
What Is the I Ching? - lermontov
http://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/what-i-ching
======
cturner
The novel _Man in the High Castle_ references this system, and was supposedly
written with reference to it. [No idea about the tv series, doesn't seem
possible to get it in the UK]

BSD 4.4 had a game in it that I'd guess simulated the yarrow generation. I
wasn't able to get it to compile on a modern system.
([https://github.com/weiss/original-
bsd/tree/master/games/chin...](https://github.com/weiss/original-
bsd/tree/master/games/ching))

~~~
pmoriarty
Excerpts from an interview with Philip K Dick[1]:

VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?

DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of
characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins
and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the
book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell
Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated
that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not
go there. But I would not do that in any other book.

VERTEX: What is the importance of the I Ching in your own life?

DICK: Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that
transcends the immediate situation. The answers have an universal quality. For
instance: "The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised." If you use the
I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape
you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever
heard the word, whether or not you want to be.

...

DICK: I've been using the I Ching since 1961, and this is what I use it for,
to show me a way of conduct in a certain situation. Now first of all it will
analyze the situation for you more accurately than you have. It may be
different than what you think. Then it will give you the advice. And through
these lines a torturous, complicated path emerges through which the person
escapes the tragedy of matrydom and the tragedy of selling out. He finds the
great sense of Taoism, the middle way. I turn to it when I have that kind of
conflict.

\---

And from an interview two years later[2]:

Phil: I don't use the I Ching anymore. I'll tell ya, the I Ching told me more
lies than anybody else I've ever known. The I Ching has a personality and it's
very devious and very treacherous. And it feeds ya just what you want to hear.
And it's really spaced out and burned out more people than I would care to
name. Like a friend is somebody who doesn't tell you what you want to hear. A
friend tells you what's true. A toady is the old word for somebody who told
you what you wanted to hear. The Kings all had their toadies around them who
told them what they wanted to hear. The King said, am I the greatest King in
the world? Yeah, you're the greatest King in the world, yeah. Well, this is
what the I Ching does. It tells you what you want to hear and it's not a true
friend. One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it
said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I
am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. In other words I set
it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak
with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn't mean to
say that. But it had already –

[1] - [http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/frank-
view...](http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-
archive/vertex-interview-with-philip-k-dick/)

[2] - [http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-
criticism/interviews...](http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-
criticism/interviews/hour-25-a-talk-with-philip-k-dick/)

~~~
adrianN
The amount of agency he imputes to the I Ching somehow feels crazy to me.

~~~
mavhc
He was crazy, and used drugs all the time, which probably didn't help.

~~~
armitron
I would hesitate to label someone with the sort of vision and forward thinking
that PKD exhibited as "crazy".

He wrote an entire book (exegesis) in which he meticulously describes his
exploration of psychotic states and experiences that shook him and shattered
his idea of reality. This is not what a "crazy" person does.

------
ytjohn
'The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made. It had probably been
manufactured in whichever of the South-East Asian countries was busy tooling
up to do to South Korea what South Korea was busy doing to Japan. Glue
technology had obviously not progressed in that country to the point where
things could be successfully held together with it. Already the back had half
fallen off and needed to be stuck back on with Sellotape.'

'It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that the LCD screen
was a little larger than usual, in order to accommodate the abridged judgments
of King Wen on each of the sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of
his son, the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of the hexagram. These were
unusual texts to see marching across the display of a pocket calculator,
particularly as they had been translated from the Chinese via the Japanese and
seemed to have enjoyed many adventures on the way.'

'The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited
degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything
up to "4".'

'"1 + 1" it could manage ("2"), and "1 + 2" ("3") and "2 + 2" ("4") or "tan
74" ("3.4874145"), but anything above "4" it represented merely as "A
Suffusion of Yellow". Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or
an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway,
enough to hand over £20 of ready cash for the thing.'

~~~
girzel
"A Suffusion of Yellow" is a phrase which I have never forgotten.

------
danharaj
> David Hinton is, with Arthur Waley and Burton Watson, the rare example of a
> literary Sinologist—that is, a classical scholar thoroughly conversant with,
> and connected to, contemporary literature in English.

Just wanted to recommend both Waley and Watson's work, which i thoroughly
enjoy. I especially enjoy Watson's full translation of the Zhuangzi.

------
revelation
We like to think it's a recent phenomenon, but as this article points out,
even Leibniz was spammed with conspiracy theorists and tinfoil hats.

~~~
gaur
In the 1600s, the mayor of Magdeburg [0] stuck a narwhal horn on the skull of
a wooly rhino, and thereby convinced Leibniz that unicorns existed.

The same mayor also invented the first vacuum pump.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Guericke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Guericke)

------
yread
Friend of mine once lost some important documents. So she went to an I Ching
guy and he calculated for 15 minutes or so the question of where are these
documents. The answer was that they are lost or stolen. And that it's possible
that a small girl or woman took them away. Not even 10 minutes after that she
got a call that her mother found them, they were just stashed in a drawer. And
she still deeply believes!

------
pmoriarty
Does anyone here use the I Ching for divination? If so, how is that working
out for you?

~~~
joe_the_user
A few years ago, I had a friend who became addicted to I Ching divination and
wound-up making every major and minor decision based on I Ching dice rolls.

For him, it worked out terribly, in the sense of pushing closer to a psychotic
state.

From that experience, it's hard for me appreciate the poetic vagueness of this
stuff given that same poetic vagueness helps sell Western Astrology.

~~~
armitron
The fact that the Yijing pushed him towards a psychotic state, means that the
process WORKED or was beginning to show results.

Psychosis and mystical experience are after all closely linked if not
objectively identical.

The Yijing, when used properly (as a tool for self-exploration and
psychonautics and not for fortunetelling or the chasing of idle fantasies)
works similarly to the Tarot or other symbolic systems that operate on the
human psyche. There comes a point (with repeated use and appropriate
conditioning/reinforcement) that these systems really open up the subconscious
and can lead to mystical unions or profound annihilatory experiences (ego
death).

So it sounds to me that your friend had no idea about these things and simply
could not handle the "results". When you play with fire, you take precautions
or you get burned..

~~~
joe_the_user
My friend was actually very aware of all these wider implications - well
informed on Buddhist and Western Philosophy, modern magic and whatever - at
one point at least he was moderately known in the world of avant guard art.

He had a theoretical understanding of "ego death" and perhaps he experienced
that.

That problem is that none of this quite had a cut-and-dried, desirable effect.
He didn't reach the final stage like Friedrich Nietzsche - no wait, he kind of
reached the final stage more or less like Nietzsche.

------
formula1
I remember in highschool picking up a copy of the i ching. I found the poetry
in simplicity to be really meaningful to me and could feel and relate to it.
Something like water and fire I always found humorous because you can see fire
as a hollow shell while water flaky yet connected. I think the I ching has a
lot to offer and similar works that base their philosophies in trying to make
the world less complicated. However, its place and impact in the world
probably will not be fully felt as, from a religious/philosophical marketing
perspective, it tends to be more of a cute idea than something to devote a
life to.

------
splitdisk
An I Ching throwing program was the first program I wrote on my own, and is
still an exercise I like to go through when teaching myself a new programming
language.

------
lomnakkus
If you think of it as art then it's very impressive. As a reliable method of
predicting the future[1]... not so much.

[1] Wouldn't we all like that?

------
kough
If you like the idea of the I Ching, you might also like this version:
[http://where-you-are.com/sheila-heti](http://where-you-are.com/sheila-heti) .
It's a "mini ching" presented as a dogital art project - I found the writing,
illustrations, and form to work very nicely together.

------
yborg
I recommend physicist Kerson Huang's translation in "I Ching: The Oracle".
Basically stripped of all of the classical commentary that is often attached
to the I Ching, I found it very approachable.

