Alan Trist and Bob DeVine
The Zen of the Tao:
Journeys Along the Ridgepole
The Way is unimpeded harmony;
Its potential may never be fully exploited.
It is as deep as the source of all things:
It blunts the edges,
Resolves the complications,
Harmonizes the light,
Assimilates to the world.
Profoundly still, it seems to be there:
I don’t know whose child it is,
Before the creation of images.
Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching 1
The I Ching consists of layered mythic, shamanic and philosophical statements and concepts, in a corpus of written texts developed over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Its original purpose was divination, and it is still an immediately useable working oracle, offering guidance interpretable at many different levels. Richard Berengarten’s long poem, Changing, or “gathering of poems”, as he elegantly calls it (‘Postscript’, 521), is a significant addition to the literature on the Ching,2 the poem’s main source. This essay tells a story of how some of these new poems have worked to enhance consultations of the old oracle by two of its long-term students.
Brimming and Bracing (Trist)
The occasion of my first meeting with Richard in 1961 magnified the meaning of chance by its ritual and ceremonial context. To be matriculated into a lifetime’s membership of a Cambridge college is a formal event befitting its gravitas of expectation and promise. At the celebratory dinner in Pembroke’s hall, we sat opposite each other at the long oak tables, and thereafter our undergraduate lives were entangled. As our correspondence has developed following the publication of his masterwork, our entanglement seems to be of the quantum kind, as marvellous connections across time and space have arisen, as will be seen.3
For the first time in many years, during his poetry reading tour of the United States in 2012, Richard and I met in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I had been living since 1970. On this occasion, Richard presented me with a screenprint version of his 365-line chant-poem ‘Tree’ (1988); we visited a ‘cathedral’ redwood grove in Samuel P. Taylor State Park – and from then on, an arborial theme was present in our lives. The redwoods of the Bay Area are close to the southern end of the West Coast’s temperate rain forest, which stretches from Alaska to Monterey Bay. Then, five years later, in 2017, at a time when I was moving house to a location 500 miles north, on the coast range of the Oregon Coast – and in that same coastal rainforest – the incidents underlying the writing of this essay began to unfold. And at that point, the Ching gradually emerged as an increasingly explicit factor in the continuing entangled branchings of our lives. What is more, as will be seen, the motifs of wood, trees and poles in this story came to assume a force and energy entirely of their own.4
Those of us who came of age in the 1960s had the benefit of easy access to the world of Chinese classics, and much else of the world’s literature, through the then fairly new medium of the paperbound book, which was to be found and read in coffee shop bookstores. You did not have to know what you were looking for, as would, say, a scholar in a library; it fell into your hands. In those newly born and self-informing communities, it was unusual not to find a worn copy of the Ching on someone’s bookshelf. While over the years my record of appeals to the oracle has been haphazard, like the shadows of clouds moving across mountains, and not disciplined by orderly strata of recollection, the text, transmuted through one English version or another, has never been far from reach; a friend, stern, kind and reliable, trustworthy, in turn enigmatic and straightforward. And I learned with Changing that Richard, too, has long been a dedicated student.5
And here’s where the leaven of chance began to rise: at the moment of this book’s publication, I happened to be involved in a deep study of the use of the Ching for parallel personal issues, together with an artist friend of mine, Bob DeVine, another lifetime student of the oracle and fellow-follower of the Tao. Soon we found ourselves being drawn into a conversation around Changing,6 which, though neither a translation nor a commentary, has a matching organisation to the Ching. The unexpected result was that, for us, Changing immediately became another source to work with, along with the seven translation texts we were already consulting between us.7
In the following story, it’s important to bear in mind Berengarten’s caveats regarding Changing. Bob’s reference to it as “a river of poems” is apt, for it reflects the author’s conception of Changing, noted in his postscript, as “a single work, a composite poem made up of many small poems […] to be read first and foremost as a poem, or gathering of poems, in its own right and for its own sake”. Here, while Berengarten affirms that Changing is rooted in, structured by, and inspired by the Ching, he is unequivocal that “it is not a translation or a commentary” (521). While one would normally be properly constrained by this authorial intent and statement of limitation, Changing happened to ‘fall into our hands’ while we were already in the Land of Ching, becoming part of an intensifying synchronistic field then developing; and nothing could have prevented it from becoming an auxiliary text – not a primary oracular text, but an evanescent co-respondent in the timeless web of the Tao, just as if it had actually been made for ‘easy’ reference thanks to its parallel organisation and structure to the Ching itself.8 I will return to this point later in this story, for it too shows the Way, but I must ask for the author’s – and perhaps also the reader’s – forbearance, in that we didn’t read Changing primarily as a long poem as he had intended, but entered it, rather, as both the Ching and the Tao directed, and as our own story unfolded.
When, some months after the book’s publication, Richard wrote to ask if, as regular, long-term users of the Ching, Bob and I might like to collaborate on an essay on Changing for a forthcoming volume, providing, so to speak, a working perspective, we both embraced the idea9 Fatefully, as it turned out, we decided that, as a case in point, we would both throw the coins that very night and go from there. I have always consulted the Ching with a specific question or situation in mind, based on the theory once received from a commentary that it would enhance the specificity of the reply. Yet I have also doubted this claim, for even though it is likely to focus the mind, the web of the Tao is surely too complex, intricate and subtle, and language itself too clumsy, arbitrary and inflexible, to allow any ‘particular’ to be genuinely illuminated. So I asked Bob how he thought our various histories of the moment would play into any guidance the Ching might offer. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, “but rather concentrate on the question of the moment, our collaborative task.” We were both to be very surprised, for the oracle had other ideas.
Holding in mind the question of how best to proceed, I threw Hexagram 28, (Ta Kuo, 大过), with changing lines in the fourth and sixth places. This is variously rendered as ‘Preponderance of the Great’ in Wilhelm/Baynes, ‘Great Traverse’ in Karcher, and ‘Vast Beyond’ in Hinton. But in whatever way the various English translators characterise the condition, the image of a “sagging ridgepole” presides. As Karcher puts it, “This figure marks a dialogue between structure, the house and the ridgepole as the social structures that support and constrain us, and the process of becoming a true individual” (Karcher 234).
But before I could address these matters in relation to the consciously intended purpose of this consultation, which was how to approach the writing of this essay, I was overwhelmed by a feeling that the Ching itself – in accord with the Tao, as always – had redirected the focus of my question to the current condition of stress in my own life: the ridgepole was indeed sagging and the oracle seemed to be saying, “Address this personal matter, now!” This was a stunning result, as if a statement demonstrating that the inner need for prioritisation had been issued by an ‘objective authority’ somehow selecting itself out from among the infinite plethora of nested foci within the net of being – and positing a reordering of the quantum entanglement.
I think this interpretation of mine came about because, primarily, all the English translations of the traditional text are full of images of rising water and housing instability. At this time, I was living in the actual reality specified in the oracular text, as I travelled between two houses, both with building construction going on, just as the creeks were rising and the hoarfrost lingering in the hollows with the onset of winter. In pointing out the parallelism here, I mean to focus on specific external correspondences with the texts, for the purpose of illustrating by dynamic example a central feature of ‘live’ experience with the oracle: the synchronistic quality of contextualising events. These correspondences can be discerned through the thinned veil of the Tao: the field of their action appears to arise in response to the casting of the oracle itself, which is, of course, an intentional act.10 This correlative parallelism will become clearer in quotations from Berengarten’s poetry below.
At the same time, internally, “bracing the ridgepole” means seeking resolution and integration of self and relationships, perhaps at a point of crisis. The Ching carries a warning about overstepping bounds in the process of integration, which is brought to light in Hexagram 28, as becomes apparent in all English renderings of the fourth and sixth changing lines, e.g. Wilhelm/Baynes:
Nine in the fourth place means:
The ridgepole is braced. Good fortune.
If there are ulterior motives, it is humiliating.
Six at the top means:
One must go through the water,
It goes over one’s head.
Misfortune. No blame. (Wilhelm/Baynes 113-114)
And Cleary, in The Taoist I Ching, renders the text and commentary of the changing line 4 of Hexagram 28 as follows:
The ridgepole is raised; good fortune. There is another shame. Great yet able to be small, the mind equanimous, the energy harmonious – this is like the ridgepole being raised and not crumbling. […] One should not be too yielding anymore, because if yielding is excessive it will damage firmness, and the great path will be impossible to complete – one will become a laughingstock […] (Cleary, 1986: 122)
At this point, in contemplation of the meaning of this counsel, in turning to Changing I found a powerful poem whose theme is reconstruction and ridgepole-shoring. As Berengarten pursues this theme metaphorically in ‘Quake’, his poem for this line, he first takes us deep into the interior of the Earth, then to its “mantle”, and then morphs the metaphor to “bracing” the house:
Our roof may fall in. Panic
multiplies – too fast for response,
too sudden for remedy.
Growls, roars, tremors
between tectonic plates. Cracks
in earth’s mantle.
How shall we avoid yet
another calamity? Foundations
need scaffolding.
deepening, shoring, and
roots of pillars, drilling like
teeth. Diagonal trusses
and cross braces will
buttress frame and shell.
Nor shall we rely
on others to get
these tasks done. We’ll see
to them ourselves. Now. (28/4: 228)
The methodical work recommended in this poem, starting with the “foundations” and working upwards, specifies that developing inner firmness involves attention to detail. Was I now beginning to find initial bearings for my own personal journey, which the Ching was bringing to notice by redirecting attention through Richard’s poem? And although the intricacies of my own psychological journey in regard to these emergent patternings are beyond the scope of this essay, the poignancy of seeking to build a studio apartment at one end of the ridgepole and a home in the heart of my partner at its other end brimmed with personal meaning. The metaphoric ridgepole of the text in fact stretched 50 miles on the ground. As I moved back and forth between its end-points, the words of the hexagram matched the conditions of the wintry journey, the dangers of flood and storm, and the strains of the inner work.
“Mists submerge the trees. Great Traverses” (Karcher 236)11
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
My partner at the time, on reading a draft of this essay and my struggles to understand Hexagram 28, replied:
I think it’s all about the inner work. The metaphors of ridgepoles, mists, water over your head and moving through it speak to that. The building projects are serendipitously active at either end of the journey you refer to as the ridgepole. The ridgepole, however, is the binding, the stabilizing element, and refers to the solidifying of your internal process, the Tao, and the holding together of these elements of your life; the mists and waters are the amorphous difficulties, obstacles and challenges. To quote Richard: “… this slow laborious scrabbling / from one secured mark / to the next …”; and I’d say the Tao isn’t hooked on the external thorns of the brambles – perhaps that’s why it cut through the generalities to your particulars.12
Meanwhile, Berengarten’s poems for the conditions of Hexagram 28 had brought the story into inescapable focus by exactly reflecting the situation ‘on the ground’; and, as the oracle’s drama continued to unfold, Bob, on hearing that the Ching had not directly answered my question but instead given cogent advice in regard to my particular existence, responded:
The more I have thought about your observation on your casting of the I Ching and arriving at the crisis of the sagging ridgepole, Hexagram 28, and its morphing into the winds of successful change, Hexagram 57, I find your conclusion most accurate. I do believe that the issue of the houses … is this moment’s concern for you, and maybe the river of poems by Richard will aid you in penetrating the winds of change that stir in your soul, as you have so expressed. They may be the boat across the Great River. Look at his poem for the sixth line of the ridgepole’s sag, it’s as if he witnessed the stables of your labors. … I was dumbstruck by that timely poem.13
I’ll let the remarkable applicability and eloquent precision of Berengarten’s “river of poems” carry the story forward from here, referring especially to the external correspondences, which I am calling the synchronistic field. This is the point at which unequivocal reference to Changing finally took over and I gave in to reading my throw, in part, through its lens. What also became apparent was the opportunity this experience presented, to demonstrate the ‘speaking’ of the poems themselves as an illustration, or perhaps filter, of the Ching’s synchronistic power.
Berengarten’s title for his group of poems that mark Hexagram 28 is ‘Overbrimming’. Here, the initial poem, ‘The lake rises above the trees’, described the conditions prevailing during a time that, for me, coincided with deepening winter. In addition to the weather, this poem spoke to the actual new building work that was being undertaking: stables for horses, fences, and drainage.
Rain on rain, storm
on storm, flood on
flood. Won’t it ever
Stop? The only way
forward is this clumsy
paddling, this careful
wading, weighed down
by too much baggage,
and then this slow
laborious scrabbling
from one secured mark
to the next. No time
to contemplate gifts or
horizons, let alone dream
or think. Every muscle,
bone, corpuscle, must
be put to work, getting
past and through. (28/0: 224)
The ‘fit’ is uncanny. And ‘Floods’, Berengarten’s poem for the changing line at 6, was even more exactly and aptly descriptive:
Roads at hills’ feet swirl
and in valleys’ lower dips
cross-currents carve
runnels down
to our river, swollen five
times normal width.
Thick sludge swirls,
fast moving, covering
tree trunks, whose
greeneries swish away.
We’ve stabled our horses
on higher land, but
our cows, marooned
in corners of sodden fields,
cluster wherever small
pockets of green have
not yet gone under. We
can’t cross the river. (28/6: 230)
“We can’t cross the river.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
No, we can’t, and here’s the rub. The flood catches us up short; we’re in the deep Ching of myth and metaphor, where pointers to individuation and enjoinders to self-correction are invoked as necessary conditions for ‘success’. As I write this, the crossing is still under way and, as ever, there’s procrastination on the banks, for the river has a fast and furious flow. But like the “gentle, penetrating winds” in various English translations of Hexagram 5714, to which the changing lines of 28 were pointing, Berengarten’s head-poem for the situation, ‘What’s that whirring’, in the cluster ‘Blowing, Billowing’. provided the right mood and tone, and a necessary stance of noticing, to enable the crossing:
What’s that whirring
in the guttering? Only
the wind muttering.
And that clattering
above the ceiling? Your spirit
staggering and reeling.
And that sighing
in the eaves? The gale that
frets and grieves.
And that rattling in
the chimney? The breath
of Death, your enemy.
And that whimpering
in the rafters? The wind’s
weepings and laughters.
And that rattling in
the basement? Your soul
breaking its casement. (57/0: 456)
Here the house itself speaks, literally and metaphorically. I heard it. How fortunate to have found such a perfect lyric in this net of chance, its own completeness magnified by the contextual fit; as if the poem itself, like the wind, were moving around the house in a timeless universe, witness to the inner questing within. “Breaking the casement” proceeds, I feel it; a new journey comes into being – “staggering and reeling”, we begin. All must cross the river, including the marooned cows of ‘Floods’ (230). Who are these cows? Are they not us? Marooning ends when the land is dried by the wind, pneuma, the breath of clarity … leading to movement, “firm but flexible”.
The sources and consequences of poetry, whether from the ancient East, as in the Ching texts, or newly from the West, as in Changing, are ‘without dimension’, at least in terms of the ways in which we experience and interpret space and time in the material world.15 But it’s precisely through and into this world that poetry constantly resurfaces, springs up, breaks out, and burgeons forth anew – always alive, and sometimes numinous.16 The Zen of the Tao arises as we notice it; the Ching reflects an unfolding vision. And just as poetry is always entangled in time, so the Tao is eternally pointed and repointed in and through poetry. In quantum mechanical terms, if two particles can be entangled in the space/time continuum, can two poems, authored in different eras on different continents, be joined in the web of the Tao?
As I have suggested, it could of course be debated whether or not an ancient corpus of oracular utterances such as the Ching is ‘poetry’ in quite the way that Berengarten’s consciously crafted verses so clearly are. But it’s reasonable to suppose that a Muse is common to both the ancient divination text and this modern poetic artefact. Both originate from deep layers of being and becoming. Both speak out of personal and communal history and cultural experience: that is, out of both an individual and the collective unconscious.17 Both discover (uncover) the universal in the particular, and bridge (connect) and rebalance (repoint) the two. Both embrace correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm as their guiding principle. Both are inspired by something beyond ordinary knowing.
I believe that the story told here, in our personal account of the Ching’s action in time, is a testament to the powers and beauty of the ancient Classic. I also believe that this story has literally incorporated Berengarten’s Changing – even if and because, not by our conscious choice, but rather by the magically natural way in which this book ‘fell’ into the laps of Bob’s life and mine, at a particular time and a particular place: that is, synchronistically. For while Changing professes to be no more than “a poem, or a gathering of poems” – at least in our case, its ‘mode of falling’, or befalling, inevitably transformed it into an auxiliary to the oracle, into its expressive variant, and even its valid representation: attributes that were triggered initially by its identical structure with that of the Ching.
As is well known, an author’s conscious intentions can never encompass all the ways in which a book is likely to be read. Our own active way of reading Changing has involved applying it both symbolically and literally to our own lives; and to my mind this suggests a valid way of revealing the inner inspirations and meanings of Berengarten’s poems too.18
The Tiger Path (DeVine)
As fate would have its way, I decided to keep a diary of all my castings of the Ching from January 2017 into 2018 and was able to pinpoint the first hexagram I threw at the time of reception of the gift of Changing from Alan. My initial question concerned my projected move into a new house as a single person for the first time in thirteen-plus years. I had just broken up from a long relationship with a woman I loved, and all that was clear to me at the time was the fact that our previously shared journey was, inevitably, now transforming into two quite separate paths.
The Ching responded to my inquiry for wisdom and guidance in this new adventure, delivering Hexagram 10, ‘Treading’,19 with changing lines in the second and fourth places. This led to Hexagram 42, ‘Increasing’.20 The dominant image and message of Hexagram 10 is the care needed when finding oneself “treading on a tiger’s tail”. While this image has many meanings, associations and applications, most obviously connected with danger, it is specifically to do with the weak (– –) approaching the strong (—) in the territory of the latter.21
After reviewing the standard texts, I approached Changing to understand its relationship to the Ching’s counsel. In Berengarten’s head-poem for the hexagram ‘Treading’, entitled ‘Water in a stone jug’, the beauty of the image is achieved differently, by expressing the upper trigram (Qian ☰ , or ‘Heaven’ in the classic texts) as ‘light’, and the lower trigram (Dui ☱ , or ‘The Joyous, Lake’), simply as ‘contained water’. The image of dancing light on water was now apparent, as the manner of treading needed to move forward in my situation. It was then I remembered that ‘Fire’ (Li ☲) is indeed the lower nuclear trigram,22 as stated in Richard Wilhelm’s translation (Wilhelm 435).
Reflections off water
in the stone jug on our table
wander over walls
doodle across ceiling
because of noon breeze
and pool and still
above our fireplace.
Always light above and
light’s inflections […] (10/0: 80)
When I entered Changing, considering it primarily as an ‘epic poem’, I realised that one of the main ways in which Berengarten connected his texts to the ancient Chinese text was through his footers or ‘base-lines’. These occur both on each hexagram’s title page and also beneath each poem. My interpretation has been that in the italicised base-line for the title-page, the left-hand notation often expresses the upper trigram, represented by the top three stanzas of a poem, while the right-hand notation often expresses the lower trigram, represented by the bottom three stanzas of a poem.
I then became aware that for ‘Treading’, a key to understanding Berengarten’s expression of ‘Heaven’ (Qian ☰) is that the image of light is clearly evident – even if one has to discover it by pondering a little. In the footer to the introductory page for the hexagram. It reads “a lake … flooded by sky.” (CH 10: 79). The light appears in the sky’s brilliant dance that blankets the lake, so that a perfect image of the process for ‘Treading’ is described here: the sky doesn’t sink beneath the lake’s surface, it bounces between ‘lord’ heaven and ‘lady’ lake; and in this way a marriage is achieved. In this way, the italicised footers become a wonderful window into the poem’s homage to the Ching itself, and onto its guiding instructions.
So Changing has inspired both heart and mind through poetry, in a song of faithfulness to the Ching. For me, journeying with it has become more complex, the weave of the Tao ever more intriguing. Berengarten’s imagery has proved true and my journey down the Tiger Path, successful. I now reside in a little cottage where the light of the moon and sun traverses my walls through the rippled surfaces of two beautiful, stained glass windows. I bathe in the delight of the union of sky (Qian ☰) and lake (Dui ☱) .
The Role of Water Dripping (DeVine)
The wonder of Changing unfolded in even fuller dimensions as I entered the collaboration with Alan for this essay. Upon learning of his take on his throw of the Ching, and in light of Richard’s timely, timeless poems in the cluster ‘Overbrimming’ for Hexagram 28, and of my simultaneous casting of Hexagram 31, ‘Reciprocating’, my role became clearer as co-author of this essay. I saw that I would be the element of ‘water dripping’ into the process of the project. My deliberations would follow the course of water’s love of gravity and seep towards the granite of Alan’s foundation of understanding and Richard’s insightful expressions of the Ching’s mysterious meanings.
As I read and reread Berengarten’s poems, his fresh take on the Ching began to settle in. With his head-poem for Hexagram 31, ‘A lake on the mountain’ in the cluster ‘Reciprocating’,23which Hinton entitles ‘Wholeness’, a deeper understanding of the hexagram occurred to me: of the coupling of ‘Lake’ (Dui ☱ ) and ‘Mountain’ (Gen ☶ ), with ‘female’ above and ‘male’ below. The top three stanzas describe the lake’s formation as descending in movement, implying that the lake’s wholeness, its coming into being, is not yet realised.
Massing water
presses down, finding
lowest outlet. A lake
collects, builds
in deepest possible
places, soaks
into permeable
ground to pool on
impassable rock. (31/0: 248)
This process of completion unfolds in the fourth and fifth stanzas with the mountain’s upward heaving. The magical beauty of wholeness is realised in the last stanza:
A mountain presses
up, pushes its presence
to rear, bucking
against gravity. So
when a lake forms on
a mountain, opposed
forces meet and
merge in fine self-
checking balance. (ibid.)
The lake’s formation takes place within and without the mountain through the meeting of the ’gentle’above and the ‘firm’ below. The lake is created only after a “fine self-checking balance”. It might even be surmised that a kind of ‘consciousness’ on the part of and within nature itself is doing its work for the lake to come into being, a supposition that posits a kind of teleonomic (purposeful) directedness in nature. What is more, this motif of ‘reciprocating’ through lake-formation spoke to my collaborative relationship with Alan; my role as ‘water dripping’ had now become clear. This essay is the ‘Lake’ that we have been forming.
In contrast, however, in ‘Overbrimming’, Hexagram 28, the movement also follows the direction of the primary trigrams, but with the ‘Lake’ (Dui ☱ ) above pushing both downward to the point where it passes its bounds, and then rising above the trees or collapsing ridgepole. These energies will be tamed by the wind’s stubborn, lateral movement in Hexagram 57 (‘Blowing, Billowing’, Xun). We now see the theme of what Alan calls “brimming and bracing” in terms of the forces of stabilisation that occur both in Hexagram 28, ‘Overbrimming’, and in Hexagram 31, ‘Reciprocating’. In the latter poem, stabilisation takes place only through a process of the natures of water and stone meeting each other half-way, that is, in their respective forces moving downward and upward, and so shaping the attainment of the lake.
As I peek at the nuclear trigrams of hexagram 28, I see that the upper and lower trigrams both embody ‘the Creative’ (symbolised by Qian ☰ ‘heaven’). This suggests that the day-by-day renewal of the originary principle of the ‘Creative’ (as embodied in hexagram 1) spells out how the overbrimming of the river and the stress on the timber bridge of the ridgepole in themselves form the path to resolution. By following the wind’s method of effectiveness, that is, its continual blowing in one direction, the example of the Creative is followed: it renews itself day after day, and thus parallel paths are followed, so that the renewal of deliverance is achieved.
Berengarten’s poems bring the image of these mysterious workings of the Tao brilliantly to light. The wonders of the synchronistic web of the Ching and Changing, unfolding in time and in varied life paths, can be clearly glimpsed in the story told here. This is a most rewarding experience. The poems stay true to the spirit of the Ching and both reflect and inflect the structure of the trigrams. Berengarten’s stanzas are aligned to their natures, and so Changing is a sound boat in which to cross the Great River called Change.24
We have come a long way with Changing. It has served us both well vis-à-vis several personal issues at times of major change in both our lives. What is more, it has provided a powerful and fresh voice for understanding the ancient texts of the I Ching. Our hope is that the story told here of how we entered the poems and profoundly resonated with them ‘in real life’ will add to their own life to come; and that Changing will be internalised by its readers and become active in them. Nothing is as constant as change, it is said, like the wind “blowing, billowing”. Its great agent, the Tao, is always working on us as individual human beings, nudging us to listen and learn.25
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
(Theodore Roethke)
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Stein, M. 2005. ‘Some reflections on the influence of Chinese thought on Jung and his psychological theory’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 50(2).
Walker, Brian Browne (trans.). 1992. The I Ching or Book of Changes. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Wilhelm, Richard (trans. from Chinese into German; and into English by Cary F. Baynes). 1968. The I Ching or Book of Changes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wilhelm, Hellmut, and Wilhelm, Richard. 1995. Understanding the I Ching: the Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of Changes. Bollingen Series LXII and XIX: 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
1 In Cleary 1998: 10.
2 We prefer to use the more intimate term the Ching, with neither italics nor quotation marks, rather than the slightly cumbersome I Ching, to suggest that, as the book becomes a friend and familiar with use, the text appears to be alive and animated – an experience of many who consult the oracle, for example C. G. Jung: “Why not venture a dialogue with a book that purports to be animated?” (‘Foreword’, in Wilhelm/Baynes: 1968: xxvi. See also Jung 1958: 594, para. 976; and Changing, 534 (7).
3 Two quantum-entangled particles cannot be understood independently. “The consequences of entanglement – a particular type of acausal quantum correlation – belong to the most surprising and counterintuitive effects of physics and our physical understanding of the world. Furthermore, entanglement endows quantum theory with a holism and a peculiar kind of nonlocality which is in complete contrast to the reductive nature of classical physics…. [I]n order to explain the quantum correlations arising from entanglement in a classical setting, nonlocal influences seem to be unavoidable” (Filk 109). The book containing Filk’s paper explores the current implications of the work undertaken by C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli in their search for a unified theory of being, especially in the context of Jung’s theory of synchronicity and these two thinkers’ collaboration and correspondence – the former a psychologist and the latter a physicist (see Jung and Pauli 1955; Jung 1960; and Meier 2001). Further, the ‘blinking’ on and off of photons, as described in quantum mechanics, is a close analogue of the absence and presence of consciousness, as understood in Taoism.
4 Richard’s long poem ‘Tree’ was partly inspired by his first visit to Muir Woods, another redwood grove in the Bay Area, in 1979. In the online Albero Project, versions of ‘Tree’ are being published in an increasing number of languages, together with ancillary and associated texts, photos, paintings, and a video (see Berengarten 2017). “Hopefully this tree will become a spinney, then a wood, then a forest, attracting all manner of life to it” (Berengarten, email to Alan Trist, April 4, 2018).
5 As Bob DeVine writes later in this essay, Changing is a “river of poems”, one for each hexagram, and every line found in the Chinese classic: 450 poems in all.
6 We felt as though suddenly thrown into the Taoist tradition of qingtan, ‘witty discourse’, exemplified by the third century ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’: “Seven Taoist scholars, musicians, and writers seclude themselves in a bamboo grove outside the capital, where they drink wine, engage in the witty Taoist discourse called qingtan, and enjoy a simple life of writing poetry and manuals of Taoist mysticism” (Bincsik 6).
7 Wilhelm 1968 [1951]; Blofeld 1965; Cleary, 1986 and 1987; Walker, 1992; Karcher, 2003; and Hinton, 2015.
8 Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, one of the various meanings of the Chinese word ‘I’ (易) in the name I Ching (易 经) happens to be ‘easy’.
9 Richard Berengarten and Alan Trist, personal correspondence, June 7, 2017 and November 28, 2017.
10 The debate over mechanism is never-ending. Some say the Ching works by magic, some say serendipity, some say future science. “The I Ching hexagrams embody change in a schematic form, so they allow us to locate ourselves in the unfolding of change. This requires that you use […] yarrow stems or coins to perform a ‘chance’ procedure. We call it a chance procedure, but it is in fact a distilled moment in the process of change, and so it allows you to find the hexagram relevant to your situation” (Hinton 2015: xi). One could say that chance, for the I Ching, is a portal offering a glimpse into the workings of the Tao, the Way of Heaven, the Cosmos at large.
11 Both this photo and the following one were taken by Alan Trist while journeying ‘along the ridgepole’, Coast Range, Oregon, Winter 2017.
12 Sandy Duveen, personal correspondence, January 9, 2018.
13 Bob DeVine, personal correspondence, December 5, 2017.
14 Hexagram 57, 巽 Sun: in Wilhelm, ‘The Gentle (The Penetrating, Wind)’; Blofeld, ‘Willing Submission, Gentleness, Penetration’; Walker, ‘The Penetrating, Wind’; Cleary, ‘Wind’; Karcher, ‘Subtle Penetration, Spreading the Fates’; and Hinton, ‘Reverence’.
15 For another account of such entangled poetic ‘eternity’, see Michael Schumacher’s account of Allen Ginsberg’s mediation of William Blake (Schumacher: 94-99).
16 For a sustained use of the expression “burgeoning forth” see David Hinton’s exposition of Taoist philosophy through the lens of Chinese landscape painting in Existence (2016).
17 Throughout this essay, the influence and concepts of C. G. Jung are present, especially in such terms as ‘individuation’, ‘collective unconscious’, ‘synchronicity’, and ‘self’. At a eulogy that Jung gave at Richard Wilhelm’s memorial service in 1930, he said that Wilhelm “[…] inoculated us with the living germ of the Chinese spirit and we found ourselves partaking of the spirit of the East as we experience the living power of the I Ching. It is capable of working a profound transformation of our thought. […] I heard from him in clear language the things I had dimly divined in the confusion of the European subconscious. I received more from him than from any other man” (Jung 1966: 55, para. 78, emphasis added; cited in Karcher 1999: 60-83; and see also Goulding 170-186; and Stein 209-222).
18 In his forward to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, Jung remarks: “Wilhelm […] has made every effort to open the way to an understanding of the symbolism of the text. He was in a position to do this because he himself was taught the philosophy and the use of the I Ching by the venerable sage Lao Nai-hsüan; moreover, he had over a period of many years put the peculiar technique of the oracle into practice. His grasp of the living meaning of the text gives his version of the I Ching a depth of perspective that an exclusively academic knowledge of Chinese philosophy could never provide” (Jung 1968, xxii, emphasis added). Jung, as an approach to writing his forward, framed it with book-end consultations of the Ching, and proceeded by analysis of those two coin-throws. We too, in the writing of this essay, have used a similar active reading of Changing: the interpretations we make in this essay of our consultations of the Ching are informed by the experience of long use. These parallels notwithstanding, our efforts, of course, pale in comparison to Jung’s analytical powers and Wilhelm’s knowledge of Chinese language and philosophy.
19 Hexagram 10, 履 Lü: in Wilhelm, ‘Treading (Conduct)’; Blofeld, ‘Treading, Conduct’; Walker, ‘Treading (Conduct)’; Cleary, ‘Treading’; Hinton, ‘Walking’; and Karcher, ‘Treading / Mating with the Tiger’.
20 Hexagram 42, 益 yi: in Wilhelm, ‘Increase’; Blofeld, ‘Gain’; Walker, ‘Increase’; Cleary, ‘Increase’; Hinton, ‘Enrichment’; and Karcher, ‘Augmenting / The Blessing’.
21 Regarding the yin (– –) and yang (—) lines, variously imaged as ‘weak and strong’, ‘yielding and firm’, ‘female and male’, Hellmut Wilhelm writes: “[In the Book of Changes] the whole order underlying the world and life is imaged in two lines charged with spiritual meaning. These lines are an embodiment of the orbit of change and of the two poles that determine it. It is important to think of this representation as very concrete. Today we tend to speak of ‘symbols’ in such a context […]. In a magical world view, however, such as the one that has left its impress on the oldest strata …, a thing and its image are identical.” He continues: “The system of linear complexes that make up the hexagrams develops naturally and logically from the imagery of the divided and undivided lines.” This is a process which constructs eight trigrams and then sixty-four hexagrams, classically described in the Tao Te Ching as, “Tao gave birth to the one, the one gave birth to the two, the two gave birth to the three gave birth to the ten thousand things” (Hellmut Wilhelm, 47-49).
22 ‘Primary’, ‘upper’, ‘lower’ and ‘nuclear’ trigrams are technical terms in the structure of the I Ching. The nuclear trigrams are considered the core trigrams of a hexagram, as if the hexagram were germinating outwards from its seed and then growing into its finalised version, with the addition of the first and sixth lines. The lower nuclear trigram is composed of lines 2, 3 and 4, and the upper nuclear trigram of lines 3, 4 and 5. Lines 3 and 4 are regarded as the ‘still point’ of a hexagram: that is, the ‘two ‘that becomes the ‘three’, and the ‘three’, the ‘ten thousand things’.
23 Hexagram 31, hsien: in Wilhelm, ‘Influence (Wooing)’; Blofeld, ‘Attraction, Sensation’; Walker, ‘Influence (Wooing)’; Cleary, ‘Sensing’, in The Buddhist I Ching, ‘Sensitivity’, in The Taoist I Ching; Karcher, ‘Conjoining / Uniting in Spirit’; and Hinton, ‘Wholeness’.
24 Pao-t’ung, eighth century student of Shih-t’ou, Patriarch of Japan’s Soto Zen sect, says: “The sutras say to cross a river we need a raft, but once on the other shore, we no longer need it. If a person resolves to find their true source and plumbs the depths of reason and nature, they will see their original face and instantly awaken to what is unborn. This is to reach the other shore” (Red Pine 34).
25 “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do” (Gandhi’, 241). “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking” (Einstein, in Calaprice: 279).
Published: Sunday 11 December 2022[RETURN TO CHANGING]
Bob DeVine is a visual artist whose focus is bearing witness to the parallels among world myths, images and symbols. The process of appropriation and the meshing of gathered images from varied eras and cultures are strong elements in his work. His art has been exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest and is in collections throughout the USA. Exhibitions include: ‘ArtQuake’ (Portland, Oregon, 1981); ‘Heads’ (Wentz Gallery, Portland, 1988); ‘New Works: From Oak Hill & Main Street’ (Jacobs Gallery, Eugene, Oregon, 1999); and ‘Ends and Beginnings’ (DIVA, Eugene, 2004). Illustrated works include: Robert Hunter’s Infinity Minus Eleven (1993) and Hal Hartzell’s The Yew Tree: A Thousand Whispers (Eugene, 1990). Awards and commissions include the Requiem Poster (Oregon Bach Festival, 1988) and ‘The Well: Hexagram 48’ (2000). He currently teaches at Lane Community College, Eugene, Oregon.
Alan Trist is a Cambridge-educated anthropologist, who was publisher and editor with the Hulogosi publishing cooperative in Eugene, Oregon in the 1980s and, in the 1970s and from 1995 to 2014, administrator of the Grateful Dead’s song catalogue at Ice Nine Publishing Company in California. His Paros Poems: An Island Sequence, co-authored with Alexis Lykiard, appeared in 1967 (Difros, Athens), and The Water of Life: a Tale of the Grateful Dead in 1987 (Hulogosi, Eugene, Oregon). He edited The Grateful Dead Family Album, authored by Jerilyn Lee Brandelius (Warner Books New York, 1989), and The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, annotated and co-edited by David Dodd (Simon and Schuster, New York: 2005). He continues to work with the cultural and arts legacy of the 1960s.