Why the ‘I Ching’?
Many of the epigraphs in my book, ‘Gateway to Gandamak’ are taken from the ancient Chinese text or method of fortune-telling, the ‘Book of Changes’ or the ‘I Ching’ (sometimes spelled ‘Yi Jing’).
Why?
My book is NOT about China, although a short, amusing, episode occurs in the ancient Kingdom of Zhou. Time travel is no problem for the narrator.
The answer is simple: I failed!
The original idea was to structure the book based on the 64 core elements of the I Ching presented in a book of divination that has been on my shelf for many years. This is ‘I Ching: Shamanic Oracle of Change’ (see the photo of the title page). It is a most wonderful book.
My idea was to write short, but linked stories inspired by the text of each of these 64 elements. So for example, I would look at a page like this, and see what came up:
I found that I couldn't do it. The demands on my imagination were too great. Nevertheless, looking at this page, “Birth Pangs” struck a chord, and I wondered if a book that somehow dealt loosely with my own experiences and some of my forebears might be possible. And so ‘The Gateway to Gandamak’, Book 1 has its title taken from the I Ching, and I tried at least to let the ancient words guide me in how my writing evolved. I’ve taken many of the epigraphs from this book too.
I should say something about the I Ching (the text that follows appears in a slightly different form in Book 2; this is a highly abridged version to suit Medium):
About 1,600 BCE the Chou people of An-Yang in Honan Province in China used a systematic method to forecast the future, an oracle. They inscribed a question on what was called “dragon bones”, a turtle shell or the shoulder blade of an ox, and then heated the bone, which would crack. The cracks, lines in the bone, were read as the answer. This, of course, sounds primitive, even incoherent. It was not. It was an attempt using a primitive kind of “computer tape” and a (human) reader to produce an answer in a standardized or formal way. The idea was eventually written down as a book called “The Changes of Chou” — the “Chou I”, the Chou or Zhou being this tribal group in the North-West of China. The original collection seems to be a document of the the real-world invasion of Shang by Chou, as well as a spiritual guide, and means of fortune-telling.
You access the wisdom of the I Ching by various methods of chance. Technically, this is called “Cleromancy”, selection by a form of random “sortition” — casting of lots — in which an outcome is believed to reveal the will of God, or other universal forces and entities. The Chou used dried stalks of the flowering plant, Achillea millefolium — yarrow.
People still toss yarrow stalks and interpret how they fall at random to pick the ‘I Ching’ divination they want to receive. Let me explain.
The ‘Chou I’ consists of a title compound character made up of a combination of eight characters that can comprise a matrix. The eight characters used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality. They are represented like this (I have left out the actual Chinese characters — I want to try and remove the “Oriental mystique” from this to reveal some of its value).
These are the Eight Trigrams (“Bagua”) used to build the system. The title name (e.g., “Dui” or “Lake”) indicates the real-world connection or allusion. The lines show the internal orientation of the object. If the line is whole/unbroken then the “spin” of the object, its relationship to the natural world, is “Yang.” If the line is broken then it is “Yin.” Yang is a complex idea of positive or active or aggressive — “male”; Yin is negative or passive or accepting — “female.” It is understood that all reality under Heaven (three Yang lines) is a combination of Yin and Yang, strength and weakness, light, and darkness, an understanding that the basic building blocks of the world are not all or nothing, true or false, but a combination and — this is remarkable since it reflects 21st-century physics — not entirely fixed since the actual meaning of Yin and Yang depends on the observer.
You have noticed already that there is a strong similarity of method between signs — the trigram shapes — inscribed, then appearing at random on heated turtle shells being read off systematically, and signs equally systematically generated by a computing machine. The same idea is used with cellular automata, especially the approach taken by Stephen Wolfram.
I’ll write more about cellular automata and Wolfram in another post. Let’s carry on with the I Ching.
There is a suggestion that binary arithmetic invented by the great German mathematician Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz is derived from that of the Chinese master scholar Shao Yong who, it was claimed, used the method, as witnessed by Leibniz himself when he calculated the sequential numbers for the I Ching’s bagua. This is not actually the case, but the obvious link between a system of two states (lines), one broken, the other unbroken is interesting and has obsessed scholars until the present day.
Leibniz pushed the China connection too hard. The Shang had no Zero. The ancient Chinese use physical objects to count. Hence the possibility of using yarrow stalks. They use “counting rods,” red for positive, black for negative and a vertical rod for five (or the reverse placement — vertical placed ordinals and a horizontal five). We’ve all made marks when scoring points or events — watch any prison movie. You make four marks and cross them with the fifth. It’s the same idea. The rod shapes in the ‘I Ching’ sequence is written in “rod numerals.” Zero cannot be easily represented in the system. It was understood as a vacant position, and not considered until well into the 13th century AD.
Old Liebniz was taking some liberties with the facts, or more probably misunderstood them. The point is that he knew that the Chinese believed the bagua to be a revelation from a supreme power, the “Taiji,” that controlled everything through the combination of Yin and Yang. Liebniz looked at what kind of mathematical system Abraham’s God would have used to create the world. Leibniz made a huge intellectual jump when he understood the value of the binary system, the simple idea of “off” and “on”. He thought that creation was a combination of the void — 0 — and God — 1.
In his book ‘Of the True Theologica Mystica’ he wrote, “All creatures are from God and nothing…. The essence of things resembles number.”
The correspondence between the broken and unbroken lines was recognized immediately and using the idea of 0 for nothingness and 1 for God, so Leibniz was able to offer an interpretation of the I Ching in Christian terms. The 8th trigram, for example, 111, was obviously entirely of God, and was on the 7th day, the Sabbath, if you had a Zero in the series. From Nothing to Everything in easy steps. By 1703 he was able to write:
“What is astounding … is that this arithmetic by 0 and 1 happens to contain the secret of the lines… of the bagua.”
The truth, unfortunately for this nice conclusion, is more complicated. The ordering, the sequence of the trigrams is something that can be chosen or indeed left to chance. Some scholars maintain that ancient Chinese text was read right to left, which would counter Liebniz. However, since the characters are stand-alone ideas (“ideographs”) they can be ordered in any direction, traditionally they were vertical, starting at the top right-hand corner, but this is not necessary. Liebniz has a reasonable claim to be on to something — but he missed the fact that his “7” (the 8th trigram) is a combination of broken rods, indicating that “God” is “Yin” — female! Fabulous irony!
In any event, the most common representation of the trigrams is not in a straight line, it is a circle, representing the spiritual world and one where you do not travel with entropic time in a straight line from past through present to future, but can move backwards and forwards. The Chou-Shang did indeed know something, b ecaue so can a Turing Machine.
Let me return briefly (I promise) to the ‘I Ching’.
If you place the trigrams in a matrix arrangement they generate sixty-four separate combinations of characters. Thus “Qian” (“Ch’ien” — Heaven) on the upper, horizontal axis in the first position combines with Qien on the vertical, lower axis. The double character emphasizes the idea of a beginning, an origin, that encompasses all the elements of a world to end with double “Kun” that confirms the Earth — if you wish to read it this way!
These sixty-four combinations are read as a set of “judgements” or oracular statements, and they are further modified by assigned “lines” of text, six for each character, and each combination, making a total of eight levels of information.
It is some of the lines — aphorisms — that are chosen and used in my book as epigraphs at the start of chapters. These eight levels of data are called “hexagrams” and are the basis for the divination. The process is based entirely on chance, and the way to ensure that is…… to use random numbers. Random numbers are, of course, a basis for modern science and computations of all sorts; simulating and modelling complex phenomena, selecting random samples from larger data sets, and probably most interesting in the context of what you will learn about Bletchley, Turing and his friends in other parts of my book.
I access the wisdom or guidance of the ‘I Ching’ as a way of introducing an entirely random thought into a decision process, or perhaps discovering a new insight that is NOT based on experience or learning or some non-random influence. A number is produced from sixty-four possibilities, that gives me a title and overriding oracle, and then a number between one and six is produced to indicate which line of modifying text I should consider.
It seems fair to explain how I used this approach to guide my writing, so here goes:
Choose at random from 1 to 64 (I use a random number generator on my phone, yarrow grows here, but the stalks are a pain):
Number 13. The title is “Allies,” and the oracle says:
“Allies will be found in frontier lands. The offering is favorable to a crossing of the Great River. The nobleman has a favorable oracle.”
Now select a line in the hexagram from the upper third idea, so spin the random number generator again (1 to 3 this time) — Number 3:
“Allies hide in the wild, armed with weapons. They go to the hills but there is no uprising.”
And now lower third of the six lines — Number 4:
“Standing on the walls of the city, he cannot be overcome.”
You’ll find the hero of the book standing on the wall of the Red Fort in New Delhi in some despair, suicidal but indeed is not overcome. And, of course, he eventually finds his way ‘Through the Gateway’ (the title of Book 2) to the wild hills of Afghanistan and Gandamak.
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