中文版：说易（一）
Lately I’ve been watching Professor Zeng Shilong’s lectures on the I Ching. I actually knew about Professor Zeng back in high school. At the time I went straight for the Tao Te Ching, but I never finished it, and the part I did read seemed to just pass through my head without much thinking. So I figured I might as well write down my own take on things.
I. Yin, Yang, Change, and Nature
In the I Ching, all the eight trigrams, including the sixty-four hexagrams, are built out of just two line symbols: yin and yang, ⚋ and ⚊. From yin and yang come shaoyin (lesser yin) and shaoyang (lesser yang), and then the eight trigrams.
Yin and yang cannot be split apart. This world is entirely yin-within-yang and yang-within-yin. Maybe it takes both to produce change, and maybe change is what produces life. I think the concept of yin and yang is fairly close to binary in computing. Maybe binary took its inspiration from yin and yang. Who knows.
Yin and yang together make the taiji (the supreme ultimate); yin and yang are also split out of the taiji, so the taiji is the mother of yin and yang. The word 太 means: as something big it has no outside, as something small it has no inside. It can be big or small.
Professor Zeng says: the taiji is the shared gene of everything in the universe. Maybe it is the source of all composition, after all. Yin and yang cannot be split.
Then everything in the universe forms nature. In the universe there is only one thing, and that is nature. Nature is unbounded; the Way follows nature. And when the ancients spoke of auspicious (吉) and inauspicious (凶), they meant going along with nature and going against nature. As long as something accords with nature, even if there is nothing to show for it right now, it will turn out right in the end.
That reminds me of what happened recently with He Rundong. Twelve years ago his Xiang Yu did not make him famous, but now that role has suddenly caught fire. Maybe that is also in accordance with nature: he fully brought out the character’s image and spirit.
II. The World Is Born Unequal
Circling round and flowing on: principles are always straight, but roads are always crooked.
Nothing is perfectly level: this world, people included, is born unequal. From where I stand now, if everything really were equal, change would be hard to produce, because everyone’s potential energy would be on more or less the same level and there would be no gap in potential energy left to drive anything.
III. No Binary Opposition
This world is absolutely not a binary opposition. Yin and yang turn into each other.
Yin becomes yang, and yang becomes yin. The taiji is also both yin and yang at once.
Right turns into wrong, and wrong turns into right. Take 1+1 = 2: normally that holds, but in some special cases it does not.
Nature does not reject the artificial. Nor is nature about maintaining the status quo. Nature is change.
Confucius said something once: “To know what you know, and what you do not know, that is knowledge.” Besides “when you know, you know, and when you don’t know, you don’t know,” there is in fact another way to read it.
Even when you do know, if the other person is someone who should not be told, you should not say that you know.
Take the three-season person, for instance: you cannot speak of ice to a summer insect. They can never know that winter exists. So a lot of the time there is no need to argue with people. Just think “isn’t this guy a three-season person” and let it go.
Three-season person: the less someone understands, the louder he talks. After all, he is always trying to get the drop on you with sheer momentum.
IV. The Four Symbols
Fuxi most likely derived the four symbols from the four phases of a day, since the four symbols can represent the four changes of a day perfectly.
Morning: ⚎ shaoyang (lesser yang). The bottom is still cold, but the sun has already come out above.
Noon: ⚌ laoyang (greater yang). Midday is the hottest part of the day, top and bottom both hot.
Dusk: ⚍ shaoyin (lesser yin). Still a bit muggy, but the sun above is about to set.
Midnight: ⚏ laoyin (greater yin). Everything has cooled down, top and bottom.
The two hours of a day in which the human body changes fastest are 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., so this is a good window to quiet down and take a short nap.
And 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.: try to be asleep by eleven, though most college students these days stay up late…
V. The Eight Trigrams
In a sense the eight trigrams split into two schools: the heaven school and the earth school.
The qian trigram is three solid lines, and qian also stands for heaven: ☰
The kun trigram is six broken lines. The lay of the land is kun, so kun is earth: ☷
5.1 The Heaven School
☰
- ☱ (dui): change happens above heaven. Changes up in the sky usually show up in the reflection on a lake.
- ☲ (li): change happens within the sky. In ancient times, visible changes in the sky were mostly the smoke from a fire.
- ☴ (xun): change happens below heaven. On the ground you can feel the wind. There is wind up above too, but the ancients had no way of getting up there. The xun trigram also stands for wind.
5.2 The Earth School
☷
- ☶ (gen): the earth moves on top. What is on top of the earth but mountains? My reading is that when the earth’s surface moves, say two landmasses colliding, mountains are what you get.
- ☵ (kan): water is kan. What moves about on land but a river? And if you turn the kan trigram upright, it is the character 水 as written in oracle bone script. So the origin of writing was probably this same symbol system too: the I Ching’s trigrams and hexagrams.
- ☳ (zhen): the earth moves underneath. Zhen stands for thunder. When thunder appears it is the earth shaking and the mountains trembling, and the lightning strikes the ground. Though we have lightning rods now.
There is also a mnemonic: “qian three joined, kun six broken; zhen a bowl tipped up, gen a bowl tipped over; li hollow in the middle, kan full in the middle; dui broken on top, xun broken below.”
Of course the most surface-level reading of the eight trigrams is eight natural phenomena, but go one level deeper and you can read them as eight qualities. Same with the five elements (wuxing); my understanding is that they are five forms of energy.
Heaven (qian): strength. 天行健, heaven moves vigorously. Perhaps it just means heaven can really move: the clouds all drift along with the sky, never stopping, always pressing outward. Very vigorous and unyielding.
Earth (kun): the lay of the land. Earth is soft and yielding, carrying great virtue, able to bear all things. So earth is the least opinionated thing there is. On rare occasions the earth shakes, but that is a low-probability event.
Water (kan): the character 坎 can be read as “lacking earth” (欠土). And ground without earth is water, rivers, and so on.
Fire (li): the sun leaves the east, travels to the west, and then sets. To put a fire out you must remove the things it depends on, such as and wood. Fire must be attached to something else.
Mountain (gen): mountain climbing should be slow. Don’t people climb for the scenery along the way? If it were only about reaching the summit, the meaning would not be worth much, and you would have wasted a lot of stamina. There are people who need to be fast, such as porters and people in a hurry. Gen also means knowing when to stop: be fast when you should be fast, and slow when you should be slow.
Thunder (zhen): when thunder strikes the whole earth shakes. That is easy to understand.
Wind (xun): if there is a gap, it can get in. Xun stands for whatever can slip in anywhere.
Marsh (dui): 兑 looks a lot like 悦 (delight). Standing by a pond puts you in a better mood.
The eight trigrams can also be stacked one more layer to become the 64 hexagrams, but in the end it all returns to the most basic thing: yin and yang.
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