What are I Ching Prescriptions?

Available on Amazon

The I Ching Prescriptions are a different way of working with the I Ching. Many people wonder how could anyone take seriously an answer to a question arrived at by tossing coins. For this reason they decide that the I Ching is not for them. You don't have to believe in synchronicity. You don't have to take the time to understand the poetic symbolic language of the I Ching. When people dismiss the I Ching because it relies on random chance they miss out on the philosophy imbedded within it. A philosophy, based on nature that has survived for thousands of years has a message worth pondering.

I wrote this book for people who are not drawn to the more complex translations that often requires one to read the responses like one would a dream. Not everyone responds to symbolic language.
I wanted to make the Prescriptions direct and easy to use, just like taking a pill might be. I don’t know how an aspirin works. I just know that it does. This does not mean I do not appreciate all the other I Ching interpretations. I get benefit from them. I love symbols, poetry and symbolic language. If I didn’t I would not have been consulting the I Ching for so many years.

How the I Ching Prescriptions are Formulated

These I Ching prescriptions are not intended to be a replacement for any of the many I Ching interpretations in publication.
Forty years ago there was very little I Ching interpretation available. It was Carl Jung’s forward in Richard Wilhelm's translation that first hooked me into the I Ching and remains my favorite version. However I frequently read several different interpretations of I Ching and benefit from various other perspectives. Because consulting the philosophy of I Ching is a subjective experience for the individual asking the question, I find all interpretations interesting.

While I have been studying and consulting the I Ching for over forty years, I cannot read Chinese so I rely on and am inspired by other translations and interpretations. They are all slightly different, depending on the subjective viewpoint of the writer. I pondered and absorbed meaning from these texts by distilling into a condensed essence a small script that has meaning for each of the 64 situations that the hexagrams describe.

If you are new to the I Ching, you might begin with one interpretation that you find relevant and then go on to read others. In the Bibliography you will find a list of interpretations of the I Ching that helped me to synthesize the material for these Prescriptions.

How is the Prescription Method Different?
I have been involved with the I Ching for so long because it works. Synchronicity happens.
So why have I created a different method in tandem with my practice of throwing the coins and relying on “chance” for my I Ching answers?

First I need to give some background as to how I arrived at creating the prescriptions. If one is using the I Ching as a tool for divination one consults the I Ching by asking a question and then relies on the synchronicity of casting the coins or yarrow sticks. Because the Chinese language is not linear but pictorial I felt that giving the work images to ponder, along with linear text, was a broader experience for the meaning of the text however subjective that may be.

Back in the dark ages before the Internet and development of the personal computer, I began my saga of interpreting the I Ching with a set of black and white woodcuts integrating the use of astrology symbols with the images for the trigrams. I made 64 prints, one for each hexagram. I laminated them onto canvasses and strung together to hang in a large wall construction. I also made two sets of these prints on rice paper and hand bound them into books, 16" X 20” in size and after that I made a similar set in color. Next I translated these designs into large acrylic paintings 36” X 48.” I exhibited these works in an exhibition in the Greenwich library, Greenwich, Connecticut in 1972.

The next generation of creating images inspired by I Ching is a book with text and illustrations called, I Ching Meditations. I began with a hand printed limited edition letterpress set of folders for the first three hexagrams. After completing that edition I continued with the illustrations in black and white pen and ink drawings for hexagrams one through sixteen. They were photocopied and published as a limited edition book. This was all before the birth of the Macintosh computer in January 1984. José Argüelles contributed a Foreword for that edition.

I discovered that in my moves across the country from Connecticut to California and back again twenty-three years later, along with several changes of computers, I had some how lost the original work that I had created in color digital format that I posted on a web page. I still have the low resolution of 72 dpi used for the web, but that resolution is not good enough for print.

After feeling stupid and horrified that I had lost all my high resolution work I accepted that fact and began again, creating all new images for hexagrams one through sixteen. Whenever I have switched the medium I am working in the process changes the outcome. On the positive side, I always like what I do better when I am forced to do it over again.

Another positive thing resulted from this loss is that now I am using graphic computer programs that allow me to create images at a faster rate than it took to do my original drawings. Having begun all these illustrations in hand cut woodblock prints and then in handset type on an antique letter press, the wonders of computer technology never cease to enrich and amaze me.

So … I began my original graphic I Ching with woodcuts, a medium that originated in China. I Ching also originating in China, and was the first computer. So … my She Ching is coming full circle here as she is created, produced and published via computer technology.

So what does all this have to do with how I arrived at I Ching Prescriptions? For one thing, I have been immersed in the varying processes of creating images that are inspired by the I Ching for
a very long time now. While I am working on the images for my graphic interpretation, I Ching Meditations, I experience each hexagram as a whole, with the 6 lines as one continual process. When I am creating an image for each line I focus on one hexagram at a time. It is as if I had asked the I Ching a question and received all changing lines. I absorbed the meaning of each line as it related to the hexagram as a whole in a different way than when I asked a question and then read only the lines that changed.

The effect of creating illustrations for interpreting the meaning makes the experience of the I Ching more intense. As I live with a hexagram for a long time I become aware of the organic movement within the six lines contained within each situation. This process led me to the idea of choosing a situation for I Ching guidance rather than to only rely on the synchronistic method. I have read a number of I Ching articles on how to use the I Ching where the writer says to read only the lines that are changing for guidance. So I'm proposing a concept here with a different approach that goes against the traditional directions for consulting the I Ching. To give an example of the organic movement from one phase to another within the changing lines, I have included at the end of the book an example that shows the development of movement within hexagram 10, Treading, excerpted from I Ching Meditations.