Day Three

[In what follows, please do not misunderstand what I mean by "image": by "image" I mean "a visual Gestalt of the hexagram drawn as a group of broken and unbroken lines." The un-Gestalted group of visual lines I refer to as a "figure." Specifically, by "image" I do not mean "hsiang" which is applied to figure, image (Gestalt), trigram relationship, and much else promiscuously.]

Is a hexagram primarily an image with attached text like an architect's blueprint with clarifying text, or is it a paragraph of text with an attached image like the explanatory but mathematically irrelevant diagrams in geometry? Which has primacy as a source of meaning, image or text?

I believe that the sterility of exegesis of The Book of Changes throughout its history has been because scholars have consistently started at the wrong end: they have considered the hexagram to be primarily text -- a verbal object -- when in reality it is primarily a visual object: image. This is true not only of Eastern but also of Western scholars who are egregiously ignorant of the hexagram as image. Consider Blofeld,p.75, where he mistakes #34 to be #14, or Whincup, p.226, where he mistakes #48 to be #59. (Whincup misread his hexagram table, p.238.) These men are serious and conscientious scholars who would not have made such mistakes had they know the hexagram as image.

For cultural, heuristic, and pragmatic reasons, I give primacy to image:

1. because, as exemplified in numerous cultural parallelisms, the ancient habit of mind esteemed Gestalten, categorization, and symbol;
2. because of the heuristic necessity to work from the most stable, invariant features of a problematical situation to features less stable and indeterminant, -- in short, to work from the known to the unknown, from the clear to the unclear, from image to text: the image of the Fox has remained stable now 3000 years, irrespective of any garbling that may have occurred in the more fragile text;
3. and because, when one actually works through The Book of Changes from image to text, it make a coherent and thorough sense as no alternative does.

It is as if I have found a secret door (hidden in plain view) into the dark house of The Book of Changes, or a second mode of access which is often a shorter and less obstructed path. If one has never looked through this second opening, my statements about The Book of Changes must appear bald, unconnected, and subjective because the information on which they depend will not be apparent.

What is "meaning"? In the standard terminology of literary criticism, the meaning of a message is its sense, feeling, tone, and intention. The area that concerns us here is the difference between sense and intention. By "meaning of a hexagram" I mean "intention" and not "sense." I aim to recover King Wen's intention. I wish to discover the topic of discussion, not any scholarly interpretation of questionably valid text.

A symbol, of course, is an object used to represent a general idea, as a hammer symbolizes industrial labor and a sickle agricultural labor. The use of symbols in The Book of Changes is both striking and obvious: