Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes)

The 3,000 year old I Ching is the most esteemed of the ancient Chinese classics, yet also the most enigmatic. Reading the Ancient I Ching (Book of Changes): Structure, Imagery, Rhetoric, Philosophy and Ethics is supplemented by recent advances in scholarship, particularly recently discovered excavated texts, and demonstrates how the Zhouyi (the ancient textual layer of the I Ching) was compiled from mostly oral material and how it is organized as an easily consulted compendium of divination responses.

This book, written by I Ching expert Geoffrey Redmond, clarifies the meanings of the ancient text by examining use of literary devices such as technical prognostic terms, imagery, rhetorical tropes, ambiguity, analogy, metaphor, and proverb-like phrases. This permits reconstruction of how the Zhouyi was composed and explains how it would have served for divination. It shows how the Zhouyi was adapted by the supposedly Confucian Dazhuan and Shuogua, to support an apocryphal sagely origin of a later metaphysics and cosmology. A novel approach is application to the Zhouyi of a variety of philological theories such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, analogy and anomaly, argumentative versus context dependence, Jungian psychology, and critical theory.

Reading the Ancient I Ching (Book of Changes) includes an interlinear Chinese text, a glossary of important words in English, Chinese, and pinyin, and an appendix. These features make it essential reading for students taking courses in Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion, and early Chinese history, as well as readers looking for a clear and accessible gloss of this text.