Benebell Wen’s I Ching

Outside the boxes

When I first heard about Benebell Wen’s I Ching, I thought it sounded unpromising. An I Ching book by someone who had already published on tarot, who maintains a website with sections on feng shui, numerology, Western astrology and esoteric Taoism as well as tarot and the I Ching, all while working full time as a corporate lawyer. This was going to be one of those sad little pamphlet-sized offerings of undigested, rehashed Wilhelm/Baynes, right?

(pause)

Er, no. (That’s 900+ pages.)

Also, take a look at the table of contents, included in Amazon’s excerpt from the Kindle version. Here’s how it begins:

…and it continues; do have a look. (The Kindle version is ridiculously cheap in the UK at the moment, by the way.)

So this really does not fit into the box I had ready for it, or indeed any box I can think of. That chapter on Yixue suggests why: Benebell Wen is very well aware of how many different ways there have been of engaging with and understanding the Yi over the millennia. She’s not a disciple of any of them, and sees no reason not to draw on them all, or find new ones.

I’d recommend reading what she has to say about the book on her own website, where she calls it both an ‘I Ching reference book’ and a ‘magical grimoire’. She also shares some generous excerpts to give you a flavour of it, including its unique ‘practicums’.

Why buy it?

Again – just look at the contents list. That Yixue chapter ranges across Yi’s history through China, East Asia and Europe, up to the present day. She’s especially good at bringing her knowledge to life. There are many vivid stories from myth and legend, all great imagination food for readings. I’d never before read about Yu the Great receiving jade tablets of magical secrets from Fuxi in a cave, for instance. (It’s odd she doesn’t mention this one when she gets to 62.5!)

I especially appreciate her portraits of the trigrams, with associated immortals and Feng Shui/ magical/ meditative practices. That whole practical, ‘practicum’ element of the book, the ‘grimoire’, is something I’ve not seen elsewhere, certainly not with these strong Taoist roots.

The introduction doesn’t attempt to separate out tradition from history – it tells both in a single story – and so we end up with yin and yang appearing at the beginning, and the Early Heaven bagua before Later Heaven. (Her videos on Youtube have the occasional error, too, though they’re still well worth watching.) But better vivid, living tradition with some inaccuracies than dry-as-dust academic correctness, perhaps?

That rich imagination-food continues throughout the translation, which is interspersed with panels telling all kinds of stories from myth and history. And these are Benebell’s own versions of the stories: 55’s (possible) eclipse comes with a magus who fails to reverse it and has his arm broken in punishment at line 3. Wang Hai shows up in hexagrams 23 and 56, but he’s innocent of all wrong-doing, except perhaps in a remote footnote. She’s not just following in the footsteps of academics, and there will definitely be associations here you haven’t seen elsewhere. Hexagram 54, for instance, will tell you about Tai Si, but also Chang-Er, who went to the moon. 44.5 comes with a page about ‘Jiang Ziya, the white muskmelon’.

She presents all these as associations and possibilities, never as the One True Meaning. I imagine she’s much too aware of the different meanings lines have held for different people over the centuries to fall into that trap. So her account of Hexagram 55 ends with a panel on eclipses, with their dates, but notes that whether the text refers to either ‘is a matter for speculation’. Which is good, because ‘here is what this hexagram is about’ is just not how readings work.

Translation troubles

(Sadly, there are some.)

No Oracle/ Image

Benebell does not translate the Oracle/Judgement and Image in their entirety. Instead, you get bits of each, interspersed with her commentary, and all blended together. Most Yijing translations use different typefaces to differentiate between translation and commentary – and she does the same with the moving line texts, but not with Oracle and Image. Here, the bold text is a mish-mash of translation and commentary.

Here’s Hexagram 28, as an example. She translates the whole as ‘Undertake the Great’, not ‘excess’ or ‘transition’ or ‘crossing the line’. (She’s not at all consistent in her translation of guo – you wouldn’t know that 62 is the small version of the same action.) After a summary of how she interprets the hexagram as a whole, comes –

The lake rises over the trees; marsh submerging wood. Embarking on a great endeavor. The sage is independent and fearless, ever concerned for the world. Let the heart be stable and calm, no matter what conditions endeavor to challenge it. A fragile, unstable roof beam – a critical situation.
Renouncing the world you knew. Expelling melancholy. It is a tipping point. You are reaching critical mass.
Yet fortune favors the inquirer – 利有攸往 (li you you wang). Undertaking a great challenge is likely to yield success, so proceed with confidence.
Take the transformative path. It is a turning point in your life.

There’s no way you could reconstruct the original text from this – which is a shame, because the original has its own internal logic:

‘Great Exceeding, the ridgepole warps.
Fruitful to have a direction to go.
Creating success.’

That sounds to me as though it’s useful to have somewhere to go because of the state of the ridgepole. And likewise with the Image: the original has a prevailing theme of being alone, withdrawing, which is diluted or demoted in her version.

Oddnesses and inconsistencies

The translation of the lines is full of interesting ideas, and some quite odd ones, but none of them seems to be consistently applied through the book. Again and again, I come across an intriguing translation that makes me sit up and take notice, look to see what she’s made of the same word or words elsewhere, and find there is no similarity at all: it’s as if the lines had been translated by different people.

For instance…

The final three words of 18.1 are 厲終吉 li zhong ji, which I translated, quite conventionally, as, ‘danger, in the end good fortune.’ Benebell has something very different:

‘The whetstone comes to the end of its life – auspicious for the future to come; prosperity and great fortune.’

And she picks up on this in her commentary on the line:

‘The whetstone, or a stone used to sharpen metal tools, axes and daggers, symbolizes refinement and the strengthening of character through friction; it’s also a symbol of cultivating a new warrior king.’

Li, usually translated as an omen word meaning ‘danger’, did also mean ‘whetstone’, and there is no punctuation in the original, so ‘danger; in the end, good fortune’ might also mean ‘whetstone ending; good fortune.’ Certainly the symbolism of the whetstone as she describes it feels like good, rich stuff for readings.

Exactly the same phrase – 厲終吉 li zhong ji – occurs in Hexagram 6 line 3, where she translates:
‘…leads first into trouble, but then to prosperity.’
There’s not a ghost of a whetstone here, nor for any other instances of li that I’ve come across so far in the book.

There are lots of examples like this: she’ll pick a character, draw out its ancient etymological associations, make them central to a translation or interpretation – and then completely lose sight of them for every other instance of the character.

One more example – 5’s crows.

The first bolded sentence for Hexagram 5 is ‘Crows above the clouds.’ There’s a whole page about ‘The crow and the totemic emblem of the Shang because ‘於 Yu is a reference to a bird in the sky.’

Wait… crows? What’s this yu character where she found them?

It’s the one used in all the lines of Hexagram 5 as a preposition after ‘waiting’ (and then after ‘entering’ in line 6): waiting at the outskirts, on the sands, and so on. Obviously it couldn’t be translated here as ‘crow’, and she doesn’t attempt that – but she does make the crow a core part of the hexagram’s meaning.

If I’m reading the dictionary correctly, 於 could mean ‘crow’ when pronounced differently; she hasn’t invented this. But the word is used liberally throughout the Zhouyi as a preposition, including in every line of Hexagram 53 in exactly the same way as in the lines of Hexagram 5. (The wild geese gradually progress yu the shore, the rocks, and so on.) I didn’t manage to count all the occurrences of yu in the book, but there are more than sixty. Not so much as a feather of a crow accompanies any of them in translation or commentary.

I’m left feeling as though this is partly a translation, partly a riff on individual character associations – not connected with the character’s meaning in the sentence, and not part of any decision for the translation or interpretation as a whole.

I don’t know why she’s done this, but I’m going to hazard a guess that perhaps this has to do with her experiences as a diviner. (She does use the Yi for readings.) I think singling out a character’s associations in a reading can work: there could be a single moment of synchronicity when it’s revelatory for Hexagram 5 to remind you of crows.

So… perhaps these associations come from such one-off reading experiences? I’m just not persuaded that they belong in a book people will consult for every reading. There, I want imagination food, yes, but with consistency, thought through with care. Partly so it won’t send you on wild crow chases unrelated to your reading, and also partly so you can trace real associations from one reading to the next.

(If you cast 44.5 about a topic and later cast 55.5 about something connected, ideally your translation should let you see how Yi is referring back to the previous reading and telling you your story. Benebell has fascinating insight into 44.5 which disappears completely from 2.3 or 55.5.)

Who’s this for?

Sadly, not for beginners, because of its translation troubles. If you’re going to be introduced to the I Ching, you need to start with the I Ching in as direct a translation as possible. (I know it isn’t altogether possible.) Without that, you can never truly connect with the oracle.

It’s a shame, as that generous, eclectic introduction would be a lovely place to start, just to get a sense of the scale of the book and the diversity of approaches available.

But if you’re no longer a beginner, if you have access to a translation or two and would like to explore further and have your ideas about Yi, its meanings and uses and roots, expanded, then definitely buy this one. You’ll love it.

If you look at that ‘this is not a pamphlet’ photo, the pages identified with the grey margins are the translation, and all the rest is background: history, myth, stories, esotericism from Crowley to Taoist magic, trigrams and DNA and Boddhisattvas… the whole technicolor panoply of the I Ching across time and space. (Or at least more of it than I’ve ever seen in one place before.) All this, and a fat bibliography and footnotes.

She uses a great breadth of sources, something that really comes across in the footnotes. Note 47 to the translation refers to an obscure academic paper about an incident in the life of King Wen. Note 48 proposes ritual magic remedies ‘for amplifying Wood and Thunder to counteract the blockading effects of Hexagram 47.’ Note 49 refers to something from Yale University Press. A later footnote tells you in detail how to use 56.1 as a curse. Like I said, I haven’t found a box this book will fit in.

I also appreciate the way she uses all this: the eclipses of 55 being ‘a matter for speculation’; how she suggests a Taoist mystic could ‘repurpose’ 64.4 (where the Thunderer subdues the Demon Country) as spell-crafting instructions. She has lots of ideas, she makes them available, and doesn’t try to nail anything down or claim that she know ‘What It Means’.

I won’t be relying on anything here as a sole source of information, but I also wouldn’t want to miss out on the breadth, depth and richness of it all. Do visit her site and explore.