i-ching reading based on qclock 2/15
The ancient character for jie, the name of Hexagram 40, shows hands with a knife removing a cow’s horn. Perhaps this has to do with a horn implement for prising knots apart – Chinese boys could carry a knot-horn at their belt when they became men – or perhaps simply with the act of removing the horn, and with it the danger of being gored.
The primary meaning of jie is to untie, loosen, separate or cut apart; a secondary meaning is to interpret and understand – one imagines the kind of understanding that comes of breaking a ‘knotty’ problem down. The imagery of knots and their untying is key to Hexagram 40; it carries through the Wings as a kind of etymological-metaphorical echo.
Oddly enough, in the songs of the Shijing that are more or less contemporary with the Yi, jie is unfailingly a bad thing: it’s what good people and good rulers don’t do, and means being idle. English equivalents might be ‘unwinding’ or ‘slacking off’.
Limping and Release
Hexagram 40 is paired with and follows from 39, Limping or Difficulties:
‘Things cannot end with hardship, and so Release follows. Release means letting things take their time.’
(To ‘let things take their time’ is to let things go, to delay or slacken; the character shows trailing silk threads.)
Limping is a hexagram of uphill struggle, but it also suggests a turnaround, away from struggle and towards flow – like Yu the Great, the limping hero who conquered the floods not by toiling alone to dam the waters, but by enlisting allies to dredge channels to the sea. The emblem of this change is the distinction between northeast and southwest: ‘fruitful in the southwest, not fruitful in the northeast.’
The northeast was where the Zhou people ultimately found their calling and purpose, to oust the Shang dynasty, but the southwest was where they found allies. The two directions are first introduced in Hexagram 2, as where you gain or lose partners; Hexagram 39 shows how a move towards the southwest, away from solitary heroism and towards support, is the best response to struggle. Then Hexagram 40 arises from that turnaround, and begins by looking towards the southwest.
The same shift is reflected in the Sequence of Hexagrams, if you look back one more step to Hexagram 38, Opposing:
‘When the way of the home [hexagram 37] is exhausted, you naturally turn away, and so Opposing follows. Turning away naturally means hardship, and so Limping follows. Things cannot end with hardship, and so Release follows. Release means letting things take their time.’
A story takes shape: alienation creating hardship, which is ended by reconnection. This is connection not only with people – though that’s often vitally important, especially when you receive Hexagram 39 – but also with the whole environment, the whole natural flow of being.
The Cheshire Cat’s hexagram
‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where -‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’
Lewis Carroll