Gregory Whincup's "Rediscovering the I Ching"?

[Liselle]

they seem pretty 'ink-blotty' to me

I see what you mean, but there are some boundaries, I think there have to be. The 64 hexagrams aren't the same. Themes will overlap - 35, 46, and 53 all mean going forward in some way - but you can still distinguish one from the other.

Individual readings might be another matter. If you cast a reading, got hexagram 4, opened a translation that called it "Dodder" instead of "Not Knowing," and "dodder" reminded you of "daughter" and that helped you with your reading - very clever. That's an oracle pulling out all its stops, maybe. Like that example that floats around where someone cast 12 to 34 or whatever hexagrams, and the phone rang at 12:34 p.m.

That won't ever mean that hexagram 4 should be named "Daughter." (Not the best example because 4 can certainly represent young children, but still.)

If "fish" is ever helpful to you in readings, fine. And brainstorming is a good thing. I remember a tarot class I took many years ago, when I didn't know anything about divination, and the teacher had us just look at a card and tell our partner everything and anything we noticed about it, very formlessly. With hindsight most of what we said had absolutely nothing to do with what the card was supposed to mean and was pretty useless, but it did get us to pay close attention to the picture.

 

[IrfanK]

Thanks, Liselle, Hilary and David, for your fascinating inputs. It all confirms in my mind that this idea that you can, with surgical precision, remove the polluting layers of Confucianism and Daoism (and Jungism, for that matter) from the Yijing and be left with a clean, pure text from the Zhou dynasty is a bit of a fantasy.

I really do agree with that statement by Redmond, et al, that "the received version is the best single witness to the Zhouyi." Rather than attempting to peel back the Confucianism and Daoism, I think you can use them, be aware of them for what they are, which is an attempt by other people to understand the Zhouyi from their own perspectives.

The contradictions and conflicts between the layers are part of the process. So, look at the layers and be aware of them. Make sense of the contradictions between the conflicting ideas throughout the centuries. Or try to, anyway.

That sounds like a lot of fun. Should I buy it?

Hmmm. If it cost less than ten dollars, I'd say yes. The list price is a bit over the top. It was designed as an undergraduate text book to enable academics to teach introductory courses on the history of the I Ching. It does set out all the major issues quite neatly and cleanly without taking a very strong position on any of them (as you can see from the quote about Bradford's critique of the modernists). I doubt it would have anything in it that you don't already know and haven't thought about, but I can see it would be a useful resource for you as a teacher, to explain issues to students.

 

[IrfanK]

So, why not 'dodder' as a fish? Or even 'dodder' as daughter, as in fodders and dodders? I think that if I did a reading, and 'Dodder Fish' gave me a useful and helpful response, that's what matters.

Hehe. Well, we've already had that argument over at the forum for Harmen's class. No point rehashing it all here.

There was a pub called "The Perseverance" that I used to frequent as a student. Perhaps when I get a judgement like "Perseverance furthers," the Yi is telling me that I should find some smoke-filled dive filled with street poets shouting gibberish at each other? Hehe. But lets not get started.

 

[Liselle]

Okay, I deleted my post, we can clean up the thread.

 

[IrfanK]

Crouch says the Zhou struggled with all this, the idea of human sacrifice and what to do with captives.

From what I can see, historical accounts written much later, at a time when human sacrifice had clearly become a lot more dubious, described the late Shang as extremely bloodthirsty and the Zhou as ... well, just the odd killing on Christmas day and Thanksgiving, or something like that. But then you get the same problem all over again. The later commentators obviously wanted to justify the replacement of the Shang with the Zhou, so they probably used ideological ideas current at their own time to explain why the mandate of heaven had been withdrawn. Whether they were really much less violent people is ... shrouded in the mists of time. History is written by the victors, or their descendants and fans. Maybe, as David suggests, there were economic or political reasons for dialing back on human sacrifice? Who really knows?

Some of the modernist writers have suggested that the more Confucian, latter day commentators were uneasy with the idea of the idealized Zhou engaging in wide-spread human sacrifice, which is why they liked to gloss "fu" as "sincerity," rather than "captives (intended for sacrifice)." That doesn't sound too implausible as a hypothesis.

 

[Sparhawk]

That sounds like a lot of fun. Should I buy it?

Yup. Stiff price nowadays but worth it, IMO

 

[Sparhawk]

Note: this conversation took place at least 15 years ago. I may be misremembering it completely. Does anyone have a handy copy of MWD to check?

I remember when we were discussing Pearson way back then. I was never thrilled with her translation as a whole but she had some interesting points of view. Re MWD you are talking about Shaughnessy's translation? I can look in it if you are interested.

 

[hilary]

I remember when we were discussing Pearson way back then. I was never thrilled with her translation as a whole but she had some interesting points of view. Re MWD you are talking about Shaughnessy's translation? I can look in it if you are interested.

Thank you. If you could just straighten out whether I'm remembering this the right way round - is 24's fu the same one as in the received text?

From what I can see, historical accounts written much later, at a time when human sacrifice had clearly become a lot more dubious, described the late Shang as extremely bloodthirsty and the Zhou as ... well, just the odd killing on Christmas day and Thanksgiving, or something like that.

But then you get the same problem all over again. The later commentators obviously wanted to justify the replacement of the Shang with the Zhou, so they probably used ideological ideas current at their own time to explain why the mandate of heaven had been withdrawn. Whether they were really much less violent people is ... shrouded in the mists of time. History is written by the victors, or their descendants and fans. Maybe, as David suggests, there were economic or political reasons for dialing back on human sacrifice? Who really knows?

Some of the modernist writers have suggested that the more Confucian, latter day commentators were uneasy with the idea of the idealized Zhou engaging in wide-spread human sacrifice, which is why they liked to gloss "fu" as "sincerity," rather than "captives (intended for sacrifice)." That doesn't sound too implausible as a hypothesis.

True.

Pleco, by the way, gives 'capturing a child' as the original meaning for fu minus radicals. I prefer 'hatchling', on the whole, but then I lack the hardiness to be a Bronze Age diviner.

Which opens up the next question: if we could establish beyond doubt that it meant 'captives' when it was first written, and it has meant 'sincerity' for maybe a couple of millennia, what is it saying when you cast Hexagram 61 today?

 

[Sparhawk]

Thank you. If you could just straighten out whether I'm remembering this the right way round - is 24's fu the same one as in the received text?

24/KWS = 39/MWD but the text of the MWD is very similar to the received text, including the name, 復:

 

[IrfanK]

Which opens up the next question: if we could establish beyond doubt that it meant 'captives' when it was first written, and it has meant 'sincerity' for maybe a couple of millennia, what is it saying when you cast Hexagram 61 today?

Hmm. I think you could keep it in mind that it's an ambiguous word, and it's meant different things over time. You might be staring at Wilhelm, puzzled and confused, and then all of a sudden get a flash that it would make more sense as "captives." But it's a pretty big if. When you say "beyond a doubt," I'm pretty sure a lot of people would still have a doubt, regardless of any clever evidence anyone presented on either side. Perhaps new translations would start using "captives," and then you'd have people ranting at each other on your forum about which one made more sense.

 

[Sparhawk]

BTW, 孚 appears 42 times in the received Zhouyi... Also, Harmen, bless his soul, wrote extensively on this character, years ago:

Another take on ‘you fu 有孚’

(To see all Chinese characters in this article use Firefox with the Hanazono font.) A few years ago I wrote an article about the meaning of fu 孚. It was appreciated by many readers as it explained …

www.yjcn.nl

 

[Liselle]

(Edit - have overlapped with Irfan a little bit; was writing this while he posted)

Which opens up the next question: if we could establish beyond doubt that it meant 'captives' when it was first written, and it has meant 'sincerity' for maybe a couple of millennia, what is it saying when you cast Hexagram 61 today?

I've wondered about that sort of thing. Not stemming from this, but from two things I don't understand---

(pause to say I don't understand half of this thread, so please please tell me when I'm being ridiculous )

---(1) ancient vs. modern meanings, (2) always using the same English word for the same Chinese character.

(1) Words change. What if we didn't know that "blahblah" in Shakespeare meant something completely different from today? Wouldn't that be useless? Don't we have to know what "blahblah" meant in 1600? (So... how useful are modern Chinese dictionaries? (added - and are there any good ancient ones?)

(2) It's perfectly possible in English for the same four letters b-l-u-e to mean a color on one page and "sad" on another. There's an association, fine, but you can't talk about a sad sky and expect anyone to think you mean a blue sky; it'd be the opposite. You can't just go through and replace b-l-u-e with "sad." Is Chinese not like that? (Just a yes or no is fine, it's only a question.)

 

[Sparhawk]

You can't just go through and replace b-l-u-e with "sad." Is Chinese not like that? (Just a yes or no is fine, it's only a question.)

Absolutely. Chinese characters at large (hyperbole warning...), especially ancient characters, are polysemous and their meaning are contextual. That's why we keep producing translations. Heck, we are still producing translations of ancient Greek and Hebrew and those are alphabetic scripts!

Something curious I found--well, I didn't--is that neither 孚 or 俘 are glossed in Schuessler's

 

[Liselle]

Okay, thanks. (I don't know a single thing about translation of any kind, if you haven't guessed.)

So... why is it considered good when Yijing translations do this, use the same English word for the same character throughout? At least I have a vague impression it is, such consistency seems to be accompanied by an implied or ...

 

[Sparhawk]

Well, there is a certain consensus in the way translations have been made regarding the general meaning of a given "phrase" as opposed to given "characters." Not sure if it is good or bad but what results is what makes sense to the translators when they try to piece together a context. Phrases are the forest while the trees are the characters and most translators end up saying pretty much the same thing in different ways. The fun starts when those same translators start paying attention to the Chinese characters themselves and their polysemous richness when isolated. It becomes something like the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics: You may know the position of a particle but not its momentum or viceversa. Once you find a consensus that a given character means something specific contextually with the rest of the other characters in a phrase, it is hard to "unsee" that. But remember that for about 2000 years, we have been dealing with Han and post-Han exegesis. Their writing standards differ quite a bit from anything pre-Qin even if most characters were pre-existing. Wilhelm, Legge, Harlez and other Victorian and early 20th Century translators worked on their translations based on that material. Even Chinese exegetes and scholars until the same period did so. They are what at the beginning of the thread were called "Traditionalists". When the OBI were discovered in 1899 it opened a whole universe of new meaning. Chinese scholars are still working in translating that corpus of those writings into modern Chinese. Recent translators, those starting in the second half of the last century, started applying that "new" semantic knowledge of the old writing system. Funnily enough, they are considered "Modernist" in this context because they added those modern findings to their toolbox when in fact they are using older material.

 

[dfreed]

... (a) statement by Redmond, et al, that "the received version is the best single witness to the Zhouyi." Rather than attempting to peel back the Confucianism and Daoism, I think you can use them, be aware of them for what they are, which is an attempt by other people to understand the Zhouyi from their own perspectives.

When you say a 'statement by Redmond', this implies that one person said it, but then you add 'et al' which makes it seem that more than one person said this? Or is the 'et al' a way of saying that you and probably (or possibly) others agree with what Redmond is saying here?

And this idea of later layers being an entry or 'single best witness' to the Zhouyi might be true, or you may end up with a Confucian, et al. version of the Zhouyi, which may have been the point of the later commentaries to being with. Who's to say?

Perhaps when I get a judgement like "Perseverance furthers," the Yi is telling me that I should find some smoke-filled dive filled with street poets shouting gibberish at each other?

If you had been using Rutt or Hatcher, you wouldn't have to worry about ending up at your local pub - since they don't use the word 'perseverance' in their translations. Think of all the money you'd save on bar/pub bills by investing in Rutt!

Besides this, I don't fully know how divination or the Yi works: it could be if you genuinely interpreted 'perseverance furthers' as a sign you should visit your local pub or bar, maybe that's a helpful and useful response, and if followed that advice perhaps you'd meet your true love, or the street poets' 'shouting gibberish' would inspire you in some creative way, or that this visit to a bar - and the ensuing brawl, vomiting, and blackout - would allow you to hit 'rock bottom' and finally deal with your alcohol addiction.

Best, D

 

[hilary]

24/KWS = 39/MWD but the text of the MWD is very similar to the received text, including the name, 復:
View attachment 3516

Thank you. That probably means that what I remember her saying is that 'fu' as in 24 is used sometimes as a substitute for 'fu' as in 61.

 

[dfreed]

So... why is it considered good when Yijing translations do this, use the same English word for the same character throughout?

I'm not sure that it is. As Sparhawk noted above, 'Chinese characters at large (hyperbole warning...), especially ancient characters, are polysemous and their meaning are contextual.' So, Chinese characters can have multiple meanings and a lot of 'what they mean' is determined by context and placement (syntax) - not to mention how meanings change and are interpreted over time. For example, in Hatcher:

For the character Jian4 (0860) you find it as:
'a dragon appears ...' in 1.2
'rewarding to encounter ... ' in 1.4
'observe a ground of dragons ...' in 1.7.

For Cong2 (6919), we find:
'someone engaged in royal service' in 6.3
'then follow, (and) hold them fast' in 17.6
'alliances will conform to your thinking' in 31.4.

And that's just a very few examples I found. In some cases the meanings seem related or similar; in other instances, not so much.

Best, D

 

[hilary]

Hmm. I think you could keep it in mind that it's an ambiguous word, and it's meant different things over time. You might be staring at Wilhelm, puzzled and confused, and then all of a sudden get a flash that it would make more sense as "captives." But it's a pretty big if. When you say "beyond a doubt," I'm pretty sure a lot of people would still have a doubt, regardless of any clever evidence anyone presented on either side. Perhaps new translations would start using "captives," and then you'd have people ranting at each other on your forum about which one made more sense.

People ranting at each other on my forum? Don't be ridiculous.

And yes, it is an intentionally overweight 'if'.

I've wondered about that sort of thing. Not stemming from this, but from two things I don't understand---

(pause to say I don't understand half of this thread, so please please tell me when I'm being ridiculous )

---(1) ancient vs. modern meanings, (2) always using the same English word for the same Chinese character.

(1) Words change. What if we didn't know that "blahblah" in Shakespeare meant something completely different from today? Wouldn't that be useless? Don't we have to know what "blahblah" meant in 1600? (So... how useful are modern Chinese dictionaries? (added - and are there any good ancient ones?)

Modern Chinese dictionaries can be pretty misleading - but also ever so interesting, looking at how the character's use now. Wenlin comes with an 'etymological dictionary of old Chinese' and Pleco comes with the 'Outlier' dictionary that includes 'original meanings'. And Richard Sears' site offers 'original meanings' too - often different.

To read Shakespeare, yes, we had better know what 'blahblah' meant in 1600, because that's what Shakespeare was saying, then. But Yi keeps on saying things now, after all those millennia of 'zhen' meaning 'constancy' and 'fu' meaning truth and 'ming yi' meaning 'brightness hidden'. So it's far from clear which meaning is the 'authentic' one.

Okay, thanks. (I don't know a single thing about translation of any kind, if you haven't guessed.)

So... why is it considered good when Yijing translations do this, use the same English word for the same character throughout? At least I have a vague impression it is, such consistency seems to be accompanied by an implied or ...

As David just said, it isn't necessarily considered good, or not from the point of view of translation. But I appreciate it, because it can make it easier to see what Yi is doing. 'Great possessions gained' in 16.4, for instance - that looks very much like a deliberate reference back to 14. Wilhelm/Baynes has a better, less clunky translation: 'Possession in great measure' for the name of 14, 'he achieves great things' in 16.4 - but now you can't see the reference. It would be nice if an English translation could do both at once, but it really can't. Bradford's two volumes are probably the best solution.

When you say a 'statement by Redmond', this implies that one person said it, but then you add 'et al' which makes it seem that more than one person said this? Or is the 'et al' a way of saying that you and probably (or possibly) others agree with what Redmond is saying here?

It's a standard way of referring to a book with multiple authors.

 

[Liselle]

To read Shakespeare, yes, we had better know what 'blahblah' meant in 1600, because that's what Shakespeare was saying, then. But Yi keeps on saying things now

Oh sure, sorry. Shakespeare isn't trying to be an oracle. Ding doesn't just mean , nor will it always mean modern pots and pans, a vessel can be a lot of things in readings including abstractions.

I'll have try to think of better examples.

As David just said, it isn't necessarily considered good, or not from the point of view of translation. But I appreciate it, because it can make it easier to see what Yi is doing. 'Great possessions gained' in 16.4, for instance - that looks very much like a deliberate reference back to 14. Wilhelm/Baynes has a better, less clunky translation: 'Possession in great measure' for the name of 14, 'he achieves great things' in 16.4 - but now you can't see the reference. It would be nice if an English translation could do both at once, but it really can't. Bradford's two volumes are probably the best solution.

Ah. Makes perfect sense, thanks.

 

[dfreed]

This discussion brings to mind a scene from one of the early episodes of the television comedy '30 Rock'. In it one of the writers, Frank, is giving instructions to people dressed as a robot and three bears for one of the comedy sketches. The head writer Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey) tells him they can't afford three bears, so he can only keep one bear for his sketch. Frank complains that people won't think it's realistic that one bear can beat up a robot, to which Liz replies:

"You're trying to bring logic to the Robot-Bear sketch?"

And that sometimes seems a bit like what we're doing:

We pose a question or query (which may need to be correctly stated, or it might only need to be a 'blah' utterance); we then toss coins, or fondle yarrow stalks, or play with beads, or press 'Enter' on a computer keyboard, etc. and we get a response in the form of a six-line figure (hexagram) made up of four kinds of solid and broken lines.

We then apply any number of methods to interpret or understand what these six-line figures mean, which can include: reading from any of dozens or hundreds of translations (including translations which are Taoist, Confucian, Shamanistic, Mythic, Magical, Jungian, new, old, complete, total, original, etc.); or we look for meaning within the two 3-line figures (trigrams) that make up the hexagrams; ... or we apply a variety of methods which give us yet more hexagrams, trigrams, or lines - the shadow, ideal, opposite, change operators, pairs, nuclears, surrounding, line pathways ... or we look for line meanings, or correct or incorrect line placement, or if the lines fall within the Heavenly, Earthly or Human (sancai) realms, or ....

And out of all that, we come up with what? A correct and/or logical answer or response? I mean talk about 'ink-blotty' (which is perhaps its own form of divination?).

And of course, for those of us involved here, this all has a certain logic and makes sense in some mysterious way. And we also want to have boundaries, guidelines, methods, etc. that work for us - but maybe it makes no sense that these should be (or need to be) logical.

So, I come back to one of the criteria I shared above:

That in summary, it - 'it' being a particular translation, or method, or more generally how we make use of the Yi - has the flavor of:

"A crane calls on a shaded slope, its chicks call in reply.
Here we have a brimming cup: together we’ll drink it dry."
(Rutt, Line 61.2)


Best, D

 

[dfreed]

It's a standard way of referring to a book with multiple authors.

Okay, (but of course) and thanks for clarifying. @IrfanK - I'd be interested to know what book or article that quote is from; his The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation ... seems to be authored by him alone, while Teaching the I Ching is co-authored.

Best, D.

 

[Liselle]

David, when you put it that way, I never want to do another reading again (also notice how it's post no. 51)

 

[dfreed]

David, when you put it that way, I never want to do another reading again

That was not my intention.

 

[Liselle]

Yes, I know.

 

[moss elk]

Once or twice I have had interesting experiences with the "close eyes, open book, point" sort of thing, but if I recall it was the words' actual meanings that suggested something.

Should try something like that again. It's kind of reinvigorating.

Hi,
The trouble with such bibliomancy as you describe is that the page flipper may unconsciously affect the 'flip-reading'
(Knowing Yi, then reaching for a page in a certain place of the book: without even realizing it.)
The coins leaving ones hands eliminates this 'influence pitfall.', or reaching for an answer you'd like to hear.

 

[Liselle]

Completely agree - we know what order the hexagrams are in! When I tried it it wasn't an I Ching book, I just blindly picked a book from a bookshelf and blindly opened it and pointed. I wouldn't do it for anything important, either, it was more just what message might there be right now, and it turned out to mean something as I recall.

 

[Sparhawk]

Okay, (but of course) and thanks for clarifying. @IrfanK - I'd be interested to know what book or article that quote is from; his The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation ... seems to be authored by him alone, while Teaching the I Ching is co-authored.

Best, D.

If you are talking about the quote about Hatcher, it is in the latter, coauthored with Tze-Ki Hon, page 127.

Amazon.com: Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes) (AAR Teaching Religious Studies) eBook : Redmond, Geoffrey, Hon, Tze-Ki, Hon, Tze-Ki: Books

Buy Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes) (AAR Teaching Religious Studies): Read Books Reviews - Amazon.com

www.amazon.com

 

[dfreed]

f you are talking about the quote about Hatcher, it is in the latter, coauthored with Tze-Ki Hon, page 127.

Thanks Sparhawk. I didn't think the quote was about Hatcher; IrfanK says it is ...

... a statement by Redmond, et al, that "the received version is the best single witness to the Zhouyi."

But it seems you may be talking about same thing. Best, D.

 

[Sparhawk]

Thanks Sparhawk. I didn't think the quote was about Hatcher; IrfanK says it is ...

... a statement by Redmond, et al, that "the received version is the best single witness to the Zhouyi."

But it seems you may be talking about same thing. Best, D.

Yup, it is. Same page.