Articles, sources and criticism
Explore historical sources, translations, research articles and critical discussions of the Yijing.
Subjects assigned by the editor take priority. Unclassified articles are provisionally matched by title and excerpt; the complete archive remains available above.
15 March 2025
Is using the Yijing difficult? Are the answers that it gives you complex? The answer to both questions is a sound ‘no’. And yet discussion boards are flooded with Yi castings…
Read article →20 August 2021
A video about the distorted view that exists of the history of the two most important trigram circles.
Read article →19 January 2021
Examining a cryptic sentence from the Shuogua 說卦.
Read article →23 November 2020
The character hui 悔 appears many times in the Zhouyi, the core text of the Book of Changes, and is often translated as ‘regret’. A student asked me if I could…
Read article →2 November 2020
Lotti replied to my article, and added a message from Hilary as well. I’ll address both Lotti’s reply and Hilary’s message in this video. I choose to reply by video because…
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25 October 2020
In my The Mystery of the Text online course I talk about the etymology of Chinese characters, and how the majority of the Chinese characters are composed: there is a meaning component,…
Read article →10 July 2020
In this video we are going to look at the phrase she da chuan 涉大川, ‘cross the great river’ and the early usage of the keywords from this phrase.
Read article →9 March 2020
素履往无咎 Su 素: in early texts almost exclusively used as a descriptive adjective: ‘unadorned, plain, not processed or modified’. This also means that what follows it is a noun, an object.…
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5 August 2019
In 2005 Dong Shan 董珊 from the University of Beijing came across a dagger-axe that was held in a private collection. The axe, dated around 900-800 BC, contains an inscription:…
Read article →30 June 2019
履虎尾不咥人亨 Lü 履: to step on (something); to walk; to proceed. The Mawangdui text has li 禮, ‘rules of conduct’, which reminds of the Xugua 序卦 line about H10: 物畜然後有禮故受之以履: “When…
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