I first encountered the Yijing in the 1960’s, when Richard Wilhelm’s translation was popular in the West. I found the text both intriguing and confounding. Its vivid metaphors and cryptic instructions inspired my imagination and provoked me to look at the world in new ways, but the text itself seemed opaque and disjointed. The first four words of the first hexagram read, “Sublime, Success, Furthering, Perseverance.” I wondered what these words meant. The second hexagram said it is “favorable to find friends in the west and south, to forego friends in the east and north.” What, I wondered, was the significance of a certain direction in finding friends?
Some readers believe that as an oracular text the Yijing is inherently mysterious and can only be understood intuitively. From this point of view, trying to unpack the metaphors and decode the text misses the point. Despite the evocative quality of the images, I suspected they were more than cosmic Rorschach blots meant to reflect subconscious insights but I was unable to decode them.
The most puzzling aspect of the book was the sequence of the hexagrams. A hexagram pair includes an odd-numbered hexagram followed by an even-numbered hexagram. It was usually clear to me that hexagram pairs were related in meaning, reflecting two aspects of a single theme, but the overall hexagram arrangement that has been passed down throughout recorded history, had no apparent rationale or narrative.
Frustrated by these conundrums, I spent less time with the book until Richard John Lynn’s translation appeared in 1994. This version included the commentary of Wang Bi, a third century Neo-Daoist. Lynn's scholarly presentation excited me, and I studied it carefully, hoping to demystify its language and metaphors. I began to see that that much of the hexagrams' meaning came from the internal structure and symbolism of the hexagram diagrams and their constituent trigrams. I also returned to the question of the hexagram sequence, wondering if the sequence arose from the same structural principles. I wondered if the hexagrams, the trigrams, and their binary structures and symmetries might illuminate the sequence's logic.
I spent many hours considering this question, with little progress. Finally, in a basement in Framingham, Massachusetts, I spontaneously saw the rough outlines of the the sequence's internal structure. It was a “Eureka!” moment, that I first recorded in the form of a diagram:
The Original Diagram of the Received Sequence
A week later, the diagram looked like this:
The Second Diagram of Received Sequence
Today, after many years of refinement, the structural map of the sequence looks like this:
The Final Diagram of the Received Sequence
The hexagram sequence, when understood from the point of view of the symmetry and structure of the trigrams and hexagrams, is a coherent and highly articulated structure. It presents a systems diagram that illustrates the evolution of society from an inchoate state to being an integrated or “enlightened” society that reflects the profound wisdom of Heaven and Earth throughout every social strata.
The early versions of this map helped me understand the received sequence's overall structure, but I did not understand the meaning and functions of the individual hexagrams in the context of this structure. I began studying the hexagram texts again, now taking their locations in the map in consideration.
I shared my initial discovery with my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the head of the Shambhala lineage. Chinese wisdom traditions like Daoism and Confucianism are resonant with the Shambhala teachings, and Rinpoche seemed interested in the diagram. He encouraged me to continue my investigation and study.
The challenge of understanding the Yijing is multifaceted. Each hexagram dyad presents a dynamic world of meaning and relationship, but the text of each hexagram is extremely terse. Each character, sentence, and paragraph carries tremendous meaning. In fact, in ancient Chinese, characters' meanings are highly contextual. In order to understand a character or passage, one must consider its structural and textual context as much as its denotation. As well, the text itself does not fully explicate most of its key characters and concepts.
The genius of the Yijing is that its interpenetrating strata of sequence, structure, and language bind every element—each character, metaphor, phrase, hexagram, and line—to every other element of the text. The internal structures and symmetries of the hexagram diagrams and their constituent trigrams generate further structures that define the role of each hexagram in the overall sequence. Understanding this, it becomes clear why hexagrams that are cousins in meaning are found far apart in the sequence. Such hexagrams perform related functions in different locations in the overall sequence. Thus, understanding the sequence map and the hexagrams' functions within it are essential to understanding the meaning of the hexagram texts. As I studied, I was in awe of, and overwhelmed by the challenges of understanding this system.
As I studied Richard John Lynn's translation,[1] I began looking up Chinese characters in dictionaries. Over time, as I studied the language, I realized that in order to understand the text, I would have to work directly from the Chinese. It has taken many years to learn how to work with with ancient Chinese, which is completely unlike modern English.
I am not sure why it fell to me to take this journey. It was certainly not my intent to translate and write a commentary and structural analysis of this precious text. Indeed, every step of the way I have felt inadequate to the task, and yet compelled to continue. Throughout the journey I feel I have been supported by the kindness and wisdom of the dralas, or shen [神], the wisdom-energies of the Shambhala and proto-Daoist lineages.
As I will discussed in more detail, process of unpacking the text was made possible by my training in and devotion to the root texts of the Shambhala tradition, and my study of Buddhism over nearly fifty years. For me, the wisdom of the Shambhala teachings is like a pair of glasses that make the meaning and patterning of the text of the Yijing bright and clear.
Over the last twenty years, friends have encouraged me to clarify the audience I was writing for—was I writing to communicate to academics and scholars, lay people who were interested in the Yijing as a way of understanding their situations or divining the future, or was I in come way popularizing this profound text? I have never been able to identify my imagined reader, or, for that matter, clearly envision clearly how the final product serve others in society. Over time it has become clear to me that I fundamentally aspire to please the dralas themselves, rather than any particular audience. This has freed me from both academic and popular constraints, and yet demands that I do my best to make this work as accessible as possible to those whose motivation is to understand the text as a means to connect their lives to sacredness and to benefit others. With that aspiration, I pray that this work can be of benefit to those who will dedicate themselves to creating a good human society on this earth.

[1] Lynn, Richard John. 1994. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press
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