geekery

[dobro]

Okay, I'm a paid-in-full member of Yi geekery now. I've started a glossary of Yi terms. I'm on Page 2 now. Absolutely hopeless. Is there a 12 steps program?

[sparhawk]

Okay, I'm a paid-in-full member of Yi geekery now. I've started a glossary of Yi terms. I'm on Page 2 now. Absolutely hopeless. Is there a 12 steps program?

Don't bother, the withdrawal symptoms would kill you... :D

[dobro]

Page 3. Geekery's difficult beginnings.

How many terms are there in the Yi? 5000?

[dobro]

I'm using Ritsema/Karcher as my concordance guide. I remember on one occasion a long time ago looking up a term in their book, and it wasn't in the concordance. I wish I'd made a note of it. I'm going to be worried about this now lol.

[hilary]

Okay, I'm a paid-in-full member of Yi geekery now. I've started a glossary of Yi terms. I'm on Page 2 now. Absolutely hopeless. Is there a 12 steps program?
Step 12: you're stuck, you'll never make it, waste of energy (and the noble one uses energy sparingly, after all).

I've more or less completed mine - it'll be available as part of the I Ching class and I'll probably sell it separately, too. It just needs a multi-translation index adding... see, I'm way ahead of you on the yeekery. Which translations should be in there?

[dobro]

Which translations should be in there?

Translations of what?

[hilary]

Um, that's a supremely witty question in some way, isn't it?
Sorry, don't get it at all.
:bag:
(Actually I need a combination of :bag: and :confused:, with the question marks showing above the bag.)

[dobro]

No, it was me who didn't get it. Now I get it. (Put the bag on my head.)

I'm on Page 4 now. One very interesting thing that's coming out of this at a more macro level is that I'm seeing the numbers and distributions of terms throughout the work. For instance, lin4 has twenty instances. That's a lot. There's a lot of screwing up imaged in the Yi. Mistakes are a big part of life, and that's reflected in the Yi.

[hilary]

I'm pretty sure there are bags enough to go around. :bag: :bag: It can be especially interesting to look at the relative distribution of words and phrases. Harmen pointed this out recently with 'great man'; it's also interesting for 'danger'. And I think it was Denis Mair who first brought to my attention a very interesting tidbit about lin4, shame. In the Upper Canon you can experience it, or be without it. But only in the Lower Canon do you hear of it 'going away'.

[dobro]

Page 5. This is becoming a very useful experience for different reasons - I'm seeing and understanding things I never saw and understood before. But it's also forcing me to make some decisions, and one of the big ones is whether I want this glossary to be comprehensive in its meanings (like Brad's) or whether I want it to be a useful pointer toward the main groups of meanings for each term. I've opted for the latter.

[dobro]

Page 6. This is a ton of work, but it's showing me stuff in my version of the Yi that I never would have seen otherwise. I'm really glad I got into this glossary/concordance project before I unleashed my version to the world lol.

[hilary]

Would you like to share some of this newly-seen stuff? Please?

[dobro]

Mostly I'm seeing mistakes that other people never would have made in the first place. For instance, early on I decided that the first level of English translation would always use the same word for the Chinese original. So, for instance, I rendered yu2 as 'toward', following Karcher. But after getting into it more, I've decided that just as it would be unnecessarily clumsy (and plain wrong) to always render the English word 'bear' using the same word in Chinese (I mean, what's the Chinese for 'carry' and what's the Chinese for the large animal you meet in the woods sometimes? I bet they're not the same!), in the same way it's unnecessarily clumsy and just plain wrong to continue to render the same Chinese term with the same English word. So now, I'm rendering yu2 about five or six different ways, depending on the English context - sometimes 'to', 'into', 'toward', 'for', 'of', 'at'. In other words, I'm being more flexible with the first level of English translation. This has been a sacrifice, cuz now it's much less systematic and tidy, as well as making the glossary a bit more difficult to use. But overall, more true and more helpful, I think.

Another thing I'm seeing is how the Ritsema/Karcher glossary is sometimes *very* personally interpretive and selective. I've been mainly drawing on Ritstema/Karcher for about ten years, and so it means I'm starting to have to outgrow that dependency.

Another advantage is how it's also helping me to spot inconsistencies and things I've missed over the years, simply because it's a finetooth comb approach.

Another thing is classifying the major meanings of a term. When I started this, I didn't want to create the sort of comprehensive lexicon that's Brad's done. (Why do that? He's done it already!) Instead, I wanted a sort of quick and dirty guide to the major groups of meanings for each term as they're used in the Yi, to help the reader (me especially, or anyone who gets to read this eventually) get a quick grok on the meaning cluster. So for instance:

"influencing (xian2): influence; come into contact with; joined, conjoined; complete, whole (19.1, 19.2, throughout 31)"

See how I arranged the meanings into four groups? And see how many meanings I chose NOT to include? So what I'm finding is that my groupings are often pretty arbitrary. I can't just copy terms from other people's lexicons - I actually have to to think and make decisions lol.

See? Geekery! Up to the hilt.

[dobro]

Page 7.

One lovely knock-on effect of this exercise is that mulling meanings more closely (I work on the meanings of terms that crop up in my daily consultation) gets me mulling the meaning of the hex I draw for each day, and that helps me to understand it and its application in my life better. Nice. I'll miss this when it's finished. Not that there's any danger of that anytime soon lol.

[hilary]

Ask Brad what you do when it's finished... ;)

By the way, I'm honoured that my words are finally deemed wise enough to be featured in your signature.

[dobro]

Funny, not wise. Your words are always wise, though. Even the funny ones.

[dobro]

Page 8. I think I've done all the major terms in the book, the ones with lots of instances.

I think that despite an understanding of how the original Chinese version works in terms of meaning 'clusters', that English renditions are inevitably going to simplify and transform the original. You can say 'dumb down' if you want to; I prefer to say 'streamline'. But it's my belief that the Yi's entering a new phase of its long career, what with so many westerners applying themselves in their indubitably western ways to the Chinese classic.

[dobro]

Page 9. Because a lot of the major terms with numerous instances have been covered, I'm making a lot of apparent progress now - the same amount of time gets more terms into the glossary and concordance. The sense of relatively rapid progress is gratifying, but the downside is that I'm focussing on the terms I *haven't* covered yet, and my attention is not on the most common terms, the 'keywords'. But you know, those keywords are...key lol. They're the key, not only to understanding the majority of lines in the Yi, but the key to understanding a lot of human psychology and spirit.

[dobro]

Page 10. Well, this thread's useful to me, if not to anybody else lol. There's a lot of discussion in the Exploring Divination about a lot of the keywords, and very timely too.

Today was something new for me on this project. I did my daily consultation, and today was the first day that all the terms in the material I drew were already covered in the glossary/concordance. Cool!

I'm really glad I started this project. It's helped me catch mistakes, revise weaknessess, see things I'd never seen before. I'd recommend it to anyone who has a penchant for endless attention to detail and nothing better going on in their life lol.

[bradford]

Ask Brad what you do when it's finished... ;)

That's when all them changes are done for good, once and for all, right?
:eek:

[hilary]

Of course!
Erm...

Dobro, could you post an excerpt?

[dobro]

above (li4): above, higher; top (40.6, 62)

achievement (gong1): achievement, benefit; merit, value (17.1)

acquiring (cheng2): acquire, receive, accept (7.6, 12.2, 32.3, 54.6)

act (wei2): act, do, make (4.6, 10.3, 42.1, 42.4, 43.1, 45.1, 48.3, 53.5)

adhering (cong2): adhere to, hold to, conform to; agree to, comply (2.3, 6.3, 17.6, 31.4, 42.4, 62.3)

[hilary]

Ah... neat. Thanks.

[dobro]

As you see, it's way stripped down compared to Brad's, and it's economical compared to Karcher's, even. I'm trying to make it useful to me, and people like myself. I'm looking to cluster the most likely meanings for each term. Brad's is so comprehensive that it counfounds casual consultation; Karcher's is a bit idiosyncratic. I'm looking for something that's both reliable and quick and dirty.

[dobro]

Ah... neat. Thanks.

Okay, I've showed you mine. How about a sample of yours?

[hilary]

I don't have a concordance, only a mini-glossary with a long index, which I ought to be putting on sale now so I can send the next newsletter (having sworn blind in the last edition that it'd be available in this one...). Here's a chunk:
Li

Literally

Li is harvest: the old character shows the ripe grain and the sharp knife that cuts it.
Related English words and phrases


Fruitful, bearing fruit
Reaping rewards
Profitable
Ideas for interpretation and application

The oldest meaning of li is ‘sharp’. It suggests the ‘sharp edge’ of a process, the moment where one phase ends to allow another to begin, and its results become clear. (The ‘knife’ element also appears in other characters, notably the title of Hexagram 23, Stripping Away.) The knife cuts the grain; it turns growth into harvest.


Later tradition developed this into an idea of ‘furthering’ or ‘promoting’ things, doing what is fitting to the nature of each thing so that it is fulfilled as itself. On a human, social level, this is natural justice. It suggests that you bring about the harvest of positive results by observing the intrinsic shape of people and things. Over the long term, something is proven to be just, in the sense of li, because it works in practice for the highest good of all involved.


Li is a very clear indicator of where the ‘harvest’ in a given situation is (or isn’t) to be found. It helps to manage expectations (eg in 33.0), and points specifically to what action, focus or stance will bear fruit.

[dobro]

As I suspected. In my own glossary, I've abandoned synonym lists in favor of a sentence or two of prose explanation when I thought it would be useful, but you've moved completely in that direction.

I love the way you've formatted it.

[dobro]

Page 11. It's getting long enough to be cumbersome now navigating through it. But it's well worth it - I can't tell you how useful it's been in getting my understanding of the Yi into better shape.

[dobro]

Page 12. One of the things I've seen in this exercise is when I'm being merely idiosyncratic, and when I'm being usefully original. When you compare ALL the instances of a term at the same time, weighing up different possibilities, things get clearer.

So who's going to take this on next?

[dobro]

Hey, does anybody know how many terms there are in the Yi? I've been online and looked around, but haven't found anything yet.

[bradford]

Hey, does anybody know how many terms there are in the Yi? I've been online and looked around, but haven't found anything yet.

Under 1000 in the Zhouyi, under 1200 including the Wings.
A couple dozen more that name Yi dimensions.
They're all in my Glossary, if you wanna count em.

[dobro]

Good, thanks. Now I know how far I've got, and how far I've got to go.

[rosada]

Very interesting reading the snippet you posted, dobro. Why not post the whole thing? You may want to come back and tinker with it later, but even as a work in progress it might be useful for us all to kinda ride along with you. I don't see myself taking on a similar project or even reading your whole opus when it's perfected, but I might be able to hang in there one page at a time...

[dobro]

I'm considering posting it when I get my website up (later this year, I hope). But here's one good reason (a good reason to me, anyway) why I should wait awhile before I post my version on the internet: when I started this glossary and concordance, I really started seeing (and correcting) the weaknesses in my version - I saw how there was too much dobro in my version, and not enough of the 'common, traditional wisdom' in it. I'm in the process of correcting that mistake these days. But it's taking me a while - I've covered about 20% of the terms in the Yi, I think. I'd like to live with the corrected version for a few more months before I unleash it on the world. And anyway, it's not so important:

Just what the world needs - yet another version of the Yi! lol

Not.

[dobro]

Page 15. One advantage of really getting into something, whatever it is, is that you start to really appreciate quality in that area. Bradford Hatcher's glossary work with the Yi is truly excellent - it's a really refined, subtle, responsive work. And did I mention comprehensive? lol