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Do Not Give Up

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Borges Takes On the I Ching

Borges Takes On the I Ching

My mind is still on Hexagram 52 (see yesterday’s post). It seems that Jorge Luis Borges had something to say about the ancient Chinese book of divination (and philosophy) that is germane to the discussion. It is called “For a Version of I Ching”:

The future is as immutable
As rigid yesterday. There is nothing
That is no more than a single, silent letter
In the eternal and inscrutable
Writing whose book is time. He who walks away
From home has already come back.
Our life Is a future and well-traveled track.
Nothing dismisses us. Nothing leaves us.
Do not give up. The prison is dark,
Its fabric is made of incessant iron,
But in some corner of your cell
You might discover a mistake, a cleft.
The path is fatal as an arrow
But God is in the rifts, waiting.

I love the poem’s final four lines. Here they are in Spanish:

Pero en algún recodo de tu encierro
Puede haber un descuido, una hendidura,
El camino es fatal como la flecha
Pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha.

Happiness perhaps lies in discovering that mistake (descuido, which could also be translated as “neglect” or “omission”) or cleft (hendidura) and taking advantage of it. But then, is God waiting to entrap us anew, or to welcome us for evading His net?

Hexagram 52

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Mountain and Mountain

Mountain and Mountain

It was the late 1960s. My late friend Norm Witty, who was much closer to the hippie scene than I ever was, told me all about the I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes. I was impessed and immediately tried to use it for divination. Essentially, the system involves sixty-four possible hexagrams which involve eight different trigrams in combination. These are: Earth, Mountain, Water, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Lake, and Heaven.

Hexagram 52, for instance,  consists of the two trigrams for Mountain, one above the other. I will summarize this hexagram using diferent translations so that you can see some of the difficulties involved.

John Minford saw it thus:

The back
Is still
As a Mountain;
There is no body.
He walks
In the courtyard,
Unseen.
No Harm,
Nullum malum.

That Latin bit comes from early Jesuit attempts at understanding the I Ching in a Christian light. Minford called the hexagram Stillness and commented: “Stillness in your back. Expect nothing from your life. Wander the courtyard where you see no one. How could you ever go astray?”

In the famous Richard Wilhelm translation, it is called “Keeping Still, Mountain.” He goes on:

KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still
So that he no longer feels his body.
He goes into the courtyard
And does not see his people.
No blame.

Well, that’s a bit different. As is the version by Richard John Lynn who calls Hexagram 52 Restraint: “Restraint takes place with the back, so one does not obtain [sic] the other person. He goes into that one’s courtyard but does not see him there. There is no blame.”

As there are numerous translations, one wonders whether is as much variation in the original Chinese. Apparently, there is. Although one of its uses is for divination, the vastly different interpretations in both Chinese and English, for instance, make it all but impossible to be sure.

I’ll stick with the two mountains and forget about bodies in the courtyard. There it is: mountain above mountain. One would think that would be the maximum of stability. Living as I do on the Pacific Ring of Fire, I don’t see mountains as being all that static. They may give that appearance, but there are pressures from below (volcanism) and the side (plate tectonics) that can result in unexpected cataclysms.

Stillness is a nice idea, but you can never be sure.