I first wrote this article for Ray Langley's Yahoo Chinese Astrology list in September of 2006.
In Plum Blossom I Ching, the main focus is on the interaction of the trigrams and the 5 elements rather than the text in the Book Of Changes. The text, however, can be used as a sort of "second opinion"to possibly clarify a situation, but greater influence must be given to the symbols and numbers. In my opinion, the PB is not a system of words but rather a system of feeling. It is designed for intuition rather than intellect. It may sound strange to say, but the more 'hazy' and 'lazy' your mind becomes, the more success you are likely to have. I will not go into the rules for setting up trigrams and hexagrams. There are sources that explain these techniques. One is a book by Da Liu (now out of print), but I find that Lorraine Wilcox's translation of a Chinese written book on the PB is the best I have yet seen. A quick definition of Ti and Yung is to say that Ti represents the 'self' or the subject of the divination and the Yung represents all the other forces involved. If you inquired about a specific person and his employment situation, then the person would be Ti and everything involving his situation would be classified as Yung. You then look at how the Ti and Yung trigrams interact with all the other trigrams in the divination in terms of the 5 elements and then the picture starts to unfold. You then also look at how the elements of the time periods from Years down to Hours or Minutes interact with the Ti and Yung.This gives even more detail. In other words, the picture becomes more clear. There are so many aspects to this beautiful system that I will not be able to mention here because it would be very time consuming. Anyway's in terms of Ti and Yung you can get a strong indication of how powerful or weak they truly are. Most, if not all of the authors who have written of the PB will merely mention that the Ti or Yung is either 'weak' / 'strong' or 'favorable' / 'unfavorable'. To me, this is too vague, so I created a system that rates the strength of the Ti and Yung. To say that a Ti trigram is weak or strong is one thing, but when you say that Ti is operating at an efficiency of -7, +3, or +12 is quite another. The numbers reveal just how strong or weak the Ti or Yung is. It shows you the potency that it is operating at. It is quite detailed and can certainly enhance your interpretations. A very quick example would be the Chien trigram. It represents the father as one of it's many attributes. If you ask a question concerning the father of a family, let's say, and the Chien trigram is operating at strength of -8, then you know that the father's influence is very weak in the situation, especially if the Yung trigram is antagonistic to his Ti and is operating at say +12. In this case, the father is in serious trouble. If the Chien trigram's strength is +10 on the other hand then you can see that the father will have great influence. If the Chien trigram is enormously high, say +15 or higher, then he may become tyrannical or overly dominant. So you see, with the numbers, you can get a much greater feel for the disposition of the father. In PB you will have a hexagram that describes the situation. One line will be the moving line. The trigram without the moving line will be the Ti and all the other trigrams will be considered the Yung. So in hex. 3, the top trigram is Water and the bottom is Thunder......Kan over Chen. If the 5th line is the moving line, then the Ti is Chen. If the 2nd is the moving line then the Ti becomes Kan. Part 2 will give the strength of every hexagram and moving line according to the Ti And Yung of that hexagram. Hexagram 1.1 would signify hex.1 line 1 changing, hexagram 3.4 would indicate hex.3 line 4 changing, 63.5 would be hex. 63 line 5 changing, and so on. Keep in mind that the Ti and Yung for every hexagram has been evaluated with every other trigram including the Nuclear hex. and the Future hex. The influence of the Time elements on the Ti and Yung have not been taken into consideration because it would be practically impossible to list them all.
To be continued ...
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