I Ching
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- James Legge
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Anonymous or composite
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 762 passages
Cite this work
- APAI Ching. (n.d.). I Ching. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/i-ching/the-i-ching-book-of-changes
- MLAI Ching. "I Ching." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/i-ching/the-i-ching-book-of-changes.
- ChicagoI Ching. I Ching. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/i-ching/the-i-ching-book-of-changes.
What it is about
The 'Book of Changes', the oldest text in the Chinese canon: sixty-four six-line figures, each with its judgement, used at once as an oracle and as a book of wisdom.
Context and history
The oldest layer is the brief judgements, from the Western Zhou period, around the ninth century BC, and it is a divination manual. What made it one of the Five Classics is the 'Ten Wings', commentaries added centuries later and traditionally ascribed to Confucius, which read a cosmology into it: change as the alternation of yin and yang, each figure a moment in a process. So the same book is at once an oracle and a philosophy of time, and the two readings have coexisted for two thousand years. It has shaped all later Chinese thought, and Richard Wilhelm's German translation brought it to Europe with a preface by Jung.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
I wrote out a translation of the Yi King, embracing both the Text and the Appendixes, in 1854 and 1855; and have to acknowledge that when the manuscript was completed, I knew very little about the scope and method of the book. I laid the volumes containing the result of my labour aside, and hoped, believed indeed, that the light would by and by dawn and that I should one day get hold of a clue that would guide me to a knowledge of the mysterious classic. Before that day came, the translation was soaked, in 1870, for more than a month in water of the Red Sea. By dint of careful manipulation it was recovered so as to be still legible ; but it was not till 1874 that I began to be able to give to the book the prolonged attention necessary to make it reveal its secrets. Then for the first time I got hold, as I believe, of the clue, and found that my toil of twenty years before was of no service at all. What had tended more than anything else to hide the nature of the book from my earlier studies was the way in which, with the Text, ordinarily and, as I think, correctly ascribed to king Wan and his son Tan, there are interspersed, under each hexagram, the portions of the Appendixes I, II, and IV relating to it. The student at first thinks this an advantage. He believes that all the Appendixes were written by Confucius, and combine with the Text to form one harmonious work ; and he is glad to have the sentiments of ‘the three sages’ brought together. But I now perceived that the composition of the Text and of the Appendixes, allowing the Confucian authorship of the latter, was separated by’ about 700 years, and that their subject-matter was often incongruous. My first step towards a right understanding of the Yi was to study the Text by itself and as complete in itself. It was easy to X1V PREFACE. do this because the imperial edition of 1715, with all its critical apparatus, keeps the Text and the Appendixes separate.← Back to I Ching