I Ching Oracle Nederlands

I Ching Oracle Guide Every translation makes a different I Ching

Every translation makes a different I Ching

Choosing an I Ching translation sounds like a hunt for the right English of a single Chinese book. The book is not single. Since the silk manuscript from Mawangdui was recovered in 1973, several early versions have been known, and they differ from one another. Legge and Wilhelm never saw that find. Shaughnessy and Pearson work with it. A translation chooses a layer of the text, a commentarial line, and often a side in the argument over whether this is first of all an old divination book or a philosophical book of wisdom.

Richard Rutt, Margaret Pearson and Geoffrey Redmond read the text as early divinatory material. The wisdom-book reading became dominant through the Ten Wings and through Richard Wilhelm. Translators and users have not settled that argument; the edition a reader takes often tracks the side already chosen. That dispute is treated at more length elsewhere on this site. Here the subject is what each translation makes of the book.

Legge and Wilhelm: two schools, one book

James Legge (理雅各, 1815-1897) lived nearly thirty years in Hong Kong, as head of Ying Wa College and minister of Union Church, before giving himself wholly to translation. In 1876 he became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford; he held the chair until his death in 1897. His English Yi King appeared in 1882 as volume 16 of Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East, a series of fifty volumes (1879-1891). The edition contains the core text, the Ten Wings, and extensive philological notes.

According to a Chinese comparative study, Legge's method is philological and explanatory: close transfer of meaning, little attention to the sound and literary beauty of the original. A common characterisation, for instance at sacred-texts.com, describes the translation as valued mainly by readers who want a philologically precise, scholarly source, and as dated in diction for an ordinary reader now.

Richard Wilhelm's German I Ging appeared in 1924, after years as a missionary in Qingdao. Cary F. Baynes, a close collaborator of C.G. Jung in Zurich from 1921, began turning that German text into English in 1929. The English book appeared in 1950 from Pantheon Books and the Bollingen Foundation, with a foreword by Jung. Wilhelm did not translate into English. Readers of the English classic therefore read a translation of a translation.

According to Online Clarity, Wilhelm/Baynes has become the best-selling and most influential English I Ching, in part because of that foreword, and is still treated as a standard by many users. Western user forums praise it for accessibility and influence. Chinese translation scholars are more critical: in their account the text is coloured by Wilhelm's Christian-humanist and Jungian frame, and diverges from how Chinese scholars read the book.

What Chinese translation studies see

The comparative study 理雅各和卫礼贤英译《易》学比较研究 sets Legge and Wilhelm explicitly against each other. According to a summary of that study, Jung found Wilhelm's German much more accurate than Legge's English, and helped get Wilhelm's text into English through Baynes for that reason. The detail is known only from a search summary, not from the full source text, and should be read with that reserve. What stands firmly is the pairing itself: two Western schools, treated by Chinese translation studies as a pair.

Set this beside the Western reputation of Wilhelm/Baynes as the standard work, and what stands out is that the standard is a fact of Western reception, not a Chinese verdict. Our reading: the best-known English I Ching is well known because Jung and the Bollingen Foundation carried it across the Atlantic, not because Chinese commentarial traditions accept it as a faithful rendering.

Chinese surveys also name figures that ordinary Western lists rarely include. The platform 中华思想文化术语传播网 (Zhonghua sixiang wenhua shuyu chuanbo wang) mentions, beside Legge and Wilhelm, the American physicist 黄克逊 (Kerson Huang), who published his own Yijing translation in 1984.

傅惠生 (Fu Huisheng), a professor at East China Normal University, published an English Zhouyi in 2008. A Chinese article in translation studies analyses that edition as the result of two-stage cultural filtering: first from classical Chinese into modern Chinese, then into English, with extra historical explanation added for Western readers. The translation appeared in the state-supported bilingual series 大中华文库 (Library of Chinese Classics). According to the article, that patronage gave the book extra authority and strict editorial control; the tone of the source is mildly promotional on this point.

It follows, we think, that a Chinese-made English Yijing is a filtered object too. The live difference is the intermediate layer. In Wilhelm/Baynes that layer is German, Christian-humanist and Jungian. In Fu Huisheng it is modern Chinese, historically explanatory, and editorially supervised by a state series.

汪榕培 (Wang Rongpei, 1942-2017), for years president of Dalian University of Foreign Languages, left according to an obituary of the 中国翻译协会 (Zhongguo Fanyi Xiehui) an English Yijing/易经 among a large body of work that also includes the Laozi, the Shijing and the Zhuangzi. Year, publisher and series of that Yijing translation are not named in the obituary.

After 1990: the text splits into layers

John Blofeld (1913-1987) published I Ching: The Book of Change with Routledge in 1968. He lived for long stretches in Hong Kong and China between 1932 and 1939, including Tianjin, Peking and South China, and received chan training from disciples of Hsu Yun. The subtitle names detailed instructions for its practical use in divination. In ordinary reader descriptions his English is more accessible than Legge's or Wilhelm/Baynes's, and the edition is meant for practical consultation without a scholarly apparatus.

As we read it, Wilhelm/Baynes then remains the default English text for a long time. Between 1994 and 1997 four major editions appear, each presenting a different book.

Rudolf Ritsema and Stephen Karcher published I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change with Element Books in 1994, according to the Eranos Foundation the first complete translation with a concordance. A provisional version had already appeared in 1992 as The Eranos Yi Ching or Chou Yi. According to the same foundation the work builds on fifty years of I Ching study by Ritsema in the Eranos circle, where Jung too was active. Reviewers, cited via Online Clarity, call the associative, psychological-symbolic method, with a vocabulary of its own for each hexagram character, uniquely liberating, and at the same time far from a literal, philological translation.

In December 1994 Columbia University Press issued Richard John Lynn's The Classic of Changes, 602 pages: the first English translation to include in full the commentary of Wang Bi (226-249). Wang Bi's reading of the text as moral-political wisdom dominated Chinese interpretation for some seven centuries. Lynn chose pinyin rather than Wade-Giles. Online Clarity recommends the edition to advanced readers interested in the traditional Chinese history of interpretation, not to anyone wanting a practical oracle in a hurry.

Edward L. Shaughnessy (夏含夷) published I Ching: The Classic of Changes with Ballantine in 1996, the first English translation of the silk Yijing recovered at Mawangdui in 1973 and buried in 168 BCE. That text has a different hexagram order, contains unknown commentaries, and often diverges from the received text at the level of words. A Chinese article on Shaughnessy's preface confirms that Owen Lock of Ballantine invited him during a sabbatical at the University of Chicago in 1993-1994, shortly after the silk text had at last been published. In 2014 the sinologist 裘锡圭 (Qiu Xigui) asked him, under the Chinese government project 2011 Plan, to write a book summing up forty years of Zhouyi research. The Mawangdui translation is, in characterisations such as that on biroco.com, relevant to the earliest archaeologically attested textual history, not to anyone wishing to consult the oracle.

Richard Rutt's Zhouyi appeared from Routledge; the first printing is dated 1996, the copyright 1997. The publisher presents the Zhouyi as a royal divination manual of the Zhou state, apart from later Confucian commentarial traditions. According to the publisher it is the first translation to try to make the original Chinese rhyme patterns rhyme in English. Online Clarity recommends it to readers who want the oldest layer before later philosophical readings.

Set these four books beside one another, and what stands out is that the 1990s did not replace Wilhelm with one better Wilhelm. They split the I Ching into at least four objects: a Jungian-associative oracle text, a Wang Bi treatise, a silk manuscript from a tomb of 168 BCE, and a rhyming Bronze Age document. Anyone looking after 1996 for the I Ching is looking in a field that has dropped that unity.

John Minford (闵福德, born 22 June 1946 in Birmingham) worked some twelve years on I Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Oracle and Book of Wisdom, published in 2014 as an ebook and in 2015 as a paperback by Viking/Penguin Classics, 928 pages. He was among other things professor of Chinese at the University of Auckland and at the Australian National University; his father-in-law David Hawkes, translator of Hongloumeng/The Story of the Stone, was an important teacher. Chinese Wikipedia also confirms Minford's Daodejing translation (2018) and his share in The Story of the Stone (1982-1986). He received for the I Ching the Medal for Excellence in Translation from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. According to the publisher the translation works in recent archaeological finds and contains a separate chapter with the 64 hexagrams as a codex of divination signs. Ordinary characterisation: for readers who want to take both the wisdom layer and the oracle function seriously.

David Hinton's I Ching: The Book of Change appeared in 2015 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 160 pages. According to his own account he translates only the oldest textual layer and drops the usual commentary, so that the text can stand as a poetic-philosophical work, in the manner of his Tao Te Ching, not as a practical oracle or a study edition. Geoffrey Redmond's The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text appeared in 2017 from Bloomsbury Academic. According to the book's presentation he treats the text as a pre-axial, non-philosophical divination book, secular and critical but not hostile. In 2024 there followed Reading the I Ching, also from Bloomsbury. Ordinary characterisation: historically critical, without the esoteric charge of Karcher/Ritsema.

Margaret J. Pearson's The Original I Ching appeared in 2011 from Tuttle Publishing, 256 pages. According to the publisher she draws on the early Zhou text, historical study of use, and current archaeology, and tries to filter out much later commentarial layers. She studied with Hellmut Wilhelm, Richard Wilhelm's son, and replaces the superior man with you should. Online Clarity calls the translation gentle, reflective and very usable. Set her time studying with Hellmut Wilhelm beside her attempt to filter later layers, and what stands out is that even someone from the Wilhelm line no longer takes the classic as the self-evident textual layer.

It follows, we think, that length here is an argument: Hinton fits the oldest layer into 160 pages; Minford needs twelve years and 928 pages to hold wisdom and oracle together.

In 2023, according to Online Clarity, North Atlantic Books issued Benebell Wen's I Ching, the Oracle, with cultural and historical notes, placing the text expressly back in its shamanic origin.

The Dutch shelf

The Dutch Wilhelm first appeared in 1953, translated by A. Hochberg-van Wallinga; the twentieth printing (2006) is from Ankh-Hermes in Deventer. It is still the best-selling Dutch edition. In 2016, according to i-tjing.info, a revised issue appeared, with Harmen Mesker as final editor and annotator beside Hochberg-van Wallinga. Mesker, founder of the Yijing Research Center in the Netherlands, has studied the Yijing for some thirty years and works from the original Chinese texts and script, rather than through Western intermediate translations.

Most other Dutch-language editions are adaptations or translations of translations. According to Dutch Wikipedia, Sam Reifler's English I Ching appeared in Dutch in 1980 from Ankh-Hermes, translated by Karel Lorteije, written more accessibly than the Wilhelm edition. Alfred Huang's The Complete I Ching (1998) appeared in Dutch in 2000 from Altamira-Becht in Haarlem, translated by Marc van der Meer. Han Boering published in 2001 with Servire/Juwelenschip an adaptation of his own from the Chinese, with commentaries; a fourth printing came in 2011. Peter ten Hoopen adapted Legge in 1971 for Bert Bakker in Amsterdam.

A fully independent modern Dutch translation made directly from the Chinese, standing clear of the Wilhelm tradition, could not be confirmed in the sources consulted. Boering's adaptation and Mesker's notes do work with Chinese material, but the shop shelf remains Wilhelm. It follows, we think, that the Dutch reader often carries the same chain as the English Wilhelm reader: Chinese, then German, then the home language. Legge is present indirectly through Ten Hoopen.

A choice is already a reading

Our reading: the division below is not a guide to taste. Each title answers the disputed question of what the I Ching is by giving the text a different age, a different commentary, and a different reader. The translation opened is already a claim. According to the usual characterisations, including those at Online Clarity, the split is roughly this.

There is no original I Ching to which all these books go back. There are translations, and each translation has already chosen.

Sources

The old ritual Cast the yarrow stalks Ask your question and build your hexagram line by line, with the classical odds.

Further reading

Back to the guide