Stated directly, trigram and hexagram diagrams were not pictorially meaningless numbers produced images, and images produced the words and judgments that formed early layers of text. If a diviner could see so many pictographic images in single numbers and sequences of numbers in combination, like what we now see in operation in the Shifa, then we ought to assume that a deeper repository of subjective and innovative images could be observed in number combinations at the multiline, trigram, and hexagram levels. My main thesis is a high percentage of images in the Changes developed through a simple and direct pictographic method, like the one used in a recently discovered Warring States period divination guidebook called *Shifa 筮法 (Method of milfoil divination), that was done by matching the graphic shapes of individual numbers and the overall shapes of numbers in three-line combination to shapes of real objects and logographs. I argue the Shuogua ’s image programs have a defined architecture, and its images are not random lists of words collected without an agenda and devoid of relationships and mutual interaction with others. The Shuogua presents images either found in or to be extrapolated from the base text within a structured and highly interpretive system that forms “image programs ” for each of the eight trigrams. This paper examines the images of trigram Li 離 in the Yijing 易經, with a focus on images in the Shuogua 說卦 commentary. The gendered logic of classical Chinese thought with its emphasis on a dynamic relational balance and transformative reversibility between the categories of the masculine and the feminine is distinguished from rationalizing Western tendencies that either essentialize social-cultural gender roles as an unchanging natural fate determined by ' natural ' biological sex or conceal gender under the guise of masculine-oriented claims to a nongendered universality and neutrality. On the one hand, Chinese cultural and intellectual traditions have been interpreted as having a greater appreciation of the significance of gender and the feminine than standard Western forms of thought. Chinese philosophical and cultural traditions have become part of contemporary interpretive conflicts over the meaning of gender and the relative social status of women and men. We consider how gender and nature have been conceived in relation to the Yijing and its potential and limits for addressing questions of gender, the environment, as well as issues of the interconnection of gender and ecology articulated in ecofeminism. This chapter traces the shifting roles of gender and the changing character of nature in the Yijing.

I ching for dummies pdf