MEDITATIONS: I CHING; THE BOOK OF CHANGES, CANTO THIRTY-SIX

Bright—Illumination—Injured
|or| Damage to Illumination

Gather your strength and collect your life-force energy deep within. Seek inner nourishment. Now is a good time for meditation and personal cultivation. Listen to your heart and it will reveal the weaknesses of any person or situation that approaches you. It is vitally important that, at this time, you keep your plans to yourself. (Bright-Fey 101)

When there is damage to illumination, it is beneficial to be upright in difficulty.

Yang 1: Illumination is damaged in flight, causing the wings to hang down. Enlightened people on a journey do not eat for three days. Going somewhere, the subject is criticized.

Yin 2: In damage of illumination, it is damaged in the function of the left thigh. For rescue, it bodes well if the horse is strong.

Yang 3: Illumination effects a leveling on a southern hunt, getting the great chief. It will not do to be righteous in haste.

Yin 4: Entering into the left abdomen, one gains the heart of those by whom illumination is damaged, and goes outside.

Yin 5: Concealment of illumination is beneficial if steadfast.

Yin 6: Without illumination, there is darkness. First ascending to the sky, later entering into the earth. (Cleary 211-218)

 Just like a useful and well-worn tool, collective cooperation and advancement must result in the accrual of wear and tear and the eventual damaging of the enlightened culture cultivated during the prior harmony. This is the bright sun represented by the trigram of fire being transposed below the dark trigram of earth. Illumination, attention, intelligence, and ego-consciousness—though not spluttered—is sequestered, fed, and kept burning underground, under the cover of secrecy, lest the benighted masses smother those final sparks that they may revel in the pitch-darkness of unconsciousness of their own decadence and corruption.

This canto is a forewarning to illuminated souls. It is a guide for protection from threats without as well as a reminder to sustain one’s own character within. Dark times must come, but the genuine man does not need to compromise his morality in order to survive it.

However, surviving darkness and thriving in darkness are not the same thing. As the first Yang indicates, those in the possession of illumination will be shot out of the sky by those cicadas beneath them. The wings will be damaged, and the enlightened will need to bide their time in destitution and poverty. That is the meaning of fasting for three days. Likewise, the wise shall be criticized for their wisdom, especially as they act as to protect themselves from the self-destructive trends being normalized and even celebrated by the small-minded masses.

One can be sure, those braying beasts of the demon herd will stampede if it means they can stamp on those they envy and therefore fear and hate. The best that an illuminated soul can do is to mitigate the injury. His wings, his ability to soar into the sky and make unfettered progress, has already been damaged. Now the rest of the body is under threat. To protect it, if the enlightened person is balanced, he can prepare an escape plan—a strong horse capable of carrying him far away when the time of attack comes. This is a metaphor for setting aside wealth and collecting favors, for diversifying means of income and support. The wise man sees the army approaching long before it arrives at his border. By the time it comes, he has means of egress. The attack can cause a superficial wound to high off-hand side thigh, preventing him from sprinting, but with the horse—his alternate means of sustaining himself—he needs not succumb the mob’s demands.

That was the second Yin, finding balance through yielding ground and escaping disaster. The third Yang represents the aggressive counter-attack of the enlightened. The southern hunt to capture the great chief is the conscious effort on the part of the illuminated during a time of darkness to rebalance the culture by stripping the corruptors of their undue influence. This means discrediting those popular hedonists who drag the masses with them into deeper and deeper depravity. This is a cultural war, and the I Ching advises it be fought with patience and caution no matter how enlightened the keepers of the fire may be. Rapid, revolutionary change only ever results in death, destruction, and a bloody tyranny on the other end. Such a tyranny will give birth to a reversal of decadence and degeneration—imbalance corrected for by imbalance, no harmony to speak of. Instead, the wise and enlightened course is to allow for gradual, incremental change within a culture. The soldiers today may never see the end of the war, but their grandchildren might inherit an order that is sustainable.

Leaving the body of fire and entering that of earth, we shift perspective from the personal to the societal. Here, the fourth Yin represents those close to the leadership, those who occupy positions within the cultural institutions. In a time of darkness, they are the cunning and scrupulous who weasel their way in as deeply as “the abdomen” on the left-hand side. The left is deception and chaos, where the right is honesty and order. Therefore, these bureaucrats will seize power for themselves through ingratiation with the corrupt people above and below them. They will indulge the leadership’s short-term desires, and they will snuff out and honesty they find.

Therefore, if there are any enlightened souls in positions of leadership, it is the only thing they can do to preserve themselves by hiding their illumination. The fifth Yin does so, retaining her morality in secret, avoiding direct confrontation with the nest of adders surrounding her. One in such a position does well to remember that in a time of damaged illumination, progress is impossible. It is the best one can hope for to survive, bide one’s time, and cultivate virtue on the inside.

The final Yin represents the result of the damage. The bright, shining phoenix falls and becomes like an egg—potential locked away until its time to hatch again. There will be longing for a better time, for the culture once attained but now squandered by it own inheritors. This is natural, but time does not course backwards, and the only way forward is down beneath the ground. The Way up again will reveal itself in time. Until then, the wise ought to keep their plans to themselves, prepare their horses, and steel themselves against the attacks which are inevitable.

I Ching; The Book of Changes, with commentaries by Cheng Yi, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Library, 2003.

I Ching: The Book of Changes; An authentic Taoist translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2006.