Let me elaborate on how to understand this concept of “image.” Not only in the I Ching, but also in Chapter 21 of Laozi’s Tao Te Ching—look it up if you have your phones with you. Your phone is a library and archive held in the palm of your hand. What does Chapter 21 say?
“The appearance of great virtue follows the Tao alone. The Tao, as a thing, seems indistinct, seems unclear. So unclear! So indistinct! Yet within it lies form. So indistinct! So unclear! Yet within it lies substance. Profound and dark! Within it lies essence. This essence is utterly real—within it lies truth.”
I’m reciting this not to boast about my memory, but to help us grasp the nature of “image.” The “image” (xiàng) is chaotic, indistinct—”seeming unclear, seeming indistinct.” In that haze, the mirage emerges: an illusion born of this ambiguity. “Within the haze lies form; within the blur lies substance.” Substance (wù) is the heart/mind. When we speak of “substance,” we don’t say “observe the image to grasp the image”—instead, we “observe the concrete to capture the abstract.” Isn’t this how painting works? We observe the tangible to capture the essence.
Hence, “writing cannot exhaust words, words cannot exhaust meaning”—so the sages created symbols (xiàng) to convey meaning fully. Why use symbols to express meaning? This is profoundly insightful. Today, when we say, “Oh, it looks so real!”—such praise hasn’t truly captured art’s essence. Descriptions like “exquisitely lifelike” or “vivid as life itself” aren’t wrong, but when we apply them to mere technical likeness, we’ve missed the point entirely.
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