Softback 244 pp, 5.5x8.5 in., ISBN #0-9759640-0-3, LCCN #2005902137

The I Ching (Yijing) is an important part of the canon of world literature. It is also a divination tool familiar to millions of modern users. Books on the I Ching tend to approach it exclusively as one or the other: literary text or oracle. This annotated translation is designed to reconcile a century of provocative new scholarship with the function of divination for the modern reader.

The most exciting new scholarship illuminates the epic tale of wise King Wen, valorous King Wu, and the rise of the Zhou dynasty. The emergence of this wonderful story explains countless cryptic allusions in the I Ching. It also provides an elegant way to recover the divinatory function for the modern reader, and suggests how it may have functioned for the original diviners. In this view, to make a divination is to read the moment against the dynasty change narrative — truly to “consult King Wen.”

The basis of this translation is the original I Ching, the Zhouyi. The I Ching emerges in this translation not as a philosophical essay, but as a great poetic work — playful, large-spirited, and occasionally truly funny. But this play of wit addresses serious and often dark matters of state. It is a book about a war — a revolution against a corrupt government. Yet courtship and marriage are the central metaphors for statecraft at many levels. The translator argues that certain features of the use of marriage as metaphor suggest the author of the original I Ching was a woman.

Students of literature in translation will appreciate the close translation and the appended remarks on the translating process. Students of divination will be pleased to diversify their readings with the original I Ching’s down-to-earth insights about organizations and relationships, and the wisdom and wit of a people who had been a nomadic herding folk not so long before.