Metaphors
The Book's other register: not what it says but what it pictures. Dragons and wells, ridgepoles and rain — twenty-six images, each with the chapters where it appears.
- Birds and FlightBirds and flight carry the oracle's meditations on ascent, aspiration, and their limits.
- Clouds and RainClouds and rain are the book's weather of tension and release.
- Cycles of TimeCycles of time are the oracle's arithmetic: it counts not in neutral units but in meaningful spans, each number naming a quality of duration.
- Fire and BrightnessFire clings to what it burns and has no form of its own; brightness therefore stands, throughout the Book of Changes, for a clarity that depends on something to illuminate.
- Heaven and EarthHeaven and earth are the father and mother of every image in the Book of Changes: the Creative above, the Receptive below, whose union is the origin of life and whose estrangement is the root of every barren time.
- Marriage and CourtshipMarriage and courtship is the union of the sexes as the human mirror of heaven and earth.
- Organic GrowthOrganic growth is the sprout, the seed, and the tree: growth as the Book of Changes' model of all right development.
- Punishment and JusticePunishment and justice names the penal imagery of the Book of Changes: stocks and cangue, mutilations of nose and ears, the lawsuit and the prison.
- Sacrifice and OfferingSacrifice and offering is the Book of Changes' model of sincerity made visible: the rite in which an inner state must take an outward form, and is judged entirely by the heart behind it.
- The ArmyThe army is the Book of Changes' image of discipline, danger, and the ethics of force.
- The BodyThe body is the hexagram's own hidden anatomy: whole hexagrams read themselves from bottom to top as a human figure, toes at the first line, head at the sixth, so that the progress of a situation becomes the ascent of a sensation through the flesh.
- The DirectionsThe directions turn the compass into a moral geography: in the Book of Changes, southwest and northeast, west and east, are not places but qualities of action.
- The DragonThe dragon is the Book of Changes' image of the electrically charged, dynamic, arousing force that manifests itself in the thunderstorm: creative energy in its purest form, withdrawing into the earth in winter and rising into the sky in early summer.
- The FamilyThe family is society in embryo: the small circle in which the Book of Changes locates the origin of all social order.
- The FoxThe fox is the Book of Changes' image of wariness in transition: the animal that crosses the ice listening for cracks.
- The KingThe king is the ordering center of the human world in the Book of Changes: the point around which fiefs, laws, music, and worship arrange themselves, as the images arrange themselves around heaven.
- The LakeThe lake is the Joyous: gathered water, open surface, the youngest daughter.
- The Mare and the CowThe mare and the cow embody docility as a form of strength.
- The MountainThe mountain is stillness, limit, and rest: the place where movement comes to an end and begins.
- The TigerThe tiger is danger personified: the wild, intractable power a person must live beside without being devoured.
- The VesselThe vessel is the container as image of nourishment, character, and emptiness.
- The WagonThe wagon is the Book of Changes' vehicle of shared undertaking, and its favorite gauge of whether a venture can move.
- The WandererThe wanderer is the stranger in a strange land, the figure whose home is the road.
- ThunderThunder is the arousing shock of spring: life energy bursting up from below, terrifying and fertile at once.
- WaterWater is the most philosophically loaded image in the Book of Changes.
- Wind and WoodWind and wood are one trigram, Sun, the Gentle, and one idea: gentle, ceaseless, invisible penetration.
In the constellation
The other register: images rather than formulas. Eight of them, taken across the list.