Yi Jing, Oracle of the Moon

 

Hexagram 1: sun and banners: time and law. 
Hexagram 2: field and space, home of the ancestors.

Time carries energy
Space carries matter

01 the active laws of yang

象曰 the great image says
天行健 heaven move strong
君子以 noble child use
自疆 personal strong (boundary, territory)
不息 incessantly

  QIAN, hexagram 1 has to do with time and timing. The lines talk about dragons and their course along the sky. The dragon is a symbol of rain and governs the weather, the creating force for all living things. He shows the time of the seasons.
  In the morning the first rays of the sun illuminate the banners flying high from the pole in the center. When the sun goes down and everything gets dark, the banners catch the last sunlight.
  The Zhou were farmers, and for farmers sun and rain set the right time to do things. Not the time measured in dates and hours, but the time of seasons and signs. 
  The visible seasons of the year, caused by the sun, and also the invisible 'time' of circumstances: ambiance, the right (or wrong) moment for a word or deed to germinate, all the things which cause success or failure of what you undertake, depending on the "time".

  No dragon – no rain, so do not act. Flying in heaven: enough moisture for a good growth. Overbearing dragon: so much rain that everything drowns.
  For your mind, it is intuïtion which tells you the time. Everything you do needs the right timing. Rain is an image for the insights, which come falling in your mind through perceptivity and intuïtion.

  And finally the dragon does refer to the one who initiates a really big undertaking. When King Wen set out to overthrow the Shang, he did not show his strength (1.1), when he was seen, he stayed the loyal vassal to the ruler (1.2), at night he vigilantly watched the skies for omens (1.3), he took huge risks but believed in his cause (1.4), he inspired everyone through his greatness of character (1.5), and he knew the dangers of going too far (1.6).

  The yang laws of hexagram 1 give all things their pattern, but without the space of the earth they cannot come to any substance. Heaven or yang is the ‘principle’, the rules and laws of universe, the warp. Yin is the weft, which gives things substance. The warp without the weft is loose threads, the weft without the warp is also loose threads.

Harmen about the name of hex.1
Wonderful story about the dragon on Marshall's website

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02 KUN, The field of yin

象曰 the great image says
地勢坤 fields power earth
君子以 noble one use
厚德 rich virtue
載 loaded with, to carry
物 things, world

  Picture at top: KUN1, the ancient character and its parts. KUN1 is composed of 1: tu3, earth, either a heap of earth or an earth altar. 2: shen1, meaning stretch-out, spirit, ghost, explain, to state, express, power of expression or lightning. In it’s oldest version it is written more or less like a double spiral: a picture of lightning.
  KUN1: passive force of realisation, receptivity, compliance, obedience, female, feminine.  In the Mawangdui Yijing hex.2 is CHUAN1, the flow, stream or water, the female organ. An old way or writing 3 broken lines (the trigram earth) is also like the character chuan.

  The characters at left: words or compounds with KUN1
1 (earth axis) axis of earth
2 (earth bag) woman's bag/purse
3 (earth actor) female actor
4 (twist turn heaven earth) change course of events; retrieve a situation
5 (stream) Mawangdui: CHUAN1, the flow or stream, the female organ.
6 (heaven earth) heaven and earth; the universe

Result:
Earth as 'yin' makes sense in all compounds. Te character itself contains shen, spirit, electricity, so something mysterious is part of it. The spirits of the deceased, the inheritance which is part of your soul, mind and body.

  KUN, hexagram 2, is the earth, not the planet but the soil and the ground on which all life exists. It is more though than just the stuff and space. The name includes lightning or electricity, a mysterious force which makes seeds grow to maturity. 
  According to the ancient Chinese, thunder came out of the earth, and thunderstorms actually start off growth. The electricity makes negative ions, which have a beneficial action on everything living. They incite the germination of seeds. They called it the spirits of ghosts and ancestors, who caused this strange force in the earth.
  The ideogram: a clod of earth and energy. It is a centuries-old image of Einstein's E=mc2. When a meteorite the size of a grain of sand enters the atmosphere, one sees a bright falling star. If it is the size of a pea, one sees a huge ball of fire. So much energy is contained within a tiny piece of matter.

  The yin energy of hexagram 2 makes all things grow, but without the pattern-laws of yang, they cannot grow into forms.

  There is one line in Kun which looks very much like the wu-wei of the DaoDeJing, for example in Chapter 37: “Without doing and yet without not done”. It is Kun, line 2. It says ‘Not repeat without not harvest’. The character repeat is the same like in the name of hex.29. This name is not Kan, but Xi Kan: repeated pit. In the old texts there are no names, the first character of the text serves as name, and here it is xi kan, repeated pit.

  Xi is a picture of two wings above (probably) a sun: to practice flying. Its meaning is practice, repeat, study, habit, routine, skill.  So line 2 means: be like the earth, without any skill, but harvest is sure, because the earth is straight, square, great. Straight and square also have the figurative meanings of a person being straight or square. And the repeating might also allude to farmer’s work, ploughing, weeding. The earth needs no plough.

  ‘No skill – without no-harvest’, it sounds like the farmers equivalent of ‘not do without not done’ (without not = always).

Harmen about hex.2

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