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Η παρακάτω κριτική παρουσίαση του βιβλίου μου "THE TRUE EYE OF THE TIGER" αναρτήθηκε στο web site "Clarity", στις 13 Φεβρουαρίου του 2008.

Some hexagrams - like 29 - seem to derive much of their meaning from their component trigrams. Some - like 27 - seem to derive it in the first place from the picture made by the lines themselves. Hexagram 27 looks like jaws; Hexagram 21 looks as though an obstacle’s been placed between the teeth for Biting Through. Brad Hatcher’s pointed out that hexagrams with a large yin ’space’ contained within yang lines (27, 41, 42) mention the carapace of a turtle.

So if the authors of the Daxiang could go on to find deep significance in the trigrams of all 64 hexagrams, mightn’t it be possible to do the same with the line-pictures, and describe every hexagram as a picture?

Thomas Hood (Pocossin here at the I Ching Community) would certainly say so. His Aardvark I Ching sees a fox in hexagram 63, a baby in Hexagram 35 and a cap in Hexagram 40 - as well as more ‘obvious’ pictures like 27’s Jaws or 50’s Vessel. You don’t have to consider the text ‘unnecessary and uninformative’, as he does, to find some new interpretive ideas here.

Now Sakis Totlis has, independently, produced a more detailed work, available from Amazon as The True Eye of The Tiger , and also generously available on this page and as a pdf download. He suggests one hexagram can represent many visual ideas: hexagram 27 can be a road uphill and the tiger’s eye as well as the eponymous Jaws. He doesn’t find a baby at Hexagram 35, but he does find the sun over the earth (for him, the trigrams are pictorial as well), and a horse, and a rodent tunnelling.

Because Sakis suggests constant meanings for particular elements (like an upturned carriage for the bigram with a broken line above a solid one), it seems that his system might be one you could pick up and use, whether or not you can readily see what he sees.

People have been trying to explain the text in its totality in terms of line structures (trigrams and nuclear trigrams, as well as correctness and correspondence) for a long, long time. It seems to me that this image-rich, imaginative approach might give a new lease of life to that endeavour.