Translation Notes
This site present the complete text of the Yi Jing in side-by-side
translation. This ensures that you are seeing the same
text and commentaries that the typical; Chinese reader
would get rather than the massive add-on of commentaries
that translators tend pile on the terse original. The English
text of the translation is derived from "Sacred Books of the East, Volume 16, The I Ching" by James Legge, 1899 (Source: Internet Sacred Text Archive). James
Legge (1815-1897) was a notable Scottish
missionary and sinologist who translated several Chinese
classics. His translation is functional although
at times rather wordy as was the custom of the times. The best
known translation in the English language is the Cary
Baynes translation of the German translation written by Richard
Wilhelm ("The I Ching or Book of Changes"), which is still
under copyright.
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The organization of the text has been changed to match the Chinese version.
The Chinese text has been enabled with YellowTip just-in-time translation.
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The transliterated Chinese names have been from their original form to their
pinyin form. Legge apparently invented and used his own scheme.
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Legge did not bother to give the hexagram a English names, instead keeping their transliterated Chinese
names. Since most English readers have difficulty pronouncing the Chinese names, providing each hexagram
with an English name or monicker has been very useful. The Wilhelm/Baynes translation has been very influential in this
respect and we have therefore adopted their names for the hexagrams.
Organization of the Hexagram Text
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The header portion of each page consists of the hexagram itself
in the top left corner, the hexagram number, the transliterated
Chinese name, and the English name given by the Wilhelm/Baynes translation.
- The first subsection is called The Image. The first phrase, printed in boldface, describes the image evoked by the hexagram. This image
was not arbitrarily chosen but derives from the top and bottom half of the hexagram itself. These halves, or trigrams, are indicated
in the second line. For example, the image of hexagram 3 is "clouds and thunder". The upper trigrams
is Kǎn, which represents water, while the lower trigram is Zhèn, which represents thunder.
- The second section is called The Judgment. The paragraph printed in bold face
is the main text for the hexagram which was written by the King Wen, the founder of the Zhou Dynasty. The non-bold
paragraphs under it are commentaries written in ancient times that are now usually read together
with the main text. Tradition has ascribed authorship of the commentaries to Confucius but this has not been proven.
- The third section is called The Lines. These usually consist of one bold face
and one non-bold paragraph corresponding to each line in the hexagram. The bold face paragraph was written by the Duke of Zhou (the
son of King Wen) while the non-bold paragrah are commentaries written in ancient times. The lines are numbered from
the bottom to the top. Hence, line 1 is the bottommost line. The result of the Yi Jing reading
will indicate which of these lines are to be read. This is because the Yi Jing reading will
determine not only whether the line is a yin or yang but whether the line is at rest or moving to its opposite
state. The paragraphs in this section only apply to the moving lines. If the hexagram reading indicates that
there are no moving lines, none of these paragraphs should be read.
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