Seeking the Spirit of the Book of Change: 8 Days to Mastering a Shamanic Yijing (I Ching) Prediction System by Master Zhongxian Wu is a wonderful book with an overly ambitious title. I don’t believe for a moment that Master Wu believes anyone can master the Yijing in merely eight days nor does the book say anything of the sort.
Instead, Wu writes about the Yijing, devoting each chapter to a different hexagram, detailing the many nuances of interpretation, drawing in history, personal experience, and offering examples.
Wu also manages to elevate this book into something much more than a simple treatise full of information. Each chapter begins with a sort of meditative introduction, describing a tea house, the view from the different sides of the eight sided structure, the tea that Master Wu is brewing to be sipped while discussing the deeper relevance behind each hexagram. Overflowing with illustrations, the images perfectly compliment the text. Calligraphic representations on one page and a photograph on the next draw the reader further into the informal tone the author is trying to create.
Each chapter is dense with information but never overwhelming. This book is clearly designed to be a resource to which the Yijing student would turn again and again, drawing increasingly on new levels of interpretation. As I read, I found myself looking forward to each chapter, even trying to abide by the affectation of the author’s suggestion about what time of day the meeting for the next lesson should occur.
There is something ultimately charming about the book and I greatly enjoyed the allusions to history and legend, the stories of emperors and monks that are used to illustrate the meaning much as the actual illustrations do. Where it misses somewhat for me is in the qigong practice which would work much better as a dvd than it does as a text. I tried to follow along with the practice and gave up after a few days, spending more time reading the text rather than getting into the sort of meditative experience that qigong is supposed to stir within.
Like everything else in the book, eight days is simply not enough to master the movements and flow from one day’s teachings to the next. This is not enough, however, to dampen my appreciation to the point of disappointment. Rather, I hope that Master Wu and the publisher will consider creating a dvd resource to be used with the text for those readers who are so inclined.
Each chapter is dense with information but never overwhelming. This book is clearly designed to be a resource to which the Yijing student would turn again and again, drawing increasingly on new levels of interpretation. As I read, I found myself looking forward to each chapter, even trying to abide by the affectation of the author’s suggestion about what time of day the meeting for the next lesson should occur.
There is something ultimately charming about the book and I greatly enjoyed the allusions to history and legend, the stories of emperors and monks that are used to illustrate the meaning much as the actual illustrations do. Where it misses somewhat for me is in the qigong practice which would work much better as a dvd than it does as a text. I tried to follow along with the practice and gave up after a few days, spending more time reading the text rather than getting into the sort of meditative experience that qigong is supposed to stir within.
Like everything else in the book, eight days is simply not enough to master the movements and flow from one day’s teachings to the next. This is not enough, however, to dampen my appreciation to the point of disappointment. Rather, I hope that Master Wu and the publisher will consider creating a dvd resource to be used with the text for those readers who are so inclined.
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