I Ching
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- James Legge
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Anonymous or composite
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 762 passages
Cite this work
- APAI Ching. (n.d.). The I Ching (Book of Changes) [I Ching] (James Legge, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/i-ching/the-i-ching-book-of-changes
- MLAI Ching. The I Ching (Book of Changes) [I Ching]. Translated by James Legge. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/i-ching/the-i-ching-book-of-changes.
- ChicagoI Ching. The I Ching (Book of Changes) [I Ching]. Translated by James Legge. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/i-ching/the-i-ching-book-of-changes.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
tantum, cum liber iste, ut integrum legenti textum facile patebit, ad sortilegii usum deductus fuerit, per ipsum jam summum homo obtinebit vitae beneficium, arcanam cum spiritibus communicationem secretamque futurorum eventuum cognitionem; theurgus igitur visus est iste liber, totus lux, totus spiritus, hominisque vitae accommodatissimus ; indeque laudes a Confucio ei tributas, prorsus exaggeratas, in hujus libri praesertim appendice videre erit, si vere tamen, ut communis fert opinio, ipse sit hujus appendicis auctor.’ There has been a report for two or three years of a new translation of the Yi, or at least of a part of it, as being in preparation by M. Terrien de Lacouperie, and Professor R. K. Douglas of the British Museum and King’s College, London. I have alluded on pages 8, 9 of the Introduction to some inaccurate statements about native commentaries on the Yi and translations of it by foreigners, made in connexion with this contemplated version. But I did not know PREFACE. XIX