Eight Introductory Lessons / 07
How to Read It, and Where It Stops
The original text, the classical commentary and the modern explanation are three different layers. Also: what this method cannot do.
- Separate original text, classical commentary and modern explanation, and know who is speaking in each.
- Name two common interpretive approaches and know that neither is the single correct one.
- State the limits of what this method applies to.
Three layers, kept apart
When you read a hexagram, the words in front of you come from three different periods and three different kinds of speaker.
The first layer is the original text: the judgements and line statements. It is the oldest, uses the vocabulary and syntax of its own time, and contains characters whose reading is still not agreed upon.
The second layer is classical commentary: the Ten Wings and the exegesis of later centuries. It is authoritative and influential, but it is still commentary.
The third layer is modern explanation, including the plain-language notes and everyday examples written for this app. Its job is to make the first two layers readable today. It is not scripture.
The main benefit of keeping them apart is that you always know whether a sentence is what the text says or what somebody thought about it.
Two common approaches
Across the tradition, two broad approaches recur, usually named image-and-number and meaning-and-principle.
The first works from the symbols themselves: line positions, the two trigrams, how yin and yang are arranged, numerical relations — conclusions drawn from structure.
The second works from the sense of the words: it reads the judgements and line statements as claims about situations and conduct, and asks what they argue for.
The two are not exclusive, and many readers use both. What matters is that they are approaches, not a right one and a wrong one. When you meet a particular claim, it helps to ask which approach it comes from before weighing how convincing it is.
In the same way, one line statement can be read differently by different commentators. That is the normal state of affairs, not a sign that someone made a mistake.
What this method cannot do
Stating the limits is more useful than overselling the uses.
It does not predict the future. The diagram is a symbol produced by a rule, and the text is an ancient document. Neither contains information about later facts.
It does not guarantee outcomes. Any claim of the form "do this and such-and-such will follow" is not something these texts can support.
It is not a substitute for professional judgement. Medical, legal, financial and psychological questions belong with qualified people.
Nor is it a measure of fortune. Where this app marks a tendency for a hexagram, that is the writer's interpretation of the text, not an assessment of your situation.
Subtract all of that and what remains is what it genuinely offers: a fixed set of questions and angles that forces you to state your problem clearly, and a body of text argued over for more than two thousand years in which you may find an aspect you had not considered.
A practical reading routine
A routine you can repeat:
First, settle the facts at the level of symbols: which hexagram is primary, what its two trigrams are, which lines move, and which hexagram results. There is no room for interpretation here; it is either right or wrong.
Second, use the selection scheme to find the passage you are meant to read, and stay aware of which scheme you are using.
Third, read the original text, and turn to the commentary and the plain-language notes where it is opaque — remembering that those are explanations.
Fourth, treat what you have read as a question rather than an answer: what situation is this passage pointing at? Where does my own case resemble it, and where does it not?
The fourth step is the easiest to skip and the only part that does any work.
Try it yourself
This lesson has a hands-on exercise. It is built into the Traditional Chinese lesson page, where you can try it straight away: open the interactive exercise.