Then they would go up into the mountains to the local 'dragon pool', a tucked-away tarn shrouded in mist, and they would chuck into the water all manner of things the dragon was thought to loathe and detest, such as lumps of iron, which stung its eyes, and, in some reports, 'the shoes of an old woman'. After the crops have been sown, and coming spring days are perhaps more parched than one would like, villagers waited until darkish clouds naturally appeared on the horizon, which they took as a sign. It is actually through a ritualised act of sympathetic magic. This story illustrates how the Chinese have traditionally 'aroused the dragon' from its winter hibernation. They fortunately took the precaution of tying the bone onto a length of rope but all the same they could not haul it up fast enough to prevent the government buildings from being severely damaged in the instantaneous typhoon they whipped up on an otherwise sunny day. There is a wonderful story from the Song Dynasty of early experimenters hoping to conjure up a storm by rowing out to the middle of a lake and dropping in a tiger bone to anger the dragon. One of the cloud-followed dragons from The Nine Dragons handscroll, painted by the artist Chen Rong in 1244 CE (located in the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, USA). By the principle of 'like attracts like', or harmonic resonance as it is termed in Chinese texts, 'Clouds follow the dragon, winds follow the tiger'. The dragon in China is a benevolent creature, a water dragon, flying without wings. When he leaves his mountain pool he heads straight for the clouds, is immediately engulfed, and then the dark brooding cloud effectively becomes the cloak of the dragon. The function of the dragon from the earliest times was to bring rain for the spring crops. The dragon is still in hibernation, and he is also not yet needed. In the first line of hexagram 1 it means a person biding their time, because the conditions are not yet right for emergence. This implies that they can make use of their obscurity to be usefully underestimated, in martial-arts terms. The phrase 'hidden dragon' later came to mean an Emperor-in-waiting, but in general it is someone of great ability who hasn't yet been recognised. The hidden dragon there does in fact originally come from the first line of hexagram 1. This immediately calls up a connection to the tiger in the title of the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The Chinese of this line actually reads 'Submerged dragon', though it is most often translated as a 'Hidden dragon'. The bottom line shows the dragon in winter, hibernating at the bottom of its pool in the mountains. Hexagram 1 consists of six solid yang lines, it is the most yang hexagram. In other words, when the hexagram deals with a single piece of concrete imagery, the second line shows a more developed stage of the change depicted than the bottom line, and as we go upwards through the lines we see a progression of the change, such that the fifth line is often the best possible manifestation of the change, while the top line frequently overbalances and becomes the point of reversion of the change. The fact that the hexagram is constructed upwards contains within it an idea that many students of the oracle don't immediately tend to notice, that change moves upwards in the hexagram line texts too. These two particular pathways I refer to as 'the ascent of the dragon lines' and 'changing like a tiger', concentrating in the former case on hexagram 1, 'The Creative', and, in the latter, on hexagram 49, 'Revolution'.Įach hexagram consists of six lines that are written upwards from the bottom line to the top in response to the tossing of three coins six times or more complex manipulations with yarrow stalks. The dragon and the tiger feature strongly in the I Ching, but they signify very different approaches to change. The dragon and the tiger have always been traditional enemies. Probably it is the wiliness and stealth of the tiger that made it yin, or the fact that the White Tiger constellation in the west is opposite the Azure Dragon constellation in the east. In fact the belief that the tiger is extremely yin is responsible for it being hunted almost to the point of extinction, because in China yin blood diseases were thought to be treatable by powdered tiger bone. The dragon is a powerfully yang creature, while the tiger, despite connotations of strength associated with yang, is regarded as a very yin creature. The Power of the Dragon’s Yang and the Tiger’s Yin The dragon and the tiger in the Book of Changes
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