[Notes on] I-Ching (the Book of Changes)

A good friend recently gave me a copy of the I-Ching, also called the Book of Changes or Zhouyi. Apparently it is not that easy to attribute the date of the origin of I-Ching, which has probably been modified over the ages, but the debate goes from approximately 3000 years BCE to 300 years BCE, with recent research preferring 9th century BCE. Regardless of the date and the person/s behind the I-Ching, in any case it has been around for quite some time and has had quite an influence on Chinese and Asian philosophy and thinking.

According to wikipedia, "The text describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is intrinsic to ancient Chinese cultural beliefs. The cosmology centres on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change."

I have now been trying it out for a couple of days and it does seem interesting. While I am only discovering the book and its wisdom, my early impressions is that it feels like an intelligent daily horoscope which not only guides you but also makes you think and ponder over personal issues. Kind of like an active meditation (meditation in the sense contemplating or turning something over in one's mind). Interesting in any case and I look forward to discovering more about it.

I won't even try to explain what it is for those who are not familiar with it but once again allow Wikipedia's anonymous authors to attempt an explanation:

The text of the I Ching is a set of oracular statements represented by a set of 64 abstract line arrangements called hexagrams. Each hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines, where each line is either Yang (an unbroken, or solid line), or Yin (broken, an open line with a gap in the center). With six such lines stacked from bottom to top there are 2⁶ or 64 possible combinations, and thus 64 hexagrams represented.
The hexagram diagram is conceptually subdivided into two three-line arrangements called trigrams. There are 2³, hence 8, possible trigrams. The traditional view was that the hexagrams were a later development and resulted from combining the two trigrams. However, in the earliest relevant archaeological evidence, groups of numerical symbols on many Western Zhou bronzes and a very few Shang oracle bones, such groups already usually appear in sets of six. A few have been found in sets of three numbers, but these are somewhat later. Note also that these numerical sets greatly predate the groups of broken and unbroken lines, leading modern scholars to doubt the mythical early attributions of the hexagram system.

While that is not the easiest explanation, maybe a visual one of the trigrams could help:

Basically, to use the I-Ching the 8 trigrams are organized in an 8 by 8 matrix and there is a simple method to find the appropriate square on the I-Ching 'checkerboard' (my personal expression).


Anyway, I have the Brian Browne Walker translation. If anyone has a good book to recommend so that I can learn more on the subject please let me know.