I Ching, Yijing or Zhou Yi
"Oracle of the moon": © 2000 LiSe

  Yi Jing, Oracle of the Moon

The lines of hexagram 28

  For the meaning of Eminent - expansion. Harvest - determination click HERE
Image: leads a life of recluse, or retires from the world or because of old age
  Line 2: 'a real woman'. The first character is 'woman', the second one 'wife'. In modern Chinese it is very usual to use two words together, so the meaning will be clear. One single word can cause misunderstanding, because the pronunciation of so many words is the same. But in written language there is no need for this, so in old texts a word is just one character. Because the two sentences 2 and 5 resemble each other so much, I think there was deliberately an emphasis on 'man' and 'woman' by doubling their meaning.
  In line 2 the poplar gets new shoots. It is an expression for 'begetting a child at an advanced age'.
  Line 4. 'Snake': the character is a picture of a snake, and can also be translated as such. Or as sudden danger, or ulterior motives. In modern Chinese it means 'this'.
  Line 5: 'a real man', the first of these two characters is usually translated as scholar, a person trained in a certain field, an officer, in general a man of quality. Some modern scholars believe it was originally a phallic symbol. The second character is a grown up man, a husband, a man engaged in manual labor. In Japanese it is the character for 'samurai'. The character for 'shoots' has many (very positive) meanings, like flowers, fruit, gorgeous, radiant, grey [hair], essence, young. I think the line is positive and says: no fault, but there will not be children: no honor.

More about hexagrams 27 and 28
Back to hex.28
Back to the story of hex.28

last update: 22.02.2024

HOME    SITEMAP    MAIL

© LiSe April 2000