Wu Wei - I Ching Wisdom Volume One: Guidance from the Book of Answers

Preface

I f you knew the laws of the Universe, knew what brought you good fortune and what misfortune, which actions led to success and which to failure, would that knowledge not be better than gold and diamonds? Would it not allow you to achieve any goal? Have anything you desired?

The ancient sages discovered the laws and set them forth so that we could be guided. They called the path that led to good fortune the way of the superior person. They called the path that led to misfortune the way of the inferior person. They spoke in terms of good and evil.

In modem times we rarely hear these terms used, but for this present work they have been preserved because they impart a sense of who those great sages were, and they add a flavor to the sayings that were contained in their original form.

AUTHORS APOLOGY TO
WOMEN READERS

I sincerely apologize for using he, his, him when speaking generally. Using he/she throughout becomes cumbersome for the reader and disturbs the flow of thought. I chose to use the masculine form because it is what we are accustomed to seeing in print and because the goal is to make the reading easy.

AUTHORS APOLOGY TO
ALL READERS

I humbly apologize to you for my presumption that I know something that you do not and for my egotistical assumption that I know anything at all. All information comes from one source, the Universe, and since we are all part of it, its information belongs to us all and is available to each of us. On the small chance that I have spent more time seeking out information about the I Ching and ways to use it than you have, and therefore may have received information which you may not have yet received, and because I want you to have as much information as possible about the I Ching, I risk this great presumption. Please overlook and forgive my immodesty. That I undertake this work at all is only because of my love for the great wisdom and my sincere desire to impart it to you.

Your humble and insignificant servant,

AUTHORS NOTE

I n this book, I Ching Wisdom, Volume I, I have found it useful to include some of the information that I have used in other books about the I Ching. For those of you who have read those books, I offer my sincere apologies for the redundancy.

In this book, the word Universe is capitalized to acknowledge its greatness, its uniqueness, its complete originality, but other words used to refer to the Universe, such as it, or are not capitalized because that practice seems to detract from the flow of thought.

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge and thank my son, Pax, for the contribution he made to this newly revised edition. Paxs understanding of the universal principles that lie beneath the inner workings of the I Ching, and his personal philosophy, which is so reminiscent of the writing of Lao Tzu and Confucius, were powerfully infused into this present work. He and I spent many hours trying to find exactly the right words and phrases that would convey the meaning of the ancient texts so you could be correctly guided in your search for wisdom and good fortune. We both rely on the use of the I Ching in making important decisions, and the guidance we write for you is the guidance upon which we ourselves rely.

I also want to thank Roger Gefvert for his enlightened cover design, which set the standard for the beauty of the book and reflects so well the look and feel of the timeless quality of the I Ching itself.

And I want to thank Robert Tinnon for his inspired interior design and layout, which correspond so well to the cover and to the clarity and spirituality of the I Ching.

A Brief History of the I Ching

T housands of years ago, before the dawn of written history, legend has it that there lived a great Chinese sage known as Fu Hsi. He is reputed to be the man who first united all of China and became its first emperor. He is also credited with leading the Chinese people from the age of hunting and fishing into the age of agriculture. As you can imagine, that was a long, long time agosix thousand years at the earliest, and, more likely, ten thousand.