Sixty-Four Chance Pieces

By Will Buckingham

The Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest and strangest of all books, a masterpiece of world literature, a divination manual and a magnet for the deranged and the obsessive. In Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, novelist and philosopher Will Buckingham puts the I Ching to work, using it to weave together sixty-four stories of chance

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Feb 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9789888273058

Book preview

1. CREATIVE

In part, we owe the continued existence of the I Ching to China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang. The historian Sima Qian tells of how the emperor burned all the books in the kingdom, buried hundreds of scholars alive, and built a great wall at the edges of the empire. Only three classes of books were saved from the fires: books on agriculture, medical works, and divinatory texts, amongst them the I Ching. The name of the first hexagram, qian, is often translated as ‘creative’ or ‘active’; it is contrasted with the second hexagram, kun, which can be translated ‘receptive’ or ‘passive’. According to the Commentary on the Attached Phrases, qian and kun are like the opening and closing of a door: they set the bounds between which all change takes place. In this tale, I have reimagined the story of Qin Shihuang, thinking in particular of the line-statement associated with the third line of hexagram one: ‘the nobleman acts ceaselessly until the day’s end, and in the evening is on guard against dangers: there will be no blame.’

The snow started to come down soon after sunset. The young scholar Li Si, having left the state of Chu behind, was travelling abroad, unmoored like a boat adrift in the stream. A storm from the west blew in, the snow turned to sleet, and the wind tugged at his robe so that his bones shivered. And when at last exhaustion got the better of him, Li Si saw the hut by the side of the road, little more than a few planks of wood, a roof of woven grass, a floor of trodden earth. He pushed open the door and went inside. It was cold and smelled of human shit. Li Si crouched down, made himself a fire, and with the composure of a sage unfurled his books of bound bamboo strips, and sat reading the words of Confucius, tracing the letters by the flickering light of the flames.

When he was too tired to read any more, he placed the book down, gazed into the flames and thought of home. He was so lost in nostalgic dreaming that he did not see the spark that leapt from the fire; and there is no way of knowing how much of the history of the world has hinged upon that moment when the fire popped and a pinprick of heat kindled on the fragile bamboo. It was only when he felt the hairs begin to burn on the back of his hand that Li Si was dragged away from thoughts of home by the sight of his bamboo books ablaze. But by then it was too late. In a moment, wisdom became no more than soot and ash.

Unable to sleep, for the remainder of the night Li Si remained watching the fire; and by the following grey dawn, when the mud of the road was dusted with a light covering of white, he looked upon the world with a renewed vigilance, and knew that he could not give his life to something so easily ruined.

Much later, whilst he was in the city of Xianyang, employed in the service of the state of Qin, the emperor called for him. Qin Shihuang seemed agitated as he sat upon his throne, his face pale in the flickering light. For months now, the scholars had been protesting that the emperor’s rule was nothing compared to that of the former kings Yao, Shun and Yu, that he failed to follow the Four Books and the Five Classics, that he squandered metal and labour in the construction of huge bells to sound at dawn and dusk, that he was dissolute and unfilial.

‘What,’ the emperor asked Li Si, ‘are we to do?’

And, reminded of that distant night as he travelled from the state of Chu, Li Si told him about the hillside hut, about the spark, and about how easily words written on bamboo can be destroyed. The emperor asked him the meaning of his story, and in reply Li Si proposed a solution to the emperor’s problems so perfect and elegant and terrible that it could only have been conceived by a philosopher. ‘On the fringes of the empire,’ he said, ‘we must build a wall so that we are untroubled from outside. And within this wall, we should burn the books of the scholars, so that we are untroubled from within. There will be no more talk of Yao or Shun or Yu…’

The emperor hesitated, twisting the hairs of his beard between his fingers. Outside the throne room, moonlight pooled in the courtyard. ‘Let it be done,’ he said.

Li Si smiled. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But let us spare books on agriculture, for the people need to eat. Let us spare books on medicine, because bodies fall sick and need healing. And let us spare the I Ching, because…’

‘Because?’ the emperor asked, leaning forward intently.

The philosopher sighed, and waved his hand as if casting around for a reason. ‘There is no possibility that is not reflected in the pages of the Changes,’ he said. ‘If we destroy this book, we destroy the possibility of our success.’

The emperor did not smile. ‘But if we destroy this book, we also destroy the possibility of my downfall.’

The flames from the oil lamps snapped in the breeze. The two men stood motionless for a while. Then Li Si found the courage to speak again. ‘Let us build a wall, but let there be spaces in the wall, so the empire has room to breathe and does not suffocate under its own patch of sky. Let us burn the books, but let us spare the Changes, because greatness comes not from fleeing danger, but instead from turning danger to one’s advantage.’

The emperor sighed and sat back in his throne. Nothing was ever as perfect, as absolute as he desired. There were always concessions, exceptions, special cases.

The oil lamps flickered. Li Si’s face was in shadow: the emperor could not read his expression. He dismissed the minster with a gesture.

Through all the nights that followed, the fires burned so strongly in the city of Xianyang that the birds, believing it to be day, sang from dusk until dawn. The scholars were led away to the frontiers bound in ropes of plaited leather, so they might heap piles of earth to make walls and ramparts. And the emperor sat on his throne gazing at the flickering oranges, reds and golds of the sky, a single book of bound bamboo upon his lap, a clutch of yarrow stalks in his hand.

Notes

i) For a somewhat unreliable account of the life of the first emperor, see Sima Qian’s Shiji or Records of the Historian.

ii) These simultaneous acts of creation and destruction fascinated the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges. What was the mysterious thread, Borges asked, that linked the destruction of knowledge and the creation of the wall? Did the emperor dream of how history might be begun again, the past effaced, so his own rule could be more firmly established? Or was this conflagration and burying, this building of barriers and ramparts, designed as a kind of vast and obscure metaphor?

iii) It seems to me that what Borges misses is this: it was only a partial wall and a partial conflagration. So perhaps the question is not why the first emperor burned books and built walls, but why he held back from building an absolute wall, why he did not destroy every last book, and why the I Ching was spared. In this story, I have attempted to find an answer to the question that Borges does not ask.

2. RECEPTIVE

CLUSTERING AROUND THE FIRST hexagram are connotations of sunlight, of the heavens and of activity. In contrast, the second hexagram, kun, is all about the Earth, shade, receptivity, waiting. The text of the second hexagram simmers with images: mares; hoarfrost underfoot; tied up sacks; yellow robes; dragons warring in the fields, spilling their dark blood upon the soil. And yet, if the story in the previous chapter came to me fully-formed, without any great struggle, when it came to kun, for a long time I was at an impasse. I struggled and failed, and struggled again and failed again, the images stubbornly refusing to coalesce into anything like a story. ‘First it is lost,’ the text reads, ‘and then it is attained… stillness augurs good fortune.’ It was only after several years, one frosty morning as I sat at my desk, that these images gathered together as if of their own accord and the following story emerged. Invention is not just a matter of activity; it also requires the ability to wait. The fourteenth century writer Lu Juren said that the point at which stories and poems arise is ‘the border between hard work and laziness.’ Our minds are not our own. Sometimes they need to be put out to graze, so that they find their own way. So, if you were to ask how I came by this story, I would say: I took the images from the hexagram — the hot breath of the mares in the fields, the yellowed robes, the hoarfrost underfoot — and I left the rest to the myriad transformations of things.

She had been alive a long time. At the last count, it was thirteen hundred and thirty-one years; but that was already long ago, and she had long given up counting. It was not that she had not grown old, it was only that, on the night before her one hundred and seventeenth birthday, a night that should have been the night of her death, there settled over her a kind of frost, and somehow she failed to die.

Her deathlessness was attained without any elixir of immortality, without long hours in meditation and mortification of the flesh, without any retreat to the mountains. And although a singular circumstance, it could in no way be considered an achievement. Her life had been no different from any other. It was only that, when it came to death, it was as if she had missed the boat, if it is indeed the case, as certain sages have maintained, that the journey to the other world is by boat and not by horse or by camel or — who knows? times change — by helicopter. So she went on living into her one hundred and eighteenth year, and into the year that followed, and again into the year after that.

She had been married three times, to three men. The first, a drinker, a good-for-nothing and a thief, was caught stealing a bronze drinking cup of little worth from a local dignitary. He was tried, sentenced, tied in a bag with snakes and scorpions, and thrown in the river. The second husband was better. He was so good that when he walked it was as if his feet did not make contact with the dust of the ground. She had loved him at first, but goodness makes a poor bedfellow. She was relieved when he eventually left their home, put on a saffron robe, and departed in pursuit of some monkish goal or other. Then there was the third husband. He had what they call a noble bearing. His warrior’s heart simmered in his breast like a pot of hot stew. He was there, briefly and passionately, and then he rode out to the fields where two armies clashed like dragons, and blood flowed under the impassive stars. He did not come back.

After that, she was too old for husbands. She lived quietly in her small house, set a little apart from the village on the banks of a small stream, surrounded by unploughed fields. She watched things grow in spring and wither in autumn. She felt the sun on her face in the summer and the bitter snow in winter. Years, decades, slipped away like water.

There was nothing exceptional about her, other than that death had withdrawn its attention from her. At first she waited expectantly for the time of her dying; then she railed against death for its coy refusal to attend to her; then she attempted to entice it with sweet prayers; but in the end she forgot all about it, as if it were another lover or husband, long departed. Only occasionally, in spring, when the trees put forth new shoots, did she think to herself: how strange that I am still alive.

I was the last living person to meet her. This was three, perhaps four decades ago. Now I am old, and my memory is not what it was. But back then, I was travelling in the provinces in late winter, wandering here and there, enjoying the final days of my youth. I was soon to be starting a new job, and I knew this freedom would come to an end, that I should savour it because it might never come again.

One evening, on what turned out to be the last night of winter, I came to a house by the side of a small stream. A tree bent its branches over the water. In the distant fields I could see a mare, stamping her foot. I was lost and cold. My watch had stopped. A light came from the house. These things I am telling you are not symbols pointing to hidden truths, they are simply what I saw, things I am recording as faithfully as I am able.

I knocked on the door and she answered, a frail figure with a stick and a shawl. She invited me in, gave me water, prepared a place for me to sit, and offered me food. Over dinner, I told her I had aspirations to become a writer, and when I asked if I might stay the night, she said I could, but only on the condition that I listen to her story. It would not take long, she said, for although the years were many, there was nothing much of incident to be told. When her story was done, she said, I should write it down, so that others might read it.

I agreed to do as she asked, so she opened a bottle of firewater, filled two sturdy glasses, and as we drank she told me all there was to tell. I listened until the night was well advanced, until the fire was burning low in the metal stove, until the firewater was finished. Then, in the silence that followed, I looked out of the window at the constellations burning in the sky, and saw the dragon beginning to nudge its horns over the horizon while the mare out in the fields whinnied and then fell silent.

The woman said she was tired and wished to retire for the night. I lay down by the warm stove on a mat of woven rushes, and I slept.

I found her the following morning. Her body was cold and frosted in her bed. There were no relatives to inform. We were far from police stations, hospitals and morgues. So I laid her in the ground, hard with hoarfrost, as the mare in the field stood watching, her head hanging low. Then I went on my way, spring sunshine beginning to break through the mist.

Notes

i) The notion of qian and kun as being like the opening and closing of a door comes from the Xizi Zhuan, or the Commentary on the Attached Phrases.

ii) I have a particular affection for the hexagram kun, in part because my Chinese name Bo Houde inline-image derives from the Da Xiang Zhuan or Greater Commentary on the Images. The text reads, ‘The earth is efficacious: Kun. The noble person, by means of deep virtue (houde inline-image ), sustains all things.’ The mother of my first Chinese teacher was an I Ching aficionado, and I owe this name to her. The more I reflect upon the name, the more alarming it becomes.

iii) The passage from Lu Juren appears in Poets’ Jade Splinters, edited by Wei Qingzhi, and published in The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters trans. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping (1996).

3. DIFFICULTY AT THE BEGINNING

IT WAS WITH THE Jesuit missionaries that the I Ching first appeared in the West; but when those subtle and learned thinkers peered into the obscure mirror that is the I Ching, it was the truths of the Bible that they saw. They believed that after the great flood, Noah’s son Shem travelled East to China, carrying with him the original knowledge once possessed by Adam in the Garden.

At the very beginning of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — who had a strong interest in the new knowledge that at that time was flowing from China — wrote to the Jesuit missionary Father Joachim Bouvet. In his letter, Leibniz outlined for Bouvet the system of binary logic that he was developing. In reply, Bouvet sent Leibniz an image of an ordering of the hexagrams of the I Ching devised by the eleventh century scholar Shao Yong.

When Leibniz saw Shao Yong’s scheme he was astonished, for in the series of figures laid out on the page before him, with their broken and unbroken lines, he saw an exact parallel of his binary system. And so the philosopher began to dream of a universal language of thought, a science that, perfect and perfectly rational, could account for all things through the combination and recombination of the simplest possible elements: shuffling zeroes and ones, being and nothingness.

The name of the third hexagram, zhun, is often translated as ‘difficulty at the beginning’. It is here, for the first time, that the broken and unbroken, yin and yang, lines that make up the hexagrams begin to interact, and once they do, disorder begins to spread through the system of the I Ching, like ripples through a pond, a subtle dynamic of creativity and receptivity, action and stillness. From here on in, anything might happen.

Beginnings and re-beginnings always involve something out of the ordinary, a grain of difficulty or of indeterminacy, that unforeseeable swerving of a single atom which the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius called the clinamen. To make use of the I Ching is to play at the boundaries between order and disorder. Nothing is born from order or disorder alone. For the arising of anything at all — solid bodies, stars, worlds, animals, human beings, poems, stories, in short, that mass of phenomena that the Chinese designate as wanwu, or the ten thousand things — both order and disorder are necessary. There is no life without uncertainty, without glitches and instabilities, without the bugs in the computer code, without chance elements, the unforeseeable and the unexpected.

Leibniz slept. Dreaming of a world that streamed in a perfectly ordered series of zeroes and ones; dreaming of an emperor who spared a book written only in broken and unbroken lines; dreaming of innumerable drops of water containing whole universes, inside each universe innumerable drops of water, inside each drop more universes; dreaming of a broad field where a mare whinnied and a woman waited for a long-postponed death; dreaming of men and women seated before strange machines capable of bringing all the world’s knowledge within their grasp; dreaming of a perfect language beyond words. And when he woke, he reached for his wig, the very first thing a philosopher must do on waking, brains being more inclined to thought when they are warm.

The philosopher noticed that the winter chill was gone, that the sun was touching the rooftops, that the wind was beating against the wall outside, that it was spring. He rubbed a hand over the bald skin of his head, settled his wig in place — a little lopsided for it was still early and his faculties were not yet as sharp as they might be — and he picked up his pen.

Father Bouvet’s letter lay to one side, thumbed and re-thumbed. A grid of sixty-four symbols, not unlike a chessboard, these same symbols encircling the grid like the sixty-four points of a clock belonging to a god who had eternity to measure.

It was precisely then, his wig still aslant, that he saw it, if only for a moment: a vision given to him in a single instant, a vision that trembled beneath every one of the ninety paragraphs of his treatise, endlessly reflected in that infinite regress of droplets containing worlds containing droplets containing worlds, a vision so troubling and strange, that it is quite beyond the capacity of any story to contain it. Writing, it has been said, does not fully convey speech; speech does not fully convey meaning. So how much better it would be if we could hear Leibniz himself tell of this vision, how much better still if we could succumb to the same vision ourselves. But Leibniz is long gone, and visions are hard to summon. We must work with what we have. We must relate the tale, hoping that it suffices.

First there was a roof upon which the spring dampness glinted in the sun. Then there was the sun itself, wreathed in mist so tightly that the philosopher could almost look, as Plato had once wished to look, directly into its light. On the horizon, grey against a grey sky, was a church spire around which pigeons were flying in formation. And in an instant, the world shimmered and showed itself uncloaked, composed of infinite streams of unities and flurries of nothingness. The pigeon, the church, the glint of the sun all disappeared, leaving behind something both simpler and unfathomably more complex, a deep and torrential stream of being and nothingness. And if it were possible to extract a single sequence from this unending stream, to read it like a book, the philosopher knew that it would read something like this:

01010111 01100101 01101100

01100011 01101111 01101101

01100101 00100000 01110100

01101111 00100000 01110100

01101000 01100101 00100000

01100100 01100101 01110011

01100101 01110010 01110100

00100000 01101111 01100110

00100000 01110100 01101000

01100101 00100000 01110010

01100101 01100001 01101100

For a moment it was breathtakingly clear; but such visions are impossible to sustain. Outside on the roof, a cat made its way along a high balustrade and put another pair of pigeons to flight. The pigeons took to the air, passing momentarily between the sun and the philosopher’s eye. A shadow fell upon his face. The vision faded. Leibniz straightened his wig. His thoughts turned to breakfast.

There is no telling what it was that occasioned this brief moment of vision: whether it was the swerve of an atom, far beneath the threshold of awareness, whether it was the coalescence of ten thousand minute perceptions, or whether instead it was simply tiredness and the undertow of the previous night’s good wine, grown on the sunlit southern slopes of the Rhine. But in later life, as he lay sleepless and dissatisfied in his bed, the memory of the vision brought him a kind of peace. Thus he had seen the world, he would murmur, lulling himself to sleep by the power of words. Thus, one day, all would see the world.

Notes

i) There is a good account of Leibniz’s relationship with Chinese thought — and a translation of his important text, Remarks on Chinese Rites and Religion — in the book Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Writings on China by Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (1994). There is also an overview of Leibniz’s relationship with China in David E. Mungello’s Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (1986).

ii) Although I allude several times throughout this book to the possible parallels between the models of creation in Lucretius and in I Ching thought, I am conscious that nowhere is the thought fully worked out.

iii) When it comes to the Jesuit order, the Sanskritist and scholar of myth, Wendy Doniger, tells a decent joke about a Jesuit novice who is called before his superior and reprimanded for smoking whilst he meditates. The young priest thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘I understand your reasoning perfectly… but surely you will have no objection to me meditating whilst I smoke.’

4. YOUTHFUL IGNORANCE

THE FOURTH HEXAGRAM is called meng, which can be translated as ‘youthful ignorance.’ It makes me think of how I first blundered into the thicket of difficulties that is the I Ching with a rash enthusiasm born of ignorance. The new-born calf, as they say in China, is not afraid of the tiger. Back then, I imagined that after a while — a year, perhaps two — I would come to understand the book; but as time has gone on, I have become less certain of myself and my earlier confidence has dissolved. ‘In the first place,’ the text associated with the fourth hexagram reads, ‘the divination gives a reply. Repeated divinations cause confusion.’ The I Ching has always been like this for me: a receding horizon, a proliferation of confusions. The more I seek to understand this chameleon book, the more it slips away. If I had known at the outset how elusive, how changeable, how slippery the book was going to prove itself to be, I would have never started. It is perhaps good, then, that sometimes folly can win through where wisdom would counsel holding back.

In the scholarly debates around the meanings of the core text of the I Ching, there are those who claim that meng refers not to folly, but instead to hellbine or dodder, a parasitic plant. The following story is about the relationship between youthful folly and the experience of age, but entwined throughout the text are the winding stems and tendrils of parasitic hellbine. This story also functions, in a fashion, as an inexact mirror image of the preceding story, just as when you turn the hexagram for zhun on its head, you obtain meng.

The mathematician tucked a sheaf of papers under his arm and headed into the kitchen. He had a headache. Hoping to clear his head, he took down a battered pan and put in a tablespoon of coffee, adding water from the cold tap. Lighting the stove with a match, he watched the flame flicker orange and blue. He brought the coffee to the boil, distractedly staring out of the window at the small, overgrown garden. Yes, he said to himself out loud, in that strange way that scholars have of speaking their thoughts to the unlistening universe, yes, I am getting close.

The bushes and shrubs were tangled with red-tinged hell-bine. He had not tended the garden since he had inherited the house on his parents’ death, ten years before. He preferred it that way. The neglect was not just a matter of scholarly absent-mindedness; it was also a moral stance. The mathematician had no interest in imposing a parody of order on the world. The order was already there, in the roots and stems of things, if only one could make it out, if only one did not disrupt it. He pushed open the window to let in the evening breeze, and remembered what he always remembered at that time in the evening: the moment the summer before his tenth birthday when he glimpsed the true order of things.

He was outside, a nine-year-old boy standing by the scented honeysuckle, peering at a green lacewing on the window-pane. The insect was quivering a little in the soft breeze. And there was something about the way it was just there and not elsewhere, with the light angled just so, something about how its wings were vibrating only as much as they were vibrating and no more, that caused him to perceive with momentary clarity