Benebell Wen’s I Ching, the Oracle: A Critical Review

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Benebell Wen’s I Ching, the Oracle: A Practical Guide to The Book of Changes is an ambitious, beautifully produced and very substantial book. It combines translation, commentary, divination practice, ritual, symbolism, historical material and esoteric interpretation in a single large volume. It is easy to understand why the book has attracted so much positive attention: it is visually impressive, rich in material, and clearly the result of an enormous amount of work.

It is also a book with a very distinct perspective. Wen is open about her background in occultism and ritual magic, and about the fact that she approaches the Yijing through a strongly spiritual and theistic lens. I do not object to that. The Yijing has never been only one thing, and there is nothing wrong with approaching it as a living divination tradition, a spiritual text, a ritual text, a philosophical text, or a combination of these. My criticism concerns something else: in the book Wen repeatedly presents material as historical fact, scholarly interpretation or direct translation. Once a book does that, those claims can and should be checked. Continue reading →

New courses at Nourishing Destiny Academy

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Synergy. Cooperation. Sharing. Growth. These are a few of the values I’ve always held close in my Yixue 易學 work, training, and study. Much of what I do happens in solitude: quietly sitting with my nose in books, writing, translating, and researching a wide range of topics that I find meaningful and worth exploring.

To some extent, that’s exactly how I like it. There are endless rabbit holes to fall into when you investigate a Chinese character, unpack a principle from Wenwang Gua 文王卦, or sit with an enigmatic line from the Zhouyi 周易. But sooner or later, research wants to become something more than research. At a certain point, you want to bring insights out of their sources and beyond the theory that gave birth to them. Sharing discoveries with like-minded spirits is far more rewarding than keeping them to yourself — and, in my experience, whatever I study needs to be used, expanded, and tested by people who recognize its practical value.

In Johannes Bloemsma I’ve found exactly that kindred spirit.

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An error in Da Liu’s book ‘I Ching Numerology’

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This is for members who are using Meihua Yishu 梅花易數, ‘Plumblossom Numerology’ and follow Da Liu’s book I Ching Numerology. I got an email from a reader, asking about a problem with the Later Heaven formula (p. 48-49). He wrote,

“The later heaven formula particularly attracts me due to its especially poetic way of reading situations but I noticed that for the moving line Da Liu provides the method of adding the numbers of the trigrams together (according to the later Heaven sequence) and then subtracting 6 if the sum is greater than 6. This troubled me as it means that each hexagram can only have one possible moving line as the trigrams have fixed values with no possibility of variation according to the situation. So for instance hexagram 44 Kuo will always have the fourth line as a moving line- and the other five will never occur. Does this accord with Shao Yong’s method?”

And I replied,

I think Da Liu might be wrong here. The original Meihua Yishu book says,

后天端法：以物为上卦，方位为下卦，合物卦之数与方卦之数，加时数以取动爻。
The Houtian rule: use Object as upper trigram, and Direction as lower trigram. Combine their numbers and add the number of the time to it to obtain the moving line.

I checked this with Jack Kuo’s website, which contains the original MHYS book with Jack’s commentary (Jack also wrote an excellent book about MHYS).

Jack gives as an example:

例如，午時見到一個老人家從東北方過來，乾為夫，老人家即為乾象（若是老婦人則取坤）。東北方則是艮卦，因此取卦為天山遯，遯卦。 乾於數為 1，艮為 7，午時為 7（這裡用的數也是先天數），1 + 7 + 7 = 15，除以 6 餘 3，因此變爻為 3。 此卦為遯卦九三爻變，為遯之否。
For example, at hour wu 午 I encounter an old man who is approaching from the North-East. Trigram Qian ☰  is a man, and an old man therefore is represented by trigram Qian (if it were an old woman it would have been trigram Kun ☷.) The North-East is trigram Gen ☶, so the result is hexagram 33 (Heaven above Mountain.) The number of Qian is 1, Gen is 7, hour wu is 7 (the numbers used here are the Xiantian numbers). 1 + 7 + 7 = 15. Divided by 6 the remainder is 3, which means that the moving line is line 3. The hexagram is hexagram 33, with a moving line at 3, changing to hexagram 12.

In other words, if you want to use the Later Heaven formula correctly: don’t forget to add the hour.

Tips to open up your reading (tips, not rules)

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Is using the Yijing difficult? Are the answers that it gives you complex? The answer to both questions is a sound ‘no’. And yet discussion boards are flooded with Yi castings of users who don’t seem to be able to gain useful insights from the Yi’s response. For a long time I wondered why that is. And through that wondering emerged the following tips and suggestions that you might consider if you feel that working with the Yi is a challenge.

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Online Workshop ‘The Power of the Hexagrams’

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Start April 14, 2025

(Click on the picture to hear the text in a video)

The Yijing, the Chinese Book of Changes, is a book of divination that is used by thousands of people all over the world. For more than twenty-five hundred years it is offering advice to those who have doubts and struggle with uncertainties in their lives. But many users of the book find it difficult to interpret the answers that the book gives them. This online workshop wants to help you with that. If you agree with one or more of the following statements, then this workshop is for you:

  • I always find it difficult to interpret the answers from the Yijing
  • I only use the text of the Yijing, and would like to do more with the hexagrams
  • I don’t know how to practically apply the trigrams
  • I know that every line in a hexagram has a general meaning, and I would like to use these in a reading
  • I have been using the Yijing for years, but I still feel like a beginner
  • I want to know more about the Chinese philosophy behind the Yijing
  • I want to pick Harmen’s brain on the Yijing
  • I want to have more confidence in my own interpretations
  • I want to integrate the Yijing into my own profession

If one or more of these statements apply to you then you will benefit from this online workshop. In eight lessons you will learn the power of the hexagrams, how to read them, and make them useful and meaningful for every question that you address to the Book of Changes. Continue reading →