dog.

Dog Gonnit to hell man, go away!!

We are having many dog days this time of the year.

Here are his dog tags.

Now try this out:

I was relaxing and eating my hot dog on one of those awful dog days. Then
that dog Captain Jane Smith lost her dog tags when a dog that was dogging
her feet ran away with them after she got blown to dog gone hell by that
land mind.

Only a person familiar with two things, usage and slang, would be able to
read that sentence and make sense of it. The word "dog" has meaning that is
DEPENDENT on the other words around it.

Does the Ching reader's mood or the reader's interaction with the person
he's doing the reading for have any meaning? NO, not at all. Mood or who
the reading is for has nothing to do with anything.

What is going on is that a few people (in the West or East) have an ability
called "LING" in Chinese language. This is simply the ability to read a
hexagram correctly. It seems to be innate (like hearing music is) because I
even ran into a kid that never heard of the Ching or saw a hexagram, a
typical teenaged high school kid interested in girls that was at a pool T
and I went to; and T said, "Hey, that kid has ling." So I went up to him
and showed him a TRIGRAM and asked, "What does this look like to you?" He
looked puzzled, but after a few seconds he shrugged his shoulders and said,
"Something round." This was exactly right. Then I showed him a HEXAGRAM.
He said, "Also round but like a bean." Exactly right again. But that is
not all there is to it at all. That would be like knowing how to read words
correctly pronounced in a foreign language, but having no idea what the
words mean - that would be a loose analogy.

If you ask the I Ching, say, tell me about so and so, it might show you a
picture of a black, pot-bellied jar with three legs and one broken leg.
This means that the person is dark complected, has a big gut, and he's
impotant.

Here, Ching knowledge is also needed of the ENTIRE Ching, because in the
Ching system, woman have two legs and men have three. The kid at the pool
wouldn't know what to make of a picture referring to a person with a broken
leg. He might think he has a broken bone in his leg.

So there are two things involved in interpreting the Ching: 1, ling, an
ability like musicalness for being able to see the pictures and 2, knowledge
of the Ching system.

Another example of #2 is that trigrams "sink" and "rise" while others just
sort of float neutrally. So when I see them combined, eg, sinking over
rising, the hexagram stays firmly together. Whereas I can also see another
as splitting apart down the middle. I can see a top trigram and a lower one
as becoming independent, while another two trigrams (hexagram) shows
compression and therefore, heat.

If you look these up in a Ching manual or text, you might be told something
represents a bird. And it does, because with LING you see diagrams at all
angles. Unfortunately, ling is absent in every text on the Ching I have
ever seen, even Wilhelm's, because with ling I also see hexagrams in other
directions, but you never see a hexagram printed this way! Something that
means bird can also mean vigorous motion. The Ching texts tell you that
something means vigorous motion, something else means standing still. This
is correct, but leads to errors of interpretation due to NOT seeing trigrams
and hexagrams from ALL angles.

There is a certain amount of innocence in having ling, the way little kids
write "dad" instead of "bad" or write "got" or "bot" instead of "pot," etc,
of even write a backward letter in a word, like "G3T" instead of "GET."
Westerners, especially educated ones, see a trigram as a linear thing,
subvocally saying it, "three straight lines" or even, "three parallel
lines." Once you think like this, any ling you may have is buried or dead.
I think Wilhelm has ling, but it got buried. Another well-known Western
Ching translator, Legge, has NO ling.

Ching knowledge is very precise. For example a particular hexgram eg, is
seen as two trigrams around a middle, so when I see this particular hexagram
I see that the bottom line has a relationship with the fourth line and the
second line has a relationship with the fifth line, and the third line has a
relationship with the top line. It's sort of like grammar or parse trees -
but that comparison is a big stretch. Understand that explaining this is
very much like trying to explain how some people "HEAR TONES IN HARMONY" to
people that not only can't do that, but also never heard of this ability.
For that matter, why DO some humans hear in tones that way? Chimps and dogs
are tone deaf, but they have no problem recognizing other animals. A meow
is till a meow, they recognize timbre, these animals recognize that easily
but they are tone deaf. It is neurologically known, also, that this ability
to hear tones has some relationship to the ability to do higher mathematics.
It seems to be that a person that is good at higher mathematics, is also a
person with good ears; but not vice versa.

Wilhelm knew about "correspondence of lines" from reading Confucius' notes
on the Ching, to which Confucius dedicated a lifetime of study! Wilhelm
calls this relationship of lines "correspondence," which is fine. Western
readers are puzzled or perplexed by this. If a hexagram were represented as
two trigrams side by side, they would not be puzzled by it, but like I said,
with ling you see it broken up and from all angles, and in motion - such as
a hexagram that shows a big mushroom shape that tends to rise slowly with
the bulge breaking off it.

I don't know if Confucius had ling, but the Duke of Chou, whose words on the
Ching Confucius commented on extensively, DID have ling. Chao was a Turkic
northern horseman whom the Chinese considered a barbarian. He was not
Chinese.

You can spend your life studying the Ching because it is NOT primarily a
fortune telling system, it is primarily a system containing the nature of
the universe. There are well known Western books which do allude to this.
But the problem is, the writers (eg, the Tao of Physics) are so uninformed
about the Ching, which they don't even mention, that they don't even know
that the four TWO line diagrams represent the four forces in physics.

I have also studied diagrams up to 19 or 20 lines, but the human brain needs
almost outside help for this. These days, I do NOT rule out computers - but
I've seen nothing quite right coming from that either.

Ling is not a magical ability, tho. It is mundane, like "perfect pitch" in
music, which appears to be a highly developed nerve module some people just
have in their brain.

T's grandfather (a Tatar Lama, more like a Shaman) passed down everything he
knew about the Ching because he saw that I already had ling. He said he
never in his life met anyone else that had it, including nobody else in his
own ethnic culture or family.

This is no different from a person with perfect pitch and musical adeptness
meeting one other person with perfect pitch who is untrained in music and
who is unrelated to his people - and then teaching that one person the
technicalities of music.

UNQUOTE

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