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French Yi Jing by Cyrille J D Javary - Reviews & Opinions?

cguleff

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I purchased Javary's French Yi Jing translation (2002) edition, 1065 pages several years ago. It's a large, beautiful hardbound copy and holds a prominent place in my bookcase. I do read French to some extent, using a Larousse dictionary, but my French is not good enough to discern the finer nuances in the text.

I know that this is considered to be one of the major contemporary translations in the Francophone world, but I've always wondered whether the author presents any unique insights or viewpoints compared to some of the major English translations we all know and love. Also, which English translation would be most comparable to Javary's presentation?

I welcome any feedback from the community. Thank you.
 

cguleff

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Additional Information on Javary's translation:

Some online searching for information about Javary in English has produced a some insight into this his treatment of the Yi Jing. It appears that his approach is similar to Stephen Karcher's. An English speaking colleague of Javary's posted the following http://www.mcelhearn.com/the-key-to-the-i-ching/#comments-title:

"Any translation must respect the text being translated, but a translation that translates only the text and not the ideas within is worthless. Many of the ideas in the Yi Jing are what could be called archetypal ideas, that can resonate even across many centuries, but even those must be discovered. The key to the Yi Jing is simple. We must go back and look at the way the Chinese lived at the time of the Yi Jing, look at their habits and their world-view, and find equivalents in our modern, western world. Only then will we truly be able to understand how the Yi Jing functions. Only then will we be able to use this extraordinary tool that can enable us to discover in ourselves that which we could not find without the aid of this book."


"People have asked me to recommend a translation of the Yi Jing. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend any current English translations, but this French translation, Le Yi Jing : Le livre des changements, by my friend and colleague Cyrille Javary, who inspired this article, with Pierre Faure, is probably the closest to what this article pleads for. His other books, Le Yi Jing : Le Grand Livre du Yin et du Yang, Les rouages du Yi Jing, and
Le Discours de la tortue give a great deal of insight into the Yi Jing. Cyrille Javary is one of the most knowledgeable westerners when it comes to the Yi Jing, and especially its historical signification. His work ignores the “new age” interpretations of the Yi Jing, and attempts to reconstruct the mind-set and conceptions of the Han Chinese."

Kirk McElhearn
 

cguleff

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Kirk McElhearn has translated one of Javary's books about the Yi Jing into English:

"The Yi Jing is an Ancient Chinese decision making tool. I have translated a book, entitled Understanding the I Ching, by Cyrille Javary, which was published in June 1997 by Shambhala:

Introduction to the book Understanding the I Ching by Cyrille Javary, translated from French by Kirk McElhearn (published by Shambhala Publications)

About the Author
Cyrille Javary is a leading authority on the I Ching . He is the founder of France's Djohi Center for the Study of the I Ching and the publisher of Hexagrammes, a French journal devoted to I Ching studies.

For his long voyage into the hereafter, the Marquis of Dai brought with him the two most valuable books of his time: the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) and the Yi Jing (I Ching). When his tomb was discovered twenty-two centuries later, the books were still there, written in black ink on long bands of silk. These two books are still, as then, the two pillars of Chinese thought.

In spite of its mysterious depth, the master work of Taoism is familiar to us, if not entirely accessible. But the Yi Jing has remained in the abyss. Its symbols can be seen on the covers of the finest works of Chinese philosophy, but few authors do more than simply point out its importance as one of the foundations of Chinese thought. It is the Phantom of sinology. Yet the Yi Jing is not an insignificant text. The name of this, the great book of yin and yang, means The Classic of Change. Since the time when the Marquis of Dai lived (around 168 BCE), it has maintained a place in Chinese civilization unequaled by any other work. It would be difficult to find a text that holds the same importance in western civilization. The Bible holds a similar seniority, and some of the works of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers present fundamental ideas, but there is no one text that can combine both of these characteristics.

How could such a work have been ignored in the west for so long? The answer is simple: the Yi Jing is considered to be a work of divination. The book is said to be, "a means of understanding, even controlling, future events." One might as well call it a book of fortune telling, a superstitious relic of pre-logical thinking that could not interest any sensible person in the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, the Yi Jing has interested many people, and sensible people at that. The architect Ioeh Ming Pei, who designed the recent additions to the Louvre Museum in Paris, and in particular, the glass pyramids in its courtyard, as well as the main terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, has been a member of the French Academy of Beaux Arts since 1984. He ended his inception speech with a quote from the Classic of Changes. The Nobel prize winning biologist FranÁois Jacob, in an article entitled, "Linguistic models in biology", has suggested that his colleagues explore the Yi Jing in order to discover the principles they had not found in linguistics, and are needed to fully explain the process of genetic coding. Fritjof Capra has cited its relationship to modern physics, showing how the Yi Jing prefigured modern S-matrix theory. Mention should also be made of artists, such as the composer John Cage, or the choreographers Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Carlson, who have based many of their works on the ideas of change and chance events that they discovered in the Yi Jing.

One can not forget, of course, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, who saw in the Yi Jing the deepest example of his theory of archetypes, as well as a model for his ideas on synchronicity. But it is important not to neglect all those who use the Yi Jing to practically solve personal or professional problems. These people refine their decision making process by dint of the advice given in this amazingly active book of wisdom. In China, they can be counted by generations, while in the west, they are counted, without doubt, by millions. But we are deprived of the experiences of the former by their language, and of the latter by a certain sense of shame. Fortune telling! That is the general opinion of the Yi Jing. Because of this, it remains, as a certain nuclear physicist working at the CERN in Switzerland said, "a charming intellectual mistress, that we are ashamed to go out in public with."

The goal of this book is not to explain the Yi Jing to those who already know it, but to give those who are interested by it some new information (chapter 1), discuss its history and its importance in China (chapter 2), the current importance of its individual use (chapter 3), and the perspectives that it brings forth as far as chance is concerned (chapter 4).

The reader will also find, at the end of this volume, a glossary of the specific terms used in this book, and a brief description of the meaning that the Chinese generally give to each of the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Changes.

There is also a glossary of terms relative to the Yi Jing, as well as a summary of the meanings of the 64 hexagrams.

Kirk McElhearn

http://www.mcelhearn.com/yijing.html
 

hilary

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Thanks for the reminder of this one, Chris. I've been wondering if I should get it for years. Any reviews?
 

AltVis8D

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Wanted: Venn Diagram: Francosphere/Anglosphere with regard to Zhouyi

I have knocked my head against this yili, meaning/principle community before (New Age and literalism, holding hands, the congress of dogs & cats in the streets...:brickwall::eek::rolleyes::bag:), being solidly xiangshu, image/number in my approach; at the very least, I take Images as the fundamental reference or ground in my own work;

I am interested however, as a provincial American with a limited familiarity of French, in some particular aspects of the francophonic literature. If Javary's translation is so much like Karcher, then I'm afraid I will have to let it pass: archetypal psychology is an Oroboros of meaninglessness to me; at best, it is a yili attempt to co-opt and subjugate the functional precedence of xiangshu (having said all of that, I would like to stipulate that xiangshu and yili aren't mutually exclusive, and in fact are contextually, relationally interdependent... I'm bound to give vent to my iconoclastic bias, in any event).

On the other hand, there are French interpretations which do interest me: the 1881 translation of the Yi King, by P.L.F. Philastre, for example, which is introduced in a 1992 edition by Francois Jullien. I leave it to others to suffer the anxiety of influence effected by the Philastre translation - it comes from the same epoch as Legge and then Wilhelm, and that's all I really need, personally.

But I am interested in the Introduction by Francois Jullien. Jullien published an interpretation of his own, in 1993, of the Yijing commentaries of Wang Fuzhi (aka Wang Fu Chih) from the 17th c. The book is called, 'Figures de l'immanence', 'Pour une lecture philosophique du Yi king'.

So I have been studying as many sources in English on Wang Fuzhi as I can get my hands on, which are unfortunately few and far between. Jullien has been translated fullsomely into English - all but this, one of his earlier works. His 'La propension des choses: Pour une histoire de l'efficacite en Chine' was published in 1992, and arrived in the Anglosphere as, 'The Propensity of Things; Toward a History of Efficacy in China', in 1999.

'Propensity' is interesting, and has references to Wang in it, but there is little or no direct reference to the Yijing in any of Jullien's subsequent work-in-translation (or in 'Propensity', for that matter), as far as I can see - and this covers about 5 or so titles in sum [edit: the exception is Jullien's own latest work-in-translation, 'The Silent Transformations', 2011, from 'Les Transformations Silencieuses', 2009, in which Jullien cites Wilhelm/Baynes (!), as well as several references to his own 'Figures de l'immanence'].

To shift the thread a little then, is there anybody with a Francophone's grasp of Wang Fuzhi in here/out there?

Much obliged and adieu,
(my old username seems to have got erased)
 
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Sparhawk

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From the old Hexagram-8 Mailing List on Javary

Hello everyone,

Javary and his translator, Kirk McElhearn (also participating), was a subject discussed extensively in Hex-8 for about two years. I just got all the mentions of Javary from the archives and made a text file that can be found here: Javary

That's a long read but some good stuff there. BTW, don't bother Kirk with the Yijing these days. He seems to have "retired" from it (or maybe it is the always likable me... :D )

Cheers
 

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