Body of Individuality, Bien Hua, and the I Ching

While practicing this morning I had this moment of clarity where the body of individuality, bien hua, and the I Ching all made sense from a very simple point of view. I’ll try to explain.

The hexagrams of the I Ching are just symbolic representations of a state – any state. Any hexagram can change into any other hexagram from moment to moment. The change from one state to another is a bien hua. The body of individuality in any moment is the total collection of how you perceive yourself and the world at that moment. This typically doesn’t last very long. How you perceive yourself and the world at any given moment can be symbolically represented by a hexagram. How does it change? How does anything change? Bagua becomes the study of how change occurs.

On a very simple level, to change from one hexagram to another at least one line has to change. That simply means that at least one yin has to change to yang or one yang has to change to yin. It is also possible that all six lines have to change, but fundamentally at least one Liang Yi (hopefully I used this term correctly.) has to happen; otherwise, there is no change.

There’s is a lot more like how hexagrams contain trigrams and perceiving the hexagrams as structures of structures, etc. But from a very simple view, it all starts to make sense. The story that is told in the I Ching is just one example of the hexagrams morphing into the next into the next. The concept behind it all is both simple and profound.