Hi, this is Chi. Welcome to Yijing Compass, Ancient Key to Modern Problems. So in this small video clip, I'm going to talk a few words about Yijing.
It's almost impossible to talk about such a vast, major work in just 3 minutes of video clip. But I'm going to give it a try. In this video, you'll learn what is Yijing, who created it, how was it known in China and the rest of the world, And what does it serve? Yi Jing is the world's oldest oracle with more than 7,000 years of history. Yi means change and Jing means book.
So it's also called a book of change. It was believed to be the head of all books, all the backbone of Confucius and Taoism. So what is it about?
It's about principle of the universe and principle in human life. We can also call human life as a small universe. Yijing believes these two universes function with the same principle.
Our wise and clever ancestors observed the nature and came to the conclusion that all human behaviors that abide by the law of nature will attract the positive energy from the universe. So you must succeed. On the contrary, if you go against the law of nature, that will only attract misfortune.
So who created Yi Jing? A legendary figure called Fuxi created the very original version with symbols only, before the Chinese characters were even invented. Fuxi understood that all things originate from the same jing called Taiji, from which two energies called yin and yang were derived.
He drew a straight line resembling yang, and two broken lines resemble yin. Yang, as we know today, has a masculine, creative, doing and advancing quality, while yin has a feminine, supportive, being and resting quality. He concluded that yin and yang are the basic elements of everything. Fuxi made eight trigrams out of yin and yang with different combinations, called ba gua, which becomes the basic units to explain the universe and human life.
Those eight trigrams resemble eight different forces in nature. Earth, mountain, water, wind, thunder, fire, lake, and heaven. They all contain the yin and yang. About 3,000 years ago, King Wen of Zhou was fascinated about Fuxi's work. but found that 8 trigrams are too little to play with.
So he made further combinations from the 8 basic units and expanded the work into 64 hexagrams, forming the earliest version of I Ching. These 64 hexagrams resemble the 64 unique situations in universe and human life. Then, many years later again, 500 BC, a famous guy called Confucius He discovered I Ching at his latest 50s.
Well, he was like long away. So he devoted the rest of his life meditating and trying to interpret it when I Ching is containing. And he put his words and things into a work called Ten Winds.
Obviously, he wished the work with I Ching, his interpretation, could travel long enough for many, many generations to benefit. So how do Chinese view it? It is our national treasure.
It has inspired so many generations of rulers, scholars, philosophers, fortune-tellers, and common people. It was predominantly used as a divination tool, meaning predicting the war outcome, the harvest, the major life events in people's lives. Well, in the late 17th However, it caught the attention of the Western world. The most famous person was Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist. He describes I Ching as a spiritual agency that helps people to find that meaningful and responsible way of responding to changes.
Well, that was just a part of it. We all know nowadays that computer language is based on binary system, right? But not so many people know that.
My sister's founder, Lee Leibniz, actually also took inspiration from Li Jing, which existed so many thousand years ago already. So connecting Western and Eastern It's not difficult to see why it's such a unique piece of work. It unites the image, the logic and the numbers in one piece of work, trying to answer the life questions.
So in sum, it is a book of change. It is a spiritual agency and source book for helping people to understand the changes and choose the most responsible way to respond to it. Hopefully you get a little impression.
If you're curious about more, please follow my next video clip which is gonna tell you about what is I Ching compass. Thank you for watching.