Early History

Originally the I Ching (Sequence of Earlier Heaven) was an oral tradition, being passed on by memory and observation. It was astrological in nature. Then the Duke of Chou added words, his own and his father’s to the hexagrams. He also took the liberty of removing the sequential asso­ciations and putting them down in random pairs of opposites. This process has been followed for thousands of years! But it was wrong from the start. It marks the beginning of a mathemati­cal justification and validation of the changes, rather than a natural and experiential one. This caused a great abstraction of thinking. This abstraction of thinking represents the seemingly contradictory and profound knowledge of the Chinese mystics and scholars. It was, more likely, an indulgence in irrelevance!

Chinese thinking and logic when related to the earlier sequence is crystal clear and not rational­ized. Once one changes the sequence, anything is possible.

“The only place in the universe where opposites are not opposite is in the King Wan and Duke of Chou‘s Sequence of Later Heaven.”