The Great Vessel Blog

Which Yijing? Thoughts over coffee continued

With my last cup of coffee I turned to thinking about those Yijings which are essential for the serious student, or for those who want to reflect on spiritual matters, or work with their deeper psychological processes.

For the serious student an ‘essential’ is Ritsema & Karcher’s Vega edition, 2003, the Eranos Foundation text of that time. It has three major qualities. Firstly it is possibly the best English translation which grew out of 8 years of focussed full time work by Stephen Karcher drawing on a lifetime of notes provided by Ritsema. Only the Hexagram figure and the changing lines have any commentary. However after each block of translated text are the ‘Associated Contexts’. These are short list of other possible meanings for each Chinese character. It is not a dictionary, each of the English words has been chosen as a possible likely alternative. This is very useful; when the Yijing is read in Chinese the reader will have ‘fields of meaning’ for each character, not just one English word. These lists are as close as we can get in English. Then there is the concordance. It is used by looking up a word in English and it gives all of the places where that word appears throughout the Yijing. When the meaning of a word is unclear it is very helpful to go to a different part of the text and see how it was used there. If you think you might like a copy of this then grab one now! I understand it is not going to be re-printed, so when it is gone it is gone. Hillary Barrett’s review and a purchasing link is here.

Lastly there are two Yijing’s which are rather different: First is Wu Jing Nuan’s ‘Yi Jing’. He studied the earliest characters found on the Oracle bones in an attempt to get back to a simple Pre-Confucian text. A text devoid of the noisy Confucian moral imperatives. Each Chinese character is given along with its phonetic and the nearest English word. His commentary is a delight. Its concise, but evocative. Like a few words spoken quietly by a sage. It is a joy to read.

Then there is Stephen Karcher’s 'Total I Ching': Stephen tried a radical experiment. He realised that people were getting hung up on words and somehow the dialogue with their inner world was getting lost. So first he brought together disparate parts of the Yijing to inform the ‘translation’ of its parts. Then he added a section, for each hexagram giving the myths, stories and songs which that hexagram evoked and which any Chinese scholar would have in their mind when trying to understand its meaning. Lastly he focussed on symbolic imagery which spoke directly to a deeper level of the psyche just in the way that dreams do.

The first time I picked up a copy of the Total I Ching (TIC) I quickly became angry. It took me a little while to realise why. I was used to reading the text, thinking about it and then imagining it. With this book I was challenged to enter into the hexagram itself, to make it come alive in my imagination and to feel the many different tones and themes which it held in its field. At first this felt like drowning in images, but in reality the only thing that was drowning was my rational mind which had been taught that it should govern everything, a Western mind! It took me a while to get used to the TIC, but for in depth experiantial understanding nothing comes close to it. One of its side effects was to start a process of the liberation of my intuitive nature. More and more these days I sense the time and its nature seeing the images in my minds eye. I instinctively adjust my actions or position to accommodate the time. I think this is the real gift the Yijing bestows, not a book of answers but a path or process.

Just a note here: The Total I Ching was completely re-edited and expanded and it is the new text which we use in our program Total Yijing. We are in the middle of re-publishing the introductory chapters on this website. They have been rewritten and expanded for the sake of clarity.

And after all of that fine musing over coffee in the sunshine, I had to go home via Persephones Highway, the London Underground (Railway), a grim journey in the underworld if ever there was one.