Over the past month, I surpassed my expectations with the I Ching by memorizing the non-intuitive “King Wen” sequence of 64 hexagrams, as well as their English and Chinese names.
The two critical tools for this exercise were my flashcards on Quizlet and on Pleco. (Quizlet is a free website and app. Pleco is a free Chinese dictionary app, but I paid extra for its flashcard functionality years ago.)
It was unfortunate that Pleco’s flashcards could not render the hexagram unicode characters properly, however this limitation turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Quizlet was great for learning the hexagrams. Switching over to Pleco without the benefit of seeing the hexagram image on the screen almost felt like starting over, but the extra mental effort locked in my memorization. Soon after moving to Pleco, I started visualizing the hexagram sequence in my head, which I suspect was a nice side effect of this difficult limitation. And of course, Pleco was indispensable for learning the Chinese characters for the titles.
The path I took in learning the sequence was unorthodox. I started by pulling a few hexagrams that had been thrown in recent sessions. I realized that a purely random approach was unworkable so I pulled out all the hexagrams with Thunder below and with Lake above. (I chose these two trigrams because they were most analogous to my old rabbits Badger and Peppercorn.) Then I started to get systematic. The obvious first choice should have been simple doubled up trigrams, so I added them into the mix.
At that point, I had about thirty hexagrams memorized. I completed the remainder by filling in the gaps in the sequence, starting from the beginning. It was slow going for a bit, but the memorization quickly coalesced at the end. For this last step, it was nice to have previously memorized milestones scattered along the entire sequence. It created a path where the mind could while rest when reciting the sequence in order.
After memorizing the sequence with English titles and Chinese pronunciations, I decided to learn the written Chinese characters. This last step only took a week. I don’t know much written Chinese, but I suspect my multitude of attempts over the years really greased the skids for the process.
All in all, it worked. Since the process went faster than expected, I don’t know if there is much value in trying to optimize the process. Just do it.
This was a good exercise in memorization with the help of modern digital tools. These flashcard programs didn’t make the effort easy, but they certainly made the process less difficult. Whenever I had a short break (or spent an hour in line to get a vaccine shot) I’d pull out the phone and work out my brain.
The benefits from this effort were immediately noticeable, even before I had memorized much of sequence. I use the slow yarrow stalk method for building the hexagrams, so I have plenty of time to mull the possible results during the process. Knowing the sequence by heart has enriched the divination process since I delight in pondering the forking paths before the final answer reveals itself.
Outside of the benefits to the I Ching practice, it was good to just go through a pure exercise of raw brute force memorization. The value of memorization diminished considerably in this age of the ubiquitous internet. However, this skill should not be completely discarded, and there is value in practicing focused concentration. The sense of accomplishment felt great, and since the process didn’t take nearly as long as I feared, I will be more willing to deploy this mental tool as the need arises. After all, I was willing to embark on this exercise partly because of the distant memory of learning koine Greek when I was a devout Christian, a quarter century years ago.
And heck, even if I move onto another obsession in a few months, I now have an interesting sequence for counting sheep, to help me fall back asleep if I wake up too early in the morning.