Excellent new I Ching book

[felix]

Just seen your site for the first time and like very much your interactive message boards. Thought I'd let people know about a great new book that has just come out, a scholarly book but extremely readable and well-written:

"The Mandate of Heaven: Hidden History in the I Ching"
by S J Marshall
Curzon Press in Europe, Columbia University Press in the USA.

This book really does lift the lid off the I Ching, showing all sorts of stuff I never imagined was hidden in the oracle. He dates the eclipse in hexagram 55 to June 20, 1070BC, points out King Wu's personal name is hidden in the text and that King Wu witnessed the eclipse and regarded it as an omen to attack the Shang, just after his father King Wen died. The name of the hexagram "Feng" isn't "abundance" at all, it's actually the name of the city King Wen founded as an advance post to attack the Shang! That curious line "Perhaps the army carries corpses in the wagon" should actually be translated in the singular, and that is in fact the corpse of King Wen himself being carried into battle. Did you know hexagram one was about rain magic? Me neither! And hexagram 18 about an ancestral curse? And which city the "empty city" actually is? And who the original "young fool" was? The Mandate of Heaven is an incredible book that completely tells the story of King Wen and where the I Ching really came from and what it is actually about, the very real stories that are in it. I could rave about it forever. I've been using the I Ching for a good decade but knew none of this stuff, and I gather not many academics knew it either. Anyway, I recommend it highly.

Felix

 

[hilary]

Sounds fascinating, thanks for the information!
Some of it I had already heard, but not all.

I will probably add this to the 'recommended books' page after reviewing it - for now, here are some links to the book:
at amazon.com
and at amazon.co.uk

 

[peter]

Very, very interesting historical information. But how it can be applied to purposes of divination? Did Song philosophers know about those facts, and how did it affect on their systems and thoughts?

 

[felix]

No, the Song philosophers didn't know about any of this material. Much has come to light in recent excavations. But this book, rather than being thoroughly "modernist" like Richard Rutt's excellent book (who I believe is a colleague of Marshall's) is a modernist approach to the actual tradition, showing that actually the tradition is not a mere myth to be written off after all but is based on real things that happened, that are actually hidden still in the I Ching preserved like a fly in amber. That has been the problem, in that the I Ching has been layered over with philosophical interpretations, losing sight of the original concrete images. I think you would agree that an original concrete image is actually of much greater use in forming an interpretation of the meaning of a line that what say Cheng Yi said the line meant (for as much as his interpretations were excellent). Understanding the dragon ritual in hexagram 1, for instance, a chapter in Marshall's book (which is based on the inscriptions on a handful of Shang dynasty inscribed miniatures of dragons discovered by Lionel Hopkins in the 1930s, but universally ignored since), has given me a much greater insight into the text, oddly actually confirming much that I thought anyway, but intuitively. I think the more you know about the actual images used in the oracle, the more you find a way to apply this information in practical divination. But I'm only just starting to do that, I might remember something from the book and look up the hexagram in the index to remind me and it may provide a new way of looking that seems closer to the actual situation before me than a commentary divorced from these images. His chapter on hexagram 44 and 47 was actually published earlier in "The Oracle" journal, as a preview, and there the interpretation he developed of the third line of hexagram 47 I just thought stunningly poetic. I just had a sudden flash of what he saw in the line and it was nothing I had ever imagined. Something really profound. I never really understood that line at all before. That one isn't "historical", just, well, penetrating. He seems to have sat down for a very long time and seriously asked himself "What does this book really mean?" I think his work may cause a few ripples in the I Ching world.

 

[hilary]

I think that with sufficient ingenuity and imagination we can use both the accumulated layers of wisdom and the earliest roots. I've a feeling that trees work best the right way up... or that, if you prefer, when you have a beautiful amber brooch (complete with fly!) there's no need to rip it from its mountings. If you see what I mean.

It can be a real challenge to fit it all together - I keep hoping someone will write a version that does this for me.

'Divination', or 'perseverance'? 'Sincerity', or 'captives'? Maybe(in the days before CNN) when you returned from what you claimed had been a great victory, captives were proof of your good faith? (Just a thought.)

Anyway, I have got Marshall's book on order, thank you. Hopefully it will arrive in time for me to read and review it before September's newsletter!

 

[candid]

This is interesting. I too have been looking more closely on the characters and primary images and judgments. Although Wilhelm?s commentaries have proven priceless, they are commentaries, after all. The images of triagrams working together alone, are what I meditate on. And these I believe, are the inspirations originally granted within the collective unconscious mind which the I Ching taps into.

I love the amber fly analogy! Seeing through time and the changes within it, still clearly seeing the fly within it. Yes, the amber gives it luster and depth, protects it, magnifies it. But before all that, was the fly.

 

[felix]

I agree that an intuitive blend of the Wilhelm commentaries (mostly a summation from Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi, Song dynasty philosophers) and the latest research is the best way to go. In some cases it may mean captives, in other cases truth. But "perserverance" appears to be definitely a much later accretion. That said, "perserverance furthers" has become a great piece of advice for living life. The I Ching is all the things it as become down the ages, not simply what it was originally, but it is useful to know what it was originally. It is the "Book of Changes" after all! I like your understanding of the fly in amber analogy Candid, a nice way to put it. By the way, Marshall shows that the trigrams antedated the hexagrams quite convincingly. There doesn't appear to be much evidence for the trigrams before the Han dynasty. Steve Moore's book "The Trigrams of Han" goes into this in a lot of depth, now out of print.

 

[hilary]

"Marshall shows that the trigrams antedated the hexagrams"
don't you mean "postdated"?

I've bought and read the book, by the way. I like his imaginative enthusiasm as well as the research!

 

[felix]

Quite right Hilary, I should stick to Anglo-Saxon, the trigrams came after the hexagrams. Are you going to review it on your site?

By the way, just received an email about the acceptance of a proposal to encode all the 64 hexagrams, the 2 monograms, and 4 digrams into Unicode, the trigrams are already there. The proposal has an appendix, mainly to show to the Unicode committee that hexagrams feature in texts widely, but there is an extract from the author of the proposal that has a fascinating interpretation of hexagram 51. It can be downloaded as a PDF. Here's the email:

****************************************************
The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) has given formal approval to my
proposal:

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~rscook/pdf/N2363.pdf

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>From the list of resolutions from the UTC meeting earlier this month:

Scripts and New Characters

[88-M4] Motion: The UTC accepts the addition of two monogram and four
digram characters at 2672..2677, and sixty four hexagram characters at
4DC0 to 4DFF, with the character names as specified in L2/01-283.

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Please forward this message to interested parties.

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Richard Cook
Linguistics Department
University of California, Berkeley