Lost in Translation

I am curious if the results follow the Pareto principle, e.g. will 20% of the found hexagrams account for 80% of the iterations. I guess we'll know soon enough.

I still need to transform the raw yarrow results into the hexagrams with transformations since there are multiple yarrow results that yield the same output. For example 548 yields the same as 584. I'll do this tonight.

Well, now that you mention it... Here are the results! count: 262,144 min: 8 948984988984948948 (1 occurrence) max: 83,966 548548544548548544 (1 occurrence) avg: 3,815 15 occurrences mode: 80 1,026 occurrences There were 262,144 unique results after 1 billion attempts. This number is no accident. An I-Ching reading is essentially an eighteen digit binary number. 2^18 equal 262,144, proving that my program found every permutation possible via the yarrow stalk method. The rarest reading was 948984988984948948 which translates to #10 ䷉ Lu / Treading and transforms to #1 ䷀ Ch'ien / The Creative. MINIMUM 948 232 7 --- --- 948 232 7 --- --- 984 223 7 --- --- 988 222 6 - - --- 984 223 7 --- --- 948 232 7 --- --- #10 #1 The most common was 548544544548544544 and translates to #52 ䷳ Ken / Keeping Still / Mountain transforming to #2 ䷁ K'un / The Receptive. MAXIMUM 544 333 9 --- - - 548 332 8 - - - - 548 332 8 - - - - 544 333 9 --- - - 548 332 8 - - - - 548 332 8 - - - - #52 #2 The average number of occurrences per result are 3,815. Fifteen readings satisfied that criteria. The mode was 80 and 1,026 readings landed on that number. If you want the final results I can send it to you. It's a 992 KB (compressed) text file. PM me with your email and I'll send it to you.

I completed my billion iterations and am now running a program to sort and count the results. I'll let you know the mean, median, and mode when it's ready.

Punny.

"He he, he he. You said 'hole'."

At the risk of going in circles, the above exchange encapsulates very well my experience of Taoism. We each have our natural propensities. Those aspects of Taoism that align with these propensities will naturally interest us. Those that don't, will not. So of course we're talking about personalities! Unlike Catholicism, there is no explicit and restrictive Taoist cannon. There is no single lineage. There is no authoritative Pope. Hence the debate. But I think such debate is valuable. It not only helps us understand where others are coming from but also forces us to more clearly articulate our own positions.

It's funny you mention this. I have a script running for the last 8 hours or so that is calculating the yarrow stalk results one billion times (yes, 1,000,000,000 times). I want to see what the most common yarrow stalk result is. As of 200 million iterations the most common is mountain/mountain transforming into heaven/fire. We'll see what happens in another 800 million iterations.

No, it's not plagiarism. The western scholars who traveled to the Orient, learned Chinese, and translated these ancient texts made no attempt to pass them off as their own. They were quite open in acknowledging the original source material.

This is awesome!

The whole coin thing is confusing. Since modern coins did not exist 3000+ years ago it's probably moot. I think whatever makes sense is what you should follow, otherwise you spent too much time thinking about it.

There is a similar distinction made by some scholars who wrote on the history of Hermeticism (which I already described as an 'Occidental' equivalent of Daoism) and wished to separate "lofty" philosophical Hermeticism from "superstitious" magical Hermeticism (including Alchemy and Astrology). When in fact, the former is using the symbolism of the latter all the time, and the latter is taking the former for granted as its underpinning natural philosophy. Is it correct to say that in ancient times the people who "invented" Daoism had no notion of "intellectual" or "philosophical" or "experiential" Daoism. To them it was all one and the same. It is only in the process of bringing the East to the West that western scholars broke the knowledge piece-meal and, in effect, create this mess that we now experience?

I wasn't happy with just hexagrams as the output. I wanted to capture the changing lines too so I modified the program to give me the full set of yarrow data instead of the post-processed data. The results are interesting. Here is a sample of the output when run for one million iterations. $ gcc i-ching-blaster.c -o i-ching-blaster $ # I-Ching, what do you think of Wandelaar's idea to analyze the yarrow data sets? $ ./i-ching-blaster 1000000 2>/dev/null | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > wandelaar.txt $ head -5 wandelaar.txt 1 544544544544984984 1 544544544584944988 1 544544544588944984 1 544544544944944988 1 544544544944948944 $ tail -5 wandelaar.txt 98 548548544544584548 99 544548544548584548 100 548548544548544548 101 544548544548544588 110 544548548544548544 $ The clear winner is 544548548544548544. Let's translate that to something meaningful. 544 333 9 --------- --- --- 548 332 8 --- --- --- --- 544 333 9 --------- --- --- 548 332 8 --- --- --- --- 548 332 8 --- --- --- --- 544 333 9 --------- --- --- Interesting. The "winning" hexagram is fire over thunder, or #21 Shih Ho / Biting Through. The changing lines are 1, 4, and 6. The transformed hexagram is #2 K'un / The Receptive. I'll leave it to you to find meaning in this.

In this example the first column represents the number of occurrences for the hexagram, e.g. 5344 occurrences of hexagram 111111. The numbers 111111, 211111, 221222, etc are the actual hexagrams. 1 is a solid line. 2 is a broken line. The numbers are pseudo random. I'm swapping out the random generator and testing now to see if the values change.

I wrote a program to calculate I Ching responses using the yarrow method. Question: What do you (the I Ching) think about this topic of discussion? Response: $ gcc i-ching-blaster.c -o i-ching-blaster $ ./i-ching-blaster 500000 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > results.txt $ head -5 results.txt 5344 111111 6101 211111 6123 111112 6140 111211 6142 121111 $ tail -5 results.txt 9833 221222 9852 222122 9880 122222 9969 212222 11114 222222 $ Already we can see that the results are skewed away from pure yang and towards pure yin. This might be a statistical anomaly since there is a greater likelihood of receiving yin via the yarrow. 500 thousand is a huge number of iterations. I'll reduce it to 50 thousand. $ ./i-ching-blaster 50000 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > results2.txt $ head -5 results2.txt 552 111111 587 121111 596 111211 604 111112 607 211111 $ tail -5 results2.txt 991 222221 994 212222 996 221222 1000 222212 1137 222222 $ Again the results are skewed towards pure yin. What if I reduce the results to only five thousand? $ ./i-ching-blaster 5000 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > results3.txt $ head -5 results3.txt 46 111111 56 211211 56 212111 58 111112 58 111122 $ tail -5 results3.txt 98 212212 98 222212 102 222122 112 222221 120 222222 $ We see the same pattern. I think this is the problem with these kinds of tests. As the sample size increases the variation in the output decreases. I'll put the program code in my PPD if you want to review.

I wish people would not delete or edit into oblivion their old posts. It makes it quite hard to search for information. For example, just now I was searching for "spiritual embryo" in an old topic from last November and December. I recall there being detailed information on that subject. Much to my chagrin I found the old thread, complete with people talking about and selectively quoting what I wanted to read, but the original post was reduced to little more than a single character. That is so not cool. Please, everyone - don't do that.

I have none. The closest I got to one of those was a career soldier. That was, what?, a lifetime ago. Must be my ancestry. Look at avatar. I truly hope you were an enlisted man. I picture you as a grizzled old sergeant major. Please don't tell me you were commissioned, it will force me undo preconceived notions of the officer ranks.

Then you have found the right place! There are people here (not many, but some) who will be happy to point you in a certain direction if that is what you seek. I suggest searching the Daoist sub-section. Some threads are old, so brew some fresh coffee and settle in for a long night!

If you are serious about testing this hypothesis I found several projects on Github that might help you get started. This project shows how to calculate a single line using the yarrow method via Javascript. https://github.com/Brianfit/I-Ching This project gives a full reading using Javascript. https://github.com/ablwr/i-ching This project also gives a full reading, but using Python. https://github.com/roorco/CliChing I tested each of these and they nominally work. At least they don't show obvious coding errors. I don't see anything that does what you are looking for explicitly but if you are comfortable modifying either Python or Javascript you can probably produce what you want.

That is quite natural. You will meet a great variety of practitioners here. Some go very deep into the energy arts, others go deep intellectually and emotionally. I am sure you will discover your areas of interest very quickly. By Magic do you mean energy work, such as Chi Kung, or do you mean things like scrying, I Ching, or Tarot? Again, there is a lot out there. My wife swears by Astrology. She produces the most detailed charts that I have ever seen and spends hours pouring over them. At first I was skeptic, but she knows things so I trust her now. Oh, boy. It's said that when the student is ready the teacher will come. For all you know you may have already found your teacher. They don't always advertise themselves. Take a good look at the people who are already close to you. You may have missed something that will be obvious in hindsight. Good luck!

Hi Nebulae Bred, Is "surrender" something you have recently come to realize, to see strength in? I recall a time, about thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I first saw surrender not as a weakness but as a strength. It changed my world. For days I walked around thinking "A ha! I figured it out!', but life has a way of tempering us and soon my everyday world came crashing back upon me. I very much look forward to hearing from you in the threads to come. I suspect you have much to say. -Lost in Translation

Ah! This is the crux of the matter! Is Daoism a way of being or is it a way of believing? Being vs believing: which is it? This is a very important question.

Another excellent video! I am enjoying your series greatly. You explain much clearer than Wilhelm. Thank you!

Awesome! Well said.