What About the 16?

In a previous post I proposed the following:

You can’t understand the 64 until you understand the 8.
You can’t understand the 8 until you understand Heaven and Earth.
You can’t understand Heaven and Earth until you understand Heaven.
You can’t understand Heaven until you unify the 15 separate neigung elements into one, unified energy.
You can’t unify the 15 parts until you’ve learned each neigung element.
You can’t learn the neigung elements unless someone teaches you.
You can’t be taught by someone who doesn’t know.

But where is the 16? One possibility is that the 16 is the 8 yang palms plus the 8 yin palms. Once you’ve got an idea about the energies of the 8 yang palms, the yin side of them begins to arise in your practice. You can go back around the Bagua diagram revisiting each of the palm changes and perform them from the yin perspective. This requires a very clear understanding of the energies of the yang palms as well as yin and yang.

That’s the point.

In order to go back and flip everything to the opposite side, you have to be very clear about what you are doing in the first place. The added benefit is that you will open those channels even more while simultaneously opening the opposite flow. But there is more.

In learning the 8 yang palms we explored stillness/movement movement/stillness. The 16 continues this but sets up the 64 palms where form is emptiness and emptiness is form will be explored.

Hypothetically if you learn the 8 yang palms and the 8 yin palms, you can mix them in 64 ways. You just define the bottom and top trigrams of each hexagram as representing the yang or the yin palm. As long as you are consistent with your definition, you can play with every possible combination.

But why?

Not only will it demand an extraordinary level of mastery, it will also setup the study of balance that ultimately reveals emptiness and in turn reveals compassion. Notice this is the same progression that Bruce outlined in the “Strings of the Tao” commentary “An Overview of Taoism”:

stillness/movement movement/stillness
form is emptiness and emptiness is form
balance
emptiness
compassion

Even though I simplified the progression a bit for discussion, if this is even close to correct, you can appreciate how important it is to get the definitions of the trigrams right. Let’s hope Bruce gives us more clues when the second installment of the BMP comes out.