‘Perhaps it is about imagining new possibilities.’ ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it is not about predicting the future.’ I was happily pouring scorn on these practices, protesting at their unreason, when my friend interrupted me. At some point during our conversation, we found ourselves talking about the taste for astrology, tarot cards and other forms of prognostication. I wanted something new and substantial to work on, but I had no clear sense of direction. My first novel was due out in the following year. It was 2006, and I was casting around for a fresh writing project. My interest in the I Ching had begun several years before, neither as a fascination with Chinese culture, nor as a mystical concern with divinatory practices, but instead in the course of a rambling and idle conversation with a friend. I had heard these arguments many times, and they made sense to me and yet there was something about the I Ching that continued to fascinate me, something that - the more I studied it - could not allow me to dismiss this book so lightly. I knew the arguments against the I Ching: divination doesn’t work, it belongs to the realm of prescientific superstition, it is a primitive attempt to tame the uncertainty of the future. In the West, the I Ching is mainly known as a divination manual, found on shelves alongside books about tarot cards, crystal healing, reiki, and contacting your angels, a part of the wild carnival of spurious notions that is New Age spirituality, that great tide of unreason against which the prophets of scientific rationality protest in vain. For the previous few years, I had been increasingly preoccupied by that strangest of books, the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching. I was in China in pursuit of an obsession that, among certain of my more sober-minded and rational friends, was the cause of some alarm. I hesitated about what to say, then I decided I might as well tell him. I was in China for only a couple of months. If they have lived in China for more than a year, they end up writing nothing. When they have been there for several months more, they write an article. When foreigners come to China for a month or two, they go home and write a book. I had heard the old joke several times now. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked me in Chinese. The priest, however, was in a chatty mood. #I CHING TRIGRAMS EXPLAINED HOW TO#Here, on the other hand, I was on my own, and felt somehow out of place, unsure how to conduct myself. I had visited other temples elsewhere in China, in larger cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan but there I had blended in among the hopeful devotees and noisy tourists. I peered into the dark, where deities and mythological beasts clamoured for attention on the painted walls. A handwritten sign in front of him announced that temple entrance was two yuan (20p). To one side of the door was a table, and behind the table sat a small, neat man in the robes of a Daoist priest. Inside it was cool, the air fragrant with incense. The only people I passed on my way up the mountainside steps were two pious old ladies, pausing to catch their breath as they struggled through the afternoon heat. It was a hot day, and the climb had been steep. I stepped into the dark of the ramshackle hillside temple.
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