The art of the question
The question comes before the coins, and it came first in history too. On the Shang bones the king’s diviner did not write a question: he carved a statement to be put to the test — an ancestor is the cause of the king’s toothache — and often the same statement reversed as well. Whether those statements were questions, scholars still debate. But one thing was already clear then: the oracle answers what is brought to it, and to bring it a vague sentence is to receive a vague crack.
In the consultations the Zuozhuan records, the question is not read: the matter is read, and the outcome. The matter is always something to be done — a battle, a marriage, a newborn son, a revolt in preparation — and the only sentence that resembles a question is said by a man to an adviser, not to the oracle: there is a matter I am about to undertake, how will it go. The book, then, was consulted about an action in doubt: not about how the world is made, but about what to do in it.
The Great Treatise says that the noble one, when about to act, asks the book and makes his inquiry in words. In words: it is the first art, and it looks like nothing. A question that stays in the head is a knot of things together — fear, desire, haste — and the book answers them all together, that is, none of them. Writing it down loosens the knot: one sees what one really wants to know, and often it is less than one believed. Here the question is written before the coins, in a whole sentence, and it stays with the reading born from it: you find it again beside it.
Open. The book does not say yes and does not say no: it gives a figure, and a figure has six lines, two natures, a movement. To ask it for a yes or a no is to ask a landscape whether it is true or false. An open question — how, what, from where — leaves the figure room to say what it can say: the shape of the situation, not its verdict. And asking whether to do one thing or the other is a yes or no in disguise: the figure does not choose between two doors, it describes the room you are standing in.
Yours. The question is about your own hands, not other people’s: about how to stand in something, about what to do, about what to let go — never about what another person will do. It is not a rule of courtesy: it is that the book does not see others, it sees the situation from where you are, and a question about others asks it to look out of a window it does not have. And a question that is not yours gives an answer that can go unheard, because there is no one it falls to.
Not predictive. What will happen, whether it will succeed, when: these are the questions the book is not made to bear. It describes a present configuration — where what is leans — and not the future; whoever asks it for the future turns it into a fortune-teller, and themselves into a spectator. In the Zuozhuan already the scribe of the Marquis of Chen, consulted about a child, hedges his prediction with cautions — perhaps in another state, perhaps among the descendants — and the marquis, writes one who has studied the case, seems to understand that the book is not that sort of instrument. It was not in 672 BC; it is not today.
Concrete. About the present, not a distant future; about one thing, not about everything. The meaning of life, love in general, work in general are questions for a book of philosophy, not for six lines: the figure needs something to touch. A situation, the people inside it, the point where you stand: the closer the question is to the ground, the more ground the answer has under its feet. And no treatise is needed — a whole sentence is enough, and the page asks you for it whole.
Often the right question is not the first that comes. One arrives at the oracle with the one that hurts — will they leave me, will I make it — and the work is to re-enter the same thing from another side: what is my part in what is happening, what is the first step, what am I not seeing, what to keep and what to let go, where to put my energy now, what truly matters to me here, what the thing I fear is teaching me, with what disposition to stand in it. They are eight angles of a rose, and the question stays yours: only the point you look from changes. Here the page can propose a few ways back in — and keeping the question as it is is a choice equal to the others.
What one does not ask, then. Not a yes or a no; not the future; not others. And one does not ask in order to win an argument, nor to learn about someone what they do not tell you, nor to see whether the book guesses right: a question put to test the oracle receives a figure like any other, because the book describes a present configuration, not the one who asks — and whoever tests it has brought it no situation to describe. The question says who you are while you ask it. That is why, before writing it, it is worth pausing a moment: not to find the perfect sentence, but to feel which is the true question under the one that makes more noise.
Written, the question is done: the coins are thrown for it, and the figure that is born speaks to it. It is not changed in the face of the answer — neither the question nor its addressee. In the Zuozhuan there is a man who, faced with an unfavourable omen about the marriage he wanted, decided that the omen concerned the woman’s first husband and not him, and married: the question was his, and right; it was the answer he diverted. If the answer seems not to fit, it almost always fits the true question, the one underneath; and if the question was wrong, the book says so in its own way, describing a situation that is not the one you thought you had. Three pieces of advice, then, and they are the ones the question page keeps within reach: open, concrete, yours. The rest is done by the coins.