MEDITATIONS: I CHING; THE BOOK OF CHANGES, CANTO TWENTY-THREE

Carve—Erode—Scour
|or| Stripping Away

Be wary of competitors and traitors. Look for an opportunity to clarify your personal goals. Courageously set out to accomplish them in spite of the dangers. Now is the time to engage in seated meditation. Learn the fine art of keeping still. (Bright-Fey 75)

Stripping away does not make it beneficial to go anywhere.

Yin 1: Stripping a bed of its legs, making naught of rectitude, bodes ill.

Yin 2: Stripping a bed of its frame, making naught of rectitude, does ill.

Yin 3: Blamelessness in stripping away.

Yin 4: Stripping the bed to the skin bodes ill.

Yin 5: Leading the fish, thus being appreciated as much as a courtier, is beneficial to all.

Yang 6: A large fruit is not eaten. The enlightened person gets a vehicle, the small person is deprived of a house. (Cleary 128-133)

Every instantiation of culture creates its counter-culture, just as any one thing brought into the lighted center leaves behind other things in the dark margins. Illuminating one such mountain, therefore, is bound to make the surrounding hills and valleys envious.

Thus does Canto twenty-three speak of earth eroding the very foundations of the great peak of culture only just identified and cultivated during the time of adornment. Indeed, the previous hexagram signified merely an external adaptation. The leadership was weak, and all about the lowly sages were bitter creatures incapable of discernment.

Now, once the time of adornment has gone, there must come a stripping away of said adornment. The resentful and indulgent moral slaves will have their way without discrimination. It is their revenge. The whole of the culture will be critiqued until no position is elevated above another. In other words, it is not sufficient for a virtuous set of norms and mores to be adopted by the wise only and then imposed on the masses. This can succeed for a time, but the end result is a reflexive reaction more degenerate than the obstruction which came before.

That is why the stripping-away of adornment makes pursuit of one’s goals perilous. Envy and jealousy will pervade like a plague. He who aims high shall be tempted away from what is proper, and if he cannot be bribed or seduced, saboteurs and back-stabbing conspirators will ensure the righteous man is punished for his virtue.

Better then to turn one’s aims inward during this age of chaos. Be courageous, but not rash, reckless, and foolish. Aim at self-transformation and self-overcoming. Develop greater discipline in the face of ubiquitous decadence—that is the central message of the first two Yins: the bed is a place of rest and restoration. To carve off its legs is to lower one’s place of rest. This means that propriety shall be forgone during times of recovery and relaxation; one’s daily joys and rewards become a practice of vicious indulgence. Soon, the very bed frame disintegrates. Then the mattress itself becomes contaminated by pests and damp. It fails to keep its shape, and soon develops tears.

Only the third Yin, she who resides at the furthest extreme of yielding receptivity, survives the counter-cultural indulgence in vice. She does so by way of her proper co-respondent, the Yang at the peak of the trigram for mountain. She yields to the masculine principles of propriety and standards. She cultivates her character, turning her efforts inward, and internalizing the culture which her cohort of Yins want so desperately to destroy.

But the rest of them have already destroyed their bed. Now they must sleep in it. This is a continuation of the metaphor presented in the first two Yins. The bed legs were stripped away, then the bedframe eroded. Now the bed itself has been infested, and so the skin of the body in next under attack.

When a counter-cultural movement is internalized, it is the adoption of a kind of slave morality. It is negative by its nature, in opposition for a positive vision of the present and future. Though some utopian ideal might be fantasized, it is never defined, for to do so would be to reify another exclusive culture—it would be to don another adornment. And so, there is nothing to stop the degeneration. The earth has fully decayed, and now the moral foundations of the masses are caving in. The mountain itself is coming down, and the catastrophic effects on society at large are beginning to manifest themselves.

(To speak of contemporary examples, the cultural promotion and enablement of single-motherhood has destroyed the institution of the family in America. Without family, nuclear or extended, children fail to develop moral characters as a consequence of fatherlessness. This hurts the fringes at first, but slowly threatens to infect the core of society as well until the whole population is gangrenous).

Continuation along this path will always lead to societal collapse and destruction. It it so obvious that the  Ching doesn’t even bother to spell it out. Instead, the Book of Changes offers a pathway toward a different destination. It is possible at this junction for the weak leadership to have been successfully influence by the prior adornment. If this has been the case, then she, the fifth Yin, can convince the others to aim with her at the sixth Yang.

He, the sixth Yang, is the last great fruit left on the highest branch of the tree. This Yang represents the final spark shining bright in the darkness. If the fifth Yin courts him—if those in positions of leadership themselves practice rectitude and moral cultivation, and if they can inspire others to do the same—then the indiscriminate masses can become a fertile ground for a kind of counter-counter-cultural revival. After all, a field strewn with rot is likewise well supplied with nourishment for newly seeded crops. Thus do the enlightened find their vehicle forward. The benighted masses, having destroyed their own families, homes, and communities, can only follow, hope, and start to sow.

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.