Lady of Changes

Her face glows in the dark of my bedroom like a yellow moon. The lovely young Chinese woman is studying me intently. She is as near as the foot of my bed. Her eyes are both very dark and very bright, her hair is lustrous black, cut neatly at shoulder length to produce a helmet effect. She is wearing a yellow tunic dress, and I remember that in China yellow is the color of Earth.=

    She communicates her intention: to teach me the real I Ching. As I look in her eyes I see they are like 8-balls, in constant rhythmic motion, displaying the eight trigrams that compose the essence of the Book of Changes, marrying in pairs to make the 64 hexagrams.

     If this is a Lady of Earth, of the receptive power of K'un, where is her consort? I see him now, wearing a robe of deep blue silk, embroidered with what may be bronze dragons. He is a Lord of Sky, and I know he personifies Ch'ien, the Heaven of the Changes. His lower body moves, indistinctly, like that of a great serpent-dragon, its coils turning like a mobius strip. I sense that his lower body interweaves with that of the Lady.

     I recall that according to tradition, the trigrams were invented by the dragon emperor Fu Xi, drawing knowledge from Heaven, and that in certain Taoist temples Fuxi and his consort Nuwa are depicted together. Their upper bodies are human; their lower bodies are those of serpent-dragons, intertwined. Awed by the energy presence of these ancient beings in my space, I am also embarrassed by my faulty memory of the Changes. I try to rehearse the names and forms of the eight trigrams in my mind. The primal pair: Heaven and Earth, Ch'ien and K'un. Fire and Water, Li and Kan. Lake and Mountain, Tui and Ken. Wind and Thunder, Sun and Chen. Do I have that right?

    Not that way. The code of Thunder flares in the Lady's changing eyes. Her fierce intent interrupts my effort to recite the list of the trigrams. Like this. Her eyes change again. I see a green mountain rising in a soft mist. There is a gentle lake at its summit, and around the peak a perfect cloud ring. Lake on the Mountain. I struggle to remember the name and the attributions of the corresponding hexagram. Something to do with lovers, newlyweds, attraction.

     Not like that. She is opening a different way of seeing and reading the code of the Changes. I relax into the embrace of Earth, and soon find myself in a different scene.

     I am on top of a very tall and steep hill, with warriors dressed in skins and armed with bows and spears. There is an intense feeling of being alive up here. The wind is fresh and brisk, lifting my hair, fluttering a loose fringe. We may have a battle to fight, but our spirits are high, our defensive position is very strong, and we can see whatever is coming at us from far away. This hill fort has a commanding view. I can see across great vistas in all directions.
     Access to our hill fort is via a wooden ladder that goes up the hillside for hundreds of feet. It can be pulled up to deny access to strangers. My lieutenant is so agile I doubt that he needs a ladder. Laughing, he sways his body over the edge of the drop until his back is almost horizontal. This defies human physiology. Maybe he has feet that can grip like fists. Respecting my human limitations, I take a step back from the brink, then smile at myself because the body I am using here can do things the body I left in bed can't manage.
     Remembering that my regular body is in a bed in a snowy town in western New York, I recollect my encounter with the Lady who told me she would teach me the real I Ching. Am I inside one of the hexagrams? If so, which one? My guess would be the 20th hexagram, which is called Guan, or Watching. Wind over the Earth.

-

The wind blows over the earth.
This is the image of Watching.

In this way ancient kings
looked across the four directions
observed the people
and gave them instruction.

-

     I hang over the precipice, studying the ladder. Despite its great height, it has only six rungs. Now I recall that ascending the Watchtower whose shape is concealed and revealed in the lines of the 20th hexagram is a journey of six steps. Few can manage these six steps in the course of a lifetime. On the first step, we see as an un-wise child; we notice only what relates to our cravings and fears. On the second step. we see like a nervous homebody peering out through a slit in a wall; protected by structure, we see little beyond it. On the third step, we look in a mirror and begin to observe ourselves, and what we have done and not done on our life journeys. On the fourth step, like lookouts, we can see across the land and provide news and warnings for our communities. On the fifth step, we return to self-observation, looking harder and deeper at our true selves. If we make it to the sixth and final step, we can see the whole. We can look at ourselves from a witness perspective. We no longer look from the ego, but from the greater Self.

     Again, I see the changing eyes, with the turning codes, and sense the movement of the dragon coils in their mobius dance. I have read thirty books on I Ching, and made my own guide to the hexagrams, giving personal names to each one and noting incidents that followed a particular reading on a certain date. I once taught a course titled "I Ching for Dreamers" in which we drummed the patterns of broken and unbroken lines, inspired by the most ancient, fragmentary text of the Book of Changes, found in a lacquer hamper in the tomb of a lord at Mawangdui as recently as 1973, where it is written that "the sages drummed the movements of all under Heaven" into the oracle. 

    However, I consider myself a rank amateur in this area, and would not trust my ability to read the Changes until I have internalized the 64 hexagrams and the changing lines without the need to look anything up. In Chinese tradition such mastery requires either a lifetime of training, memorizing and practice, or the direct inspiration of past masters, or both.

    The shining eyes give me Heaven under Earth, the desirable placement since this means the primal pair are coming together. Maybe I can aspire to know a little more of the Changes in the years that remain to me. Maybe, with the Yellow Lady and the Blue Lord as gatekeepers, I will lead others on a journey through the cycles, to climb the ladder of six steps to the Watchtower.

AFTERTALE

Oracles have their own life, and can call you even when you are not calling on them. I took up the study of I Ching because Einstein met me at a Chinese gate and instructed me that the Chinese oracle is the best working model of the universe that is generally accessible. Months later, on a snowy night in a motel in western New York, the oracle came alive for me. Jung knew something of this. He wrote that “One could even define the I Ching oracle as an experiential dream, just as one can define a dream as an experiment of a four-dimensional nature.” (Letter to the Rev. W.P. Witcutt, August 24, 1960). The Mawangdui text quoted here follows the translation by  Edward L. Shaughnessy, I Ching, The Classic of Changes: The First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century B.C. Mawangdui Texts (New York: Ballantine, 1997) 203.

Adapted from Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler's Tales from the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image at the top: ancient painting of Nuwa and Fuxi

An Emperor of China Governs by Synchronicity

Ours is not a dynasty that shuns bad omens 

                

-          Kangxi, Emperor of China 1661-1722

Kangxi, Emperor of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, ruled China for over sixty years, surviving wars, rebellions and numberless intrigues. He was a man of science and reason who personally attended to many details of government without getting overwhelmed by those details. Dissatisfied with the quality of graduates from the all-important civil service examinations, he personally graded hundreds of exam papers while campaigning under a military tent. 

     Unimpressed by his generals’ handling of river pirates, he issued exact and savvy directives on the recruitment of agents, the deployment of special forces, and the need for rulers to have personal knowledge of the character and motivation of the enemy: "To learn about pirates you need more than official reports – you can question pirate leaders in person, as I did…You can employ captured pirates themselves as advisers, or use them to take messages to their fellows and induce them to surrender. ..One needs, too, to examine the type of person who is a pirate."

     One of the most instructive aspects of this Emperor’s long and successful reign is that he governed with the help of synchronicity and, in particular, with that remarkable Chinese vehicle for pattern recognition, the I Ching or Book of Changes. From his own surviving writings, beautifully edited and arranged by the distinguished Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence* we can track Kangxi’s study of the Changes and decisions he made based on specific readings. There is absolutely no flavor of credulity or superstition in his practice or his commentaries. We are observing a ruler who simply understands that whatever is happening – or is likely to happen – in a given moment is connected, and that by reading those connections , and reaching for the secret harmony, we can do better.

      In 1680, Kangxi embarked on a “preliminary reading” of the Book of Changes with three counselors. They devoted three days’ study to each hexagram. Four years later, they went through the hexagrams all over again. The emperor noticed that his diviners were placing some things in the category of “things there was no need to discuss” for fear of offending their master – for example, the sixth line in hexagram 1, Ch’ien: “Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent.” Kangxi instructed that nothing would be off-limits for discussion of a reading. A warning against arrogance was especially important since “arrogance means that one knows how to press forward but not how to draw back…something about winning but nothing about losing.”

     In 1683, after the capture of Taiwan, the Emperor discussed hexagram 56,  Lu - “Fire on the Mountain” - with his diviners: “The calm of the mountain signifies the care that must be used in imposing penalties; the fire moves rapidly on, burning up the grass, like lawsuits that should be settled speedily. My reading of this was that the ruler needs both clarity and care in punishing: his intent must be to punish in order to avoid the need for further punishing.” Here the Emperor’s reading is based on considering the natural qualities of the two elemental trigrams, Mountain and Fire – not on looking up the wordy and obscure commentaries of Confucian bureaucrats (which, however, he uses in other readings). Be calm like a Mountain, and look on things from a higher perspective; be quick and decisive in cleansing, like Fire.

     The Emperor gives us excellent guidance on the need for a ruler to be open to receiving unwanted messages:

My diviners have often been tempted to pass over bad auguries, but I have double-checked their calculations and warned them not to distort the truth: the Bureau of Astronomy once reported that a benevolent southeast wind was blowing, but I myself calculated the wind’s direction with the palace instruments and found it to be, in fact, an inauspicious northeast wind; I told the Bureau to remember that ours was not a dynasty that shunned bad omens.

He notes that while some phenomena once held to be supernatural are now known to have natural causes and may be predicted “with absolute precision”, their guidance within the weave of change must still be acknowledged and honored:

Human affairs are involved in the phenomenon of eclipses, and it makes no difference that we can now calculate them with absolute precision; we must still make the reforms necessary to avoid trouble and obtain peace.

He insists that we make our own fate, and should “urge on Heaven in its work”:

Things may seem determined in our lives, but there are ways in which man’s power can help Heaven’s work….We must urge on Heaven in its work, not just rely on it….In our own lives, though fixed by fate, yet that fate comes from our own minds, and our happiness is sought in ourselves…If you do not perform your human part you cannot understand Heaven’s way. 

Late in his reign, he celebrates the Book of Changes in these words:

I have never tired of the Book of Changes and have used it in fortune-telling and as a source of moral principles; the only thing you must not do, I told my court lecturers, is to make this book appear simple, for there are meanings here than lie beyond words.

We can learn today from Emperor Kangxi’s curt response to the diviners who tried to pretty up a disturbing portent: "Ours is not a dynasty that shuns bad omens." In other words, give us the data straight, whether we like it or not – notice the larger patterns - and do not ignore any source that can be checked out.

* Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi. (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).

Images: (top) Kangxi in ceremonial armor, on the hunt. Qing Dynasty (bottom) Fuxi drawing a trigram. By Gua Yu,circa 1503.