Top Tip #1 - Don't Poke a Small Fish

Roughly defined by anyone who has studied it as ‘the book you will never fully understand’ The Book of Changes is a complicated and confusing thing to talk or even think about. Taking this into account I still marvel at how well Will Buckingham and Alan Baker managed to explain it to their audience last Friday afternoon as part of Cultural Exchange week. 

The Yi Jing, pronounced I Ching and also known as The Book of Changes, is made up of 64 chapters, each containing six lines, each line corresponds to the other and this creates a marvelous and individual hexagon of lines which reads from the bottom upwards. In order for it’s foreign audience to understand; these chapters need to be literally translated, and then translated further in order for them to make grammatical sense. Some quite bright and talented people have managed to do this and have used the Yi Jing for inspiration for their own writing and/or written about the Yi Jing itself. 

Will Buckingham and Alan Baker are but two of many writers who have used the The Book of Changes to inspire writing of their own and we got to hear a few of their pieces. One of the stories Will read out was particularly interesting to me because of the analogy he used to describe it. He said that the story was based on the principle that ‘you shouldn’t poke a small fish’, meaning in a political sense that you might not need to do a lot in order to keep everyone happy. This was an extremely vivid and dramatic story about peace which was based on chapter eleven of the Yi Jing, entitled ‘Peace’ ( roughly translated). Then Will read another story, a heart warming story about a little girl waiting for a delicious fruit to split, a story that teaches it's audience about patience and about sometimes having to wait for something until you can get the best out of it, like a fruit to ripen. This story was based on chapter 23 with a title roughly translated to ‘Peeling’ or ‘Splitting’. 

At the end of the talk, and after a breath taking translation read by Will of a chapter from The Yi Jing in its true language, there were a few questions asked by the audience. Understandably many of us took a couple of minutes to actually put those questions into words. The lad next to me was the first to ask a question, one which I had been wondering myself; “How do you consult the Yi Jing?” and having no knowledge of the Yi Jing I was a little confused when Will answered “with a coin or with sticks”. He explained that a number was assigned to each side of the coin so when you flipped it there were only a set few numbers the flips would add up to, these numbers would determine whether the line was a broken line or a unbroken line and the coin was flipped six times due to there only ever being six lines in each of the 64 chapters. This is how they read the book of changes and came up with such emotive and vivid pieces of writing, along with Google that Alan Barker admittedly pointed out a number of times.  

I have to say that I enjoyed this event the most out of the few I went to in Cultural Exchange Week, it was definitely the most interesting out of them all. It had me thinking about and questioning The Book of Changes for days. 

Rachael Byrne