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.
1 December 2008
The fifth line of hexagram 2 has the sentence 黃裳元吉 Most often this is translated as something like ‘yellow lower garment/skirt. Greatly auspicious’. The Mawangdui manuscript made me ponder about another…
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5 October 2008
The first three characters of line 2 of hexagram 2, 直方大, are most often translated as ‘straight, square, great’ (Wilhelm, Wu Jing-Nuan, Huang, etc.). It is a sentence which has always…
Read article →27 February 2006
In every Yi book that teaches you how to consult the oracle you read the same thing: you must ask a question, and the Yi answers that question. It is necessary…
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28 September 2005
(If you see tiny squares where Chinese characters should be you are probably using Internet Explorer. Switch to Firefox, it does a much better job.) Most Yijing translations translate sheng 升,…
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10 August 2005
(Click pictures to enlarge) At first glance the houtian bagua 後天八卦trigram circle seems devoid of any symmetry. It seems as if the trigrams follow each other in a random order, and…
Read article → 18 July 2005
(If you see tiny squares where Chinese characters should be you are probably using Internet Explorer. Switch to Firefox, it does a much better job.) Through several channels the character of…
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19 June 2005
The character dui 兌 from hexagram 58 is an old character with many meanings. One of those meanings is ‘happiness’ or something similar, and this is how it is most often…
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26 May 2005
Books can make me happy, but the book I received today thrills me with excitement. I finally received a copy of the Chujian Zhouyi, aka the Shanghai Museum manuscript of the…
Read article → 14 May 2005
There are a lot of things you have to keep in mind when you investigate the character qian 乾 from hexagram 1. First, there is the problem of finding the right…
Read article → 16 April 2005
The Chinese character of hexagram 20, guān 觀, is most of the time translated as ‘contemplation’, ‘observing’ or something similar. There is nothing wrong with that, and even though 觀 has…
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6 April 2005
In the Yi the character you 攸 often occurs, 32 times to be exact (2-0, 3-0, 4-3, 14-2, 19-3, 22-0, 23-0, 24-0, 25-0, 25-2, 25-6, 26-3, 27-3, 28-0, 32-0, 32-1, 33-1,…
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12 December 2004
Here in the West we are not familiar with the work of Wu Enpu 烏恩溥 , but in China’s world of Yixue he is a well known name. His speciality is…
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