Last night I went out to see some old friends and colleagues from Japan. The dinner we had did not agree with me, and my stomach woke me up two hours ago. I figured I should channel my discomfort into writing, and and post a blog entry since I wasn't able to put one up yesterday.
I want to start out talking briefly about two definitions that are important when studying the I Ching. The first word is "Feminism," meaning the view “that women and men are equal politically, socially, and economically." The other word is "Ching" (or "Jing," depending on how the Chinese is written in English – as in the Tao Te Ching, the Nan Jing, the Huang Di Nei Jing, and the I Ching). This word is translated as "classic." Or, as one of my teachers once explained it to me, "If you disagree with this book, you just don’t understand it well enough." Certainly a little glib, but classics do tend to be full of deep meaning that takes some time to absorb.
As we read the I Ching, we see gender showing up in the text in ways that can be difficult to relate to for a modern reader. Women are sometime spoken of a objects of ill-omen or things to be feared and shunned in the text. I have wrestled with this over the years, trying to find a common ground between the what I consider the truth of "Feminism" and the possibility that I am missing something when reading a "Ching.”
There is a contrasting negative male reference as well, which is that of a man who is overly aggressive, and this is the key to understanding why women get such a bad rap in parts of the I Ching. Confucius’s commentaries aside, any reference to “male” or “female” in the I Ching should be read and understood as “Yang” or “Yin” by acupuncturists. The “fearsome strong woman” and the “foolishly aggressive man” are both allusions to an inappropriate and potentially destabilizing Yin or Yang energy, when looking at the overall balance of the hexagram.
Equating Yang with “masculine” and Yin with “feminine” is the conceptual point at which using labels really starts to limit our understanding and appreciation of Yin and Yang. I encourage all readers of the I Ching not to take gender references literally if you want to actually make use of this text in a meaningful way.
Most translations of the I Ching tend to venerate the Yang more than the Yin, so the disparaging of the Yin is more common. However, if we keep in mind that this is a book about concepts that were (and are) difficult for most people to fully grasp and apply, and that the majority of commentary and translation has been written by men, we can move beyond this unpleasantness and develop a close understanding of the symbolism that will be of such great use in the acupuncture setting. It is the symbols that are the heart of the I Ching.
The translation I prefer for people new to this study is “The Complete I Ching” by Alfred Huang. The book has several good and bad points if you compare it to other translations, but on the whole I find it very accessible and more useful than other texts in understanding the character and Shen of each hexagram. But if you pick up this book and flip to, say “The Marrying Maiden” as you leaf through it, just remember that it is about the relationship of the Yin lines to the Yang lines in that hexagram – their overall balance and placement. So cringe, as I do, and then as you ponder this hexagram you can always think of it as “Thunder over Lake” instead.
