Two Quick Yijing Dice Methods: With Yarrow and Dice Probabilities!
I’ve always been a fan of having multiple ways to perform divination, and particularly a fan of methods that are compact, minimalist, and portable.
The Yi’s traditional coin method is portable (three coins in a pocket or wallet!), but I wanted to see if there were any other pocket methods, and particularly ones that involve dice. There’s already quite a few dice-based Yi methods out there, but mostly ones that result in only one moving line, or they have their own probabilities.
With a quick bit of ingenuity, however, you can get Yi casts with the same probabilities as coins with one die, or the same as yarrow with two. This requires an eight-sided (and extra four-sided, for yarrow probabilities) die, found in standard polyhedral dice sets sold online and at geeky stores the world over.
The probabilities of the two different methods and an explanation of the numbers can be found here.
Coin Probability
As the probabilities for the coin method all reduce down to fractions of 8, this is quite straight forward.
One option would be to simply chunk the dice results up by probability, but I want to stick with the yin-yang structure of even and odd numbers. I also want to keep the traditional association of moving lines as “old” lines, and so assign them to higher numbers on the die. Doing so also makes the method easier to remember! Thus:
- Roll a d8.
- If an even number, it’s a yin line. If an odd number, a yang line.
- If the result is 8 (the highest possible yin number), it’s a moving yin line. If the result is 7 (highest possible yang number), it’s a moving yang line.
- Repeat five more times for a complete hexagram!
Simple.
Yarrow Probability
Yarrow probabilities are more complicated, as they cannot be reduced to fractions of 8, and so we have to deal with fractions of 16.
We can solve this by doubling the range of our d8, through adding a second dice to decide whether we have a yin or a yang line — I would recommend here a d4, staying with the Daoist-Confucian cosmology of doubling from the One, but you could also flip a coin.
- Roll a d8 and d4 at once.
- If the d4 is an even number, it is a yin line, if odd, a yang line.
- For yin lines: if the d8 is showing 8, it is a moving yin line.
- For yang lines: if the d8 is showing 6, 7, or 8, it is a moving yang line
- Repeat five more times for a complete hexagram!
As simple as that. Thanks, ancient compilers of the Yijing.
Peace,
⭕️
Parinirvāṇa Day Reflections
Today is Parinirvāṇa Day, the annual remembrance of the death of Siddhārtha Gautama, the “historical Buddha”.
The story of the Buddha’s death is recorded in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and the Pāli Canon’s Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (both are readable in full, here for the Mahāyāna version and here for the Pāli version) — I won’t go into the story here, but I’ll post the final words of the Buddha in the Pāli sutta, as I previously shared on Mastodon:
Then the Blessed One addressed the monks, “Now, then, monks, I exhort you: All fabrications are subject to ending & decay. Reach consummation through heedfulness.” That was the Tathāgata’s last statement.
Thinking about “ending & decay” reminded me of Chris Lizama’s recent post about a zen kōan, where a fox says that they used to be a monk, but fell into five hundred lifetimes of being reborn as a fox after saying that awakened people do not experience cause and effect. The fox asks the monk Baizhang for a “turning word” to take him out of this cycle, to which Baizhang says: “Don’t ignore cause and effect.”
Parinirvāṇa teaches us that even the Buddha — one who is, for lack of a better phrase, “at one” with cause and effect — is still subject to it. The body of the Buddha was born, lived, got old, and died. The materiality of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, culminating in the end of a body’s functioning, is a reminder that the process of passing away is something that will happen to us too, even if we were to be literally the Buddha.
However, passing away is something that we can come to perceive in an entirely new way. It’s the “parinirvāṇa” sūtra, not the “death of the Buddha” sūtra. It is the story of someone not being reborn, rather than the story of someone dying.
I have no way of knowing what it was that Siddhārtha Gautama, the noble one of the Śākya clan, experienced as those body functionings changed so radically that he stopped communicating with the assembled monks. But part of following the Dharma is understanding that the parinirvāṇa event was somehow different from a usual passing away. It was the visible, sensory total representation of something that happened years prior with the Buddha’s awakening, and a moment that capped the time-and-space bound aspects of the Buddha’s teaching. To understand what the parinirvāṇa was would be to deeply understand the Dharma itself.
Entering the stream does not give us immortality, but instead such an intimate and deep understanding of mortality, that death becomes something else entirely.
南無阿弥陀仏
namu amida butsu
Peace,
⭕
A Half-Remembered Zen Poem and a Definitely Apocryphal (Also Half-Remembered) Anecdote of Hōnen
There are two gems I carry around, both of which I have misremembered, and both of which I have lost the original source for — let me know if you know of either of these (or things that sound similar).
First, is a Zen (Chan?) poem I read on a very Web 1.0 website (it had frames!), with two lines something like:
Sit down
and take the last 1,000 years off your shoulders
(I’m not a poet.)
Secondly, is an anecdote of Hōnen that is almost certainly apocryphal, and probably quite modern. I think I heard it on a YouTube dharma talk from a Shin Buddhist priest, but I haven’t been able to find it since.
The anecdote is something like:
A disciple approaches Hōnen and asks,
“Is the Pure Land real or a state of mind?”
Hōnen turns and replies,
“Let’s go there and find out.”
Peace,
⭕
Every Year’s Resolution: Just Exist
I made a choice at a time in the recent past (I can’t quite remember when) to “just exist”, as an existential goal.
This is neat because I can’t fail—I exist by default. If I cease to exist that probably means I have achieved some kind of prajñā insight into no-self, which is a win-state anyway.
On a deeper level, the Pure Land Buddhist (Shinran’s, especially) point that there is nothing “you” “can” “do” to achieve nirvāṇa holds that the goal of any kind of religio-spiritual practice is simply to exist, while the machinations of compassion and wisdom work themselves out in the background.
Awareness of this can be kickstarted by manual, intentional practice, but it only settles once awareness starts to run itself (this is one of the places where Shin and Zen start converge).
This ties into another choice of mine to not “believe” anything systematically. I believe in things — compassion, love, peace, the usual Dharma ethical wheel — so to speak, but I don’t feed seeds of belief about things.
I am not concerned about having the “correct” understanding of the cosmos, the nature of the Way(s), of God(s), of Buddha(s), whatever it might be. I can just stand watching it all, and go “yep.”
🐘 As I posted on Mastodon: “feeling like you have to be correct in speech is a heavy burden — a lot easier to replace with being kind in speech”
Peace,
⭕
Pay It Forward
I love one ethical implication of no-self and rebirth: the next life dealing with your karma isn’t “you”, so you can’t brush off actions with ‘well, I can deal with that later,’ because you’re (sort of) passing that sweeping up to someone else.
(This also applies to karma within a lifetime too.)
Saying nembutsu is buying a ticket to the Pure Land then giving it to the person behind you in the queue.
Peace,
⭕