The Great Vessel Blog

Hexagrams in Pairs - A New Article

We have just posted another article, ‘Working with Pairs’.

For many years I viewed each hexagram as if it was a vessel for dynamic movements which took place within it as indicated by the lines. I delved a little further and found that there was a dynamism between the two trigrams interplaying as images. Both of these added to my understanding of what the hexagram represented. However I was still stuck with what now feels like 64 fairly static images. These only became dynamic in a reading when set along with the other hexagrams it brought forth.

All this changed when someone informed me that there was a structure to the Yijing with every hexagram sitting in dynamic tension as a pair. There are in fact thirty-two pairs of hexagrams. Contemplating them as pairs was like letting the brake off a car for the first time. Suddenly everything was moving around. Each hexagram lent insight to its partner and the proverbial sun rose above the horizon. I still find it an extraordinary exercise to work at holding the two hexagrams, of a pair, in my mind at once. The ‘Pairs’ page in the Total Yijing program, available on this site, is a good start to understanding how they represent the movement of energy. However by contemplating them a sort of understanding begins to emerge about the nature of the worlds fundamental dispositions and the way they exist in cycles. I don’t know why I ever imagined that a book about change might have been made up of 64 static components.