I Ching
I Ching (eee-Ching), also known as the Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese text used as a philosophy and as a divination practice in the modern day. Its guiding principles of digesting life and its challenges has been adapted and reinterpreted many times over. Copies of several translated editions are available for purchase at bookstores. Today, it serves as a major foundation for other new-age healing modalities such as Human Design and Gene Keys.
The text presents and describes 64 trigrams, a combination of any two characters seen below, that are said to encompass the totality of the universe in a microcosm. Any situation, decision, or pattern can be found within these 64 ideas, as well as its resolution.
Historically, first adaptations of 64 oracles appeared during the Zhou dynasty in 1050 BCE, but non-written knowledge of what would later become the I Ching may have been used by fortune-telling diviners as far back as 1600 BCE. Mythological origins of the I Ching say that the dragon Fu Xi studied the patterns of nature in the sky and on the earth: the markings on birds, rocks, and animals, the movement of clouds, the arrangement of the stars and discovered that everything could be reduced to eight trigrams, each composed of three stacked solid or broken lines, reflecting the yin and yang, the duality that drives the universe.
As a brief interpretive example, hexagram 10 pairs Qian (Heaven, the Creative) with Dui (Lake, the Joyous), for which the themes are about Treading and Conduct. The Lake (the lowest in elevation), in this situation, treads over Heaven (the highest). How can the low tread over the high and be successful? How can one step on a tiger’s tail and not get bitten? The answer: with the innocence of a child, with authenticity, simplicity, and good humor, and without presumption. This can be applied to situations where one is dealing with difficult people, trying to improve their own ranking in life, finding themselves in a precarious position, etc. Conducting oneself with pure intentions is well advised from the eyes of the 10th hexagram.
