When I first started using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching (The Book of Changes, The Emperor's Yellow Book) as an oracle, the answers I got to my questions were often quite confusing. So often, in fact, that it's a wonder that I ever got past the beginner's stage of learning how to use a wisdom book as an oracle. When I finally got past the beginner's stage (maybe ten years) then I really got confused. Obsessions have a way of doing that. I didn't realize for a long time the basic reason one adopts and uses the I Ching as an oracle for. It's FOR to learn to ask mo' bettah questions.
After years and years of subjective sado-masochism, I finally took the attitude that the answer I got was always right. I wasn't able to do that with the King James version of the Bible. The fact that I was able to do that with the I Ching is the real miracle that made the way of the world mo' lucid to me.
I had a stroke of good luck at the beginning of this quest. I was given Cary Bayne's English translation of Richard Wilhelm's German translation he created directly from a Chinese master's instructions. Other English translations like James Legge's translation was too strictly academic and lost the true meanings of the Hexagrams, and the later ones based on Legge's translation are more like pop art usually done for the New Age crowd.
The Wilhelm/Baynes translation is published in English by Princeton University Press, which in some way legitimizes that it's been done with at least some academic rigor. What that means to me is that it was not just a New Age endeavor for me, but had some critical thought looking things over. The translators didn't make it easy for the layman. Wilhelm stuck to the original text where possible, but revised it if the Chinese master didn't think his academic treatment of the Chinese language carried the true tone or meaning of the oracle.
This attitude I finally got to that I mention above happened this way. I would consult the I Ching as an oracle using the coin method, and it provided me with a Hexagram and perhaps some specific lines of the Hexagram to look up and read. The problem for me came when I didn't see the relationship between the answer I got and the question I asked.
I have read quite a bit about oracles and how they work. One of the more universal connections between them is that an oracle only gives one answer, and doubts about it are not entertained. Some cultures or societies only allowed it's citizens to ask the oracle one question for the whole of their life. If you didn't like the answer the oracle provides you're just screwed, complain too much about it and you could get stoned to death.
I didn't really have to look outside the Yellow book to discover this tendency of oracles to give one answer. The middle book in the Wilhelm translation provides lots of reasons why it happens this way.
Something happened that made a difference. I began to think that if the answer the I Ching provided me with was the right answer to the wrong question, and it's answer was the answer to the right question, then my true task was to find the right question for the one answer the oracle gave me. This is how the I Ching taught me how to ask the right question the first time. It took thirty years. Why am I always the last to know?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
