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Jiao Shi Yi Lin (Forest of Changes) Translation Available

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cjgait

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I have published my translation of the Han Dynasty expansion of the Yi Jing called the Forest of Changes (Jiao Shi Yi Lin) on CreateSpace:

https://www.createspace.com/5175226

It's a large format book, 8.5 by 11 inches and 518 pages, so if you don't find it useful for divination you can use it to hold open doors, fight off attackers, etc.

The price is 38.88. I wanted to make it affordable. We all have enough overpriced books on our shelves.

It will be available on Amazon, including the European sites, within the next few days.

Thanks for all here who have helped me in the work!
 

charly

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Hi, Chris:

Congratulations!!!
An be with luck!


Charly

4b07049bg702583a547a7

Source: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4b07049b0100f5py.html
 

Sixth Relative

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Great, your book is now on Amazon :)

While I get my copy, could you share the table of contents? I'm wondering if you discusses how to use it in practice.
 
C

cjgait

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Great, your book is now on Amazon :)

While I get my copy, could you share the table of contents? I'm wondering if you discusses how to use it in practice.

Thank you for your interest in the Forest. Below is the TOC of the introductory material. The remainder of the book is the 64 chapters, each with 64 verses.

As to technique, I use the Plum Blossom hexagram (there's a Chinese language one here: http://www.zhycw.com/pp/meihua.aspx (pick the year, date and time defaults to current, second button on the bottom to get a hexagram for the hour). Use that in combination with an Yi Jing reading by whatever method you choose to get two hexagrams (I usually get mine from the Oracle of the Singularity at Svarga in Second Life). I then look at both combinations of hexagrams in the Forest. So if I got 48 and 23 I look at 23 - 48 and 48 - 23. This is because the Forest is a bit broken. It was heavily damaged at some point and only about 1500 of the 4096 verses survived. An editor duplicated verses to fill back in. But they used too many negative verses, so the text is off balance. If you look at the divining tags for the Yi Jing, for instance, things like good fortune, no blame, nothing benefits, you will find that the Yi has a very slight positive balance. There are a few more positive readings than negative. So with the Forest I tend to look at the two verses, see if one is obviously apt to the situation, and if there is not one, pick the most positive of the two. This compensates somewhat for the imbalance in the book. Overall though for me, the Yi Jing is still the best oracle. But you are getting an Yi reading every time you read from the Forest using the above technique, so the Yi never goes away. By the way, if people could buy the book from CreateSpace, not Amazon, I would appreciate it. My royalties are better from CreateSpace. Also there is a sample of chapter 15 available (same copy in both places):

Preview at CreateSpace


Sample chapter at Academia.edu


Translator’s Preface 8

Acknowledgments 9

About the Forest of Changes 9

Dating the Text 10

Themes in the Forest 10

Conventions 11

Duplicate Verses 12

Merchants 12

History as a Language in the Forest of Changes 13

On the Yi Jing 13

Notes on Divination 14

Divination, Fate and the Confucian World View 16

A Cast of Characters for the Forest of Changes 18

1 Originating 22
 
C

cjgait

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For people interested in the sinojapanese god of wealth (BuDai / Hotei):

The Ch'an Master Pu-tai
Helen B. Chapin
Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol. 53, No. 1 (Mar., 1933), pp. 47-52


Ch.

A relative perhaps?

From the Forest of Changes:

14 - 48

A luminous sacrifice upon the altar of spring,
Cheng Bao* appears, and the cock crows.
The Yang brightness loses its way,
Unable to defend itself.

* Cheng Bao or Tian Bao, a god of wealth, called the ‘God of the Great Jewel’, was a popular god in the Han Dynasty. The god was associated with bright lights from the sky, rumbling noise and the crowing of pheasant cocks and roosters. In some versions of the legend the god has the head of a human, in others the head of a pheasant cock. Some scholars think the god represented a meteorite and may have reflected an incident where a sacrificial altar was hit by a bright light, possibly a meteorite. See Hawkes, 1985, The Songs of the South, Nine Regrets, III, Dangerous Heights. There are also references in the Han Shu and other sources.
 
P

peterg

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Good luck with the book. Hard work pays off.
I would have liked to see some Chinese characters but I'll settle for the hard research of the copious footnotes.

I see it on Amazon.com. Pity its not on Amazon.uk where I can get cheap shipping, but they don't compete with each other.

A big book weighing in at 3.2 pounds. I can see the logic of that as a cherished first edition but I have my doubts about that from the point of view of mass market appeal.

The Yilin is always interesting as a relative of, or derivative of, the Book of Changes and for the reference material. You meet some great people there, like Yu the Great and Peng Zu the Chinese Methuselah, and the details of concepts like ancestor worship.

For divination I don't use it so much, but I like the way Wang Yang (''Authentic I Ching'') uses it. He just reads the two Hexagrms of the cast and gives a few examples.

I have used Lise's Hexagram of the Day method where you take the hexagram of your cast as the relating Hexagram and the hotd as the primary hexagram.http://www.yijing.nl/i_ching/yilin/yilin-intro.htm

I had back pain and asked if I was fit to travel to town. The I Ching cast was 41-30.
Using Lise's method I calculated the hotd as 57 and JiaoshiYilin 57 > 41 was indeed about going to the marketplace and seemed auspicious. Encouraged, I did make the trip even though it was risky with my tilted shoulders.

How would I calculate the hexagram of the day ?
I would use the Meng Zi hexagram chart from Lise's website http://www.yijing.nl/i_ching/yilin/yilin-time.htm
Rather than the Lunar days I would use the Solar Terms and count the first line of the Gong hexagrams as the start of a Major solar term and the fourth line of the Hou hexagrams as the start of the Minor solar terms. Each line corresponds to 1 degree of the sun's longitude along the Zodiac, or slightly more than a day. http://www.weather.gov.hk/gts/time/24solarterms.htm

So today 2nd June, I would go the 2016 Almanac page for June http://www.weather.gov.hk/gts/astron2016/almanac2016_index_e.htm
June 2nd is three days before the start of the Minor solar term Corn on Ear on June 5th and that takes you to H14.1
So the hexagram of the day is H.14.

EDIT: Lise's lunar method would have the last quarter of the fourth month giving H.9 as the hexagram of the day. I wonder if you could use H.1 as a Hexagram of the month and get another Yilin cast ? Or H.30 as the Hexagram of the Season, the seasons being 51 30 58 29, as per later heaven trigrams doubled.
The monthly almanacs clearly mark the four lunar phases, and the solar terms mark the change of season.

I go with the Hong Kong times of the Almanac, and just make a mental adjustment for local time if its important. (If the times were very close to midnight I might take 1.6 into account and so Hexagram 1 as the hotd. But that doesn't apply here.)

That's how I would calculate, but its not something I have used much in practice.

The Almanac pages also give the lunar days, and June 2 is the 27th lunar day of the 4th lunar month. June 5th is also the start of the 5th lunar month.
At Calendar > Gregorian-Lunar calendar conversion table > 2016
you will see that its the 27th lunar day of the fourth Lunar month, and June 5th the start of the Minor solar term Corn on Ear.
The table might look complicated at first glance, but its a simple and fascinating overview of the Gregorian-Lunar-Solar year http://www.weather.gov.hk/gts/time/conversion.htm

In practice, I think the Chinese now use the traditional calendar only for calculating the dates of Festivals, and for divination.
 
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C

cjgait

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Thank you for your informative reply! I find the Yi Lin a fascinating book for the study of the transition period between the Western and Eastern Han, but it is not as good as the Yi for divination. I see a couple of factors involved.

1. The nature of a large set of oracle texts with a lot of specifics is that the answers tend to be either spot on (with the verse seeming to refer directly to the question, as in the case you point out from personal experience)...or totally off the mark, which is more frequent.

2. Much of the Yi Lin was lost at some point and 'back filled' with duplicates. So there are actually only about 1500 unique verses in the work.

3. A disproportionate amount of the Yi Lin texts are negative. If you look through the divining tags of the Yi Jing you will find that positive omens outnumber negatives by a very slight amount. In Zhou Yi Dao philosophy this is considered a key point. The universe has a very slight positive spin that keeps it from being in perfect balance. If it ever reaches balance....it will stop. One project I plan after my next book is to attempt to create a matrix or 'redirects' that will rebalance the Yi Lin texts to match the balance of the Yi Jing.

On putting Chinese in, that would of course be desirable, as would the attributions texts that associate trigram images with the various words in the verses. However that would have turned the already large (518 pages of dual column text) book into a two or three volume work. I wanted to avoid that. Also I think that work eventually should be done in the context of a detailed variorum text like the Chinese ones:

Ben She, Yi Ming, 2000, Jiao Shi Yi Lin Hu Jiao Ji Zhu (Jiao Shi Yi Lin Variorum Edition), ISBN: 9787532561728.

and

Liu Li Ming, Jiao Shi Yi Lin Jiao Zhu (Annotated Jiao Shi Yi Lin), ISBN: 9787807528425.

But I'm not the person to do it. I just got a translation out there so there isn't a big hole in English translations where there should be an Yi Lin. I'm pretty sure Robert Matusan Boyler's translation of the Yi Lin does have the Chinese texts and attribution paragraphs. Not sure when he is publishing, but I know he's close to finishing.

To generate the daily Morning Reading verse from the Yi Lin I get a a hexagram either from the Oracle of the Singularity in Second Life or generated by random.org, then get a Mei Hua hexagram based on the calendar I find at this site: http://www.zhycw.com/pp/meihua.aspx I set the year and use the 时间起卦 to generate a hexagram. I then look at both combinations of Yi Lin hexagrams, picking the most positive of the two. This compensates, to some extent, for the negative bias of the Yi Lin texts.

I'm disappointed it's not on Amazon.uk. It is supposed to have international distribution on Amazon. have you seen how much the shipping is on CreateSpace? I ask people to buy from there if possible anyway, since I make more royalties from it. And, as you say, the Forest is hardly a mass market appeal book, so royalties are few and far between. Indeed, although there was quite a bit of noise about the book on Facebook most people have just shared the info, not actually bought it, judging from the numbers.

You can find the results of Zhou Yi Dao Morning Reading daily on my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/ZhouYiDao which links to my blog with the actual verse: http://templeofthesingularity.blogspot.com/

I am currently working on a book about Zhou Yi Dao meditation and living the Yi Jing and Lun Yu and giving weekly lectures on the subject in Second Life. Look for Taras Balderdash in SL for details. Lectures are at 11 AM Eastern at the teahouse in Amatsu Shima. This week's topic will be hexagram 6.
 

hilary

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Createspace's cheapest rate for shipping to the UK is $4.88 - but that's the version delivered by absent-minded lobster, and would arrive on 27th July. So I ordered from Amazon UK - looking forward to its arrival!

Let us know any time you do talks outside Second Life - how about Google Hangouts?
 
C

cjgait

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Createspace's cheapest rate for shipping to the UK is $4.88 - but that's the version delivered by absent-minded lobster, and would arrive on 27th July. So I ordered from Amazon UK - looking forward to its arrival!

Let us know any time you do talks outside Second Life - how about Google Hangouts?

Oh, that's great,Hilary, thanks! Yes, the Createspace people have no plant in Europe, so they print them in the depth of some Carolinian swamp and send them on turtleback across the Atlantic.
 
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peterg

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It seems that after signing up to Createspace you have to give all your personal details before getting a shipping quote.
Actually the shipping quote at Amazon.com is cheap. $7.37 international.
($0.00 for the whole transaction if I sign up for an Amazon loyalty visa card, and assume no hidden costs).
Sometimes I see a book on amazon.com or amazon.uk or both. It depends on the book and your country.

Wang Yang (Authentic I Ching) says that Jiao Gan was the teacher of Jing Fang (77-37 BC), the founder of the Na Jia method. So I wonder if the JSYL has more in common with that kind of school, than the classical text school.
For complex divinations Wang integrates the interpretations of the different methods and schools to get a combined overview, using classical text, mei hua, na jia, and jiaoshi yilin.
(I would not recommend his complex calendrical methods for generating hexagrams but he gives a good overview of the Chinese calendar, mei hua, na jia, and a few practical examples of Yilin divination.
There is also a weak 65 page editor's translation of the I Ching).

I think Boyler is translating the Shang Binghe edition of the Yilin.
David Raft (Four Syllable Verse in Medieval China - a dissertation) translated all of the Yilin verses for H.1 only, and quotes textual variants from about ten key Yilin editions (which he lists). On Shang's edition, he thinks 'his collation notes are inaccurate and his textual choices questionable', so did not cite all the variants in his text.
 
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cjgait

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It seems that after signing up to Createspace you have to give all your personal details before getting a shipping quote.
Actually the shipping quote at Amazon.com is cheap. $7.37 international.
($0.00 for the whole transaction if I sign up for an Amazon loyalty visa card, and assume no hidden costs).
Sometimes I see a book on amazon.com or amazon.uk or both. It depends on the book and your country.

Yes, Amazon shipping seems better for international orders. CreateSpace is US based and I don't think they have printing capabilities overseas. I imagine Amazon gets the printing copy and piggybacks it on a shipment overseas.

Wang Yang (Authentic I Ching) says that Jiao Gan was the teacher of Jin Fang (77-37 BC), the founder of the Na Jia method. So I wonder if the JSYL has more in common with that kind of school, than the classical text school.


Yes there is actually a correction to the preface on that which will go in the next edition as kindly pointed out by Harmen Mesker. I had the order of masters wrong. It should read:

The Jiao Shi Yi Lin 焦氏易林 "Master Jiao's Forest of Changes" is a Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) book of divinatory verses. The book is traditionally attributed to Jiao Yan Shou 焦延寿, courtesy name Jiao Gan焦贛, who came from Liang 梁 (modern Shang Qiu 商丘, Henan) and was a tutor in the household of the Prince of Liang (early 1st century BCE). He was a scholar and official, reaching the rank of district magistrate in Xiao Huang 小黃 (near modern Kai Feng 开封, Henan). He was a student of the great Yi Jing scholar Meng Xi 孟喜 and passed on the traditions of his school to Jing Fang 京房. However, some scholars suspect that the book was composed later, perhaps in the late Western Han, perhaps even somewhat later. I am inclined to agree with those who attribute the book to Cui Zhuan (崔篆), a scholar and official who was active in the time of the Wang Mang interregnum (9 - 23 CE). It is also my contention that much of the text is a divination manual specifically designed for merchants. How that fits in with the book’s scholarly provenance remains to be discovered.

I see a lot of influence from the various schools of time, Huang Lao, Gong Yang Chun Qiu school, and a very large element of folk elements, particularly omens for traveling merchants.

I think Boyler is translating the Shang Binghe edition of the Yilin.

Yes, quite right, that's the one Boyler is working on. I look forward to it very much.

I have that dissertation of David Raft's and did some comparisons of it with my own text to make sure I was on the right path.
 
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peterg

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Got it on Amazon, but Createspace is ok, it was just the extra effort of signing up. I find with standard shipping it usually comes expedited anyway, or within a couple of weeks. I forget what the expedited quote was at CS, don't think it was too much. And they use secure pay services.

Initially I had doubts about the large format but that was before I got the book. It works well in practice. Room for notes if you're a scribbler like me, and easy to read the many footnotes.
Well bound, good paper , the page stays open without fluttering away, and very easy to navigate between the many verses of this 'vast and exuberant forest' as one writer puts it. Good index.
 
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C

cjgait

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Glad you like it! I'm pretty happy with CreateSpace's formatting, though next edition might pull the chapter headings down just a bit. They're too close to the edge of the page. Also, one error I've found is that there are some page headings mislabeled in chapter 33 as 32. Also an error in the intro. The history of the purported author should include this:

He was a student of the great Yi Jing scholar Meng Xi 孟喜 and passed on the traditions of his school to Jing Fang 京房

Overall though I haven't come across too many typos and errors, so I'm holding off for now on the 1.1 version.

Please let me know if you find any errors and I will correct them.

Got it on Amazon, but Createspace is ok, it was just the extra effort of signing up. I find with standard shipping it usually comes expedited anyway, or within a couple of weeks. I forget what the expedited quote was at CS, don't think it was too much. And they use secure pay services.

Initially I had doubts about the large format but that was before I got the book. It works well in practice. Room for notes if you're a scribbler like me, and easy to read the many footnotes.
Well bound, good paper , the page stays open without fluttering away, and very easy to navigate between the many verses of this 'vast and exuberant forest' as one writer puts it. Good index.
 
C

cjgait

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Just posted on Facebook: Version 1.1 of the translation is out. Mainly catching some typos and some annoying page header errors. Only one place in the introduction with a change to a factual statement. It is a Confucianist work, with many of the texts reminiscent of Dong Zhong Shu's system of aberrations and omens pointing out flaws in governing. Interestingly, it also has a major component of divination verses clearly connected with the life of traveling merchants. Though mainly of interest to those studying the Yi Jing, the numerous footnotes expand on the many references to Chinese history and culture in the work (there are extensive citations of events in the Spring and Autumn and Songs).

https://www.amazon.com/Forest-Changes-Dynasty-Divination-Manual/dp/1505566843
 
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cjgait

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The Kindle version of my translation of the Jiao Shi Yi Lin, The Forest of Changes, is now available on Amazon. The paperback is still more convenient to work with, but at a weight of 0 ounces, the Kindle one is more portable. With over 2000 footnotes connecting the verses to the Confucian classics and histories the book is like an encyclopedia of late Western Han thinking and folk culture. If you already bought the paperback the Amazon page should offer you the Kindle edition for .99 cents.

https://www.amazon.com/Forest-Changes-Dynasty-Extrapolation-Ching-ebook/dp/B01FNBKTWE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1471115005&sr=8-1#nav-subnav
 

fyreflye

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The book is free to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited members and $9.99 for those buying the book for the first time. Thanks for your valued service :D
 
C

cjgait

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Second Edition of the Jiao Shi Yi Lin in the Works

I have started work on a second edition of the Forest of Changes. This one will be very ambitious. At some point between the Han and the Song the book was badly damaged. The person who put it back together filled in the gaps by using the same verses repeatedly (sometimes up to eight times) and perhaps adding verses of their own.

I am working on analyzing the various layers and components of the text and will try to put it together in a form that will work better for practical divination. At this point the work is far too negative to be effective. The Yi itself is very slightly positive overall, 50.03% positive. The Forest is more like a 60/40 split with negative verses predominating.

Of course my real wish is to avoid the whole thing by having someone find a copy of the Yi Lin in a Han tomb.

Regards,

Chris Gait
 

charly

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...
You can find the results of Zhou Yi Dao Morning Reading daily on my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/ZhouYiDao which links to my blog with the actual verse: http://templeofthesingularity.blogspot.com/
...
For these interested, as a sample of Chist's translations, I'm quoting the traditional chinese text of , «Retreat going to Retreat», taken from Donald Surgeon's «Chinese Text Project» followed by Christ's translation taken from «Temple of the Singularity Blog»
遯之遯:
dun4 shi1 dun4

三涂五岳,阳城太室,神明所保,独无兵革.
San1 Tu2 wu3 yue4, Yang2 Cheng2 Tai4 Shi4, sheng2 ming 2 suo3 bao3, du2 wu2 bing1 ge2.
Source: «Jiaoshi Yilin»
Forest of Changes Verse for 08-SEP-2016
Yi Dao Morning Reading:​
Hexagram 33, judgment text. Jiao Shi Yi Lin 33 - 33.​
Forest of Changes verse for today:​
33 - 33​
Mount San Tu and the five sacred mountains,[1]​
Yang Cheng Valley, Tai Shi peak,[2]​
Places the Spirits protect,​
Not needing a defending army.​
____________________________________​
[1] See note on 5 - 4 on Mount San Tu.​
[2] Tai Shi is one of the two peaks of Mount Song Shan in Henan near Yang Cheng.​


Source: «Temple of the Singularity Blog»

All the best,

Charly
 
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