Yellow is the color of measure and mean.

[stevev]

After reading Andreas Schöter‘s paper on Boolean Algebra and the Yijing, in which he seems follow the practice of rotating Xgrams 90 degrees to the right in order to form binary numbers, I asked the IChing if my practice of rotating them to the left is correct. I received the answers 30.2.4 -> 26, which I call Clarity & Discipline respectively. With a name like that, and the fact that I noticed a thread about 2 and 3 and heads and tails not so long ago, it’s just begging for a thread of it’s own.

PS. I have written to Andreas for clarification, I may have taken him the wrong way round !

 

[bradford]

Stevev-
A few years ago a few people were writing the hexagrams right to left as binary numbers, or turning the gua counterclockwise (Roy Collins was one, with a book on the Fuxi Yijing). Some people were also using 0 as Yang and 1 as Yin, which was a lot more boneheaded. Both are dying breedd though. The emerging standard, which Andreas is following, is left to right, as equivalent to bottom to top, the binary places being 32,16,8,4,2,1, such that Splitting Apart is 000 001, Binary 1. Put into an 8x8 grid, this gives the Fuxi or Xian Tian sequence without any modification. Rotate this clockwise 90 degrees and you have the 64 numbers in columns and rows, the way the Chinese would have written them, top to bottom, right to left

 

[stevev]

Seems to be the way

Yes, that's what he's doing, I would have thought lest significant bit at the bottom, then I'm from the southern hemisphere, what's this I hear about birds flying south for winter ?

 

[stevev]

Was never concerned about the Label

Yin and Yang are interchangable, generally I assign Yang to 1. I just never considered turning the XGrams upside down, or the right way up. There's that damned fixed opinion again !

 

[lindsay]

Stevev -

"Yellow is the color of measure and mean"? Now that sounds more interesting than binary arithmetic (which bores me silly even though I've been a computer geek for thirty years). I've just been thinking about the "yellow skirts" in Hex. 2.5. Do you think yellow really indicates "measure and mean"? Do you think color has any symbolic value in the Yi? There aren't many colors mentioned, are there? I remember, years ago, I was surprised to learn the Vietnamese use the same word for both blue and green. Maybe the ancient Chinese did not see the full spectrum. Wasn't it Laozi who talked about the five colors, the five tones, and the five tastes (v. 12) as though that were all there were? That doesn't sound like nearly enough, does it? Maybe we are talking about sensory deprivation or a failure to discriminate visual/auditory inputs. Could it be the ancient Chinese perceived the world - the color, sound, texture, smell, and taste of the ten thousand things - differently than we do? If that is true, then aren't we thinking about two different worlds in some very fundamental way? And the most intriguing question of all: did the Zhou have plaid?

Lindsay

 

[stevev]

I don't know about skirts,

but my yellow pants are sure reliable and genuine.

Well you can't measure much in the dark.

I think I read somewhere the ancients were color blind, and they only ate meat, hide, hair, blood and dirt.

They didn’t have X and Gamma rays, they were only perceiving surfaces.

I guess you could weave 2 Hexagrams into plaid, I wonder what the binary expression for that is ?

 

[ewald]

Yellow being the color of measure and mean is as far as I'm aware of a Confucian view. Probably not something that was around when the Zhouyi was being written, so interpreting the use of that color that way in the Yi doesn't seem correct to me.

Perhaps the yellow lower garment is made of some kind of undyed material. It could represent something unassuming then.

There are indeed not many colors mentioned in the Yi. Kunst, in his dissertation The Original Yijing, goes as far as to say (p. 214) "Here too the Yi presents a picture which is the most archaic of any received text." There are only the four basic colors of a "primitive four-term color naming system" (white, black, yellow, red).

Kunst doesn't list a second Chinese character meaning "white," that is in 22.4. He does however list the two characters for "red" that are in hexagram 47, that apparently represent different kinds of red (he adds vermillion as a possible meaning to Zhu). It's interesting that a "primitive" color naming system has two different words representing different shades for a particular color.

Kunst often refers to the Shijing (the Book of Odes), as a contemporary text that can shed light on the Yi. I checked whether other color names are present in it, and there are. Green is in Ode 27 (in the title even), blue-green in Ode 91, blue in Ode 96 and there is talk of black silk in Ode 75. Yellow is there too, as in the Yi, and there is yet another shade of red in Ode 10 (deep red).

Apparently the color names of that time were not as primitive as Kunst thought they were.

 

[lindsay]

Hi Ewald -

What you wrote is very interesting. Acutally, yellow is a good color to talk about, because some Yi readers assume there is significance in the fact that yellow was the official imperial color in China. But this association was not established until Han times - you can hardly have an imperial color until you have an emperor.

Regarding the Shijing, it just so happens it contains direct textual evidence bearing on line 2.5. There the Yi mentions huang2 chang2, "yellow skirt". Ode 154.3 identifies chang2 as an article of clothing worn by young noblemen. In the eighth lunar month, according to the Ode, women spin the cloth they need to make these "skirts":

In the eighth month, they begin their spinning: --
They make dark fabrics and yellow [huang2].
Our red manufacture is very brilliant,
It is for the lower robes [chang2] of our young princes. (Legge)

In Ode 27.2, a female lover uses the yellow skirt as a poignant reminder of her loved one:

Green is the upper robe,
Green the upper, and yellow [huang2] the lower garment [chang2]!
The sorrow of my heart, --
How can it be forgotten? (Legge)

So here is an association between "yellow skirts" and young noblemen. The association is strong enough to make a lover's heart to feel a pang of remembrance, and to bring forward the image of women devoting the eighth month to making red and yellow fabric for making such skirts. The whole thing - "yellow skirts" - seems a pretty positive allusion to sexy young men.

If I were a young woman, and if 2.5 came my way, I might suppose a handsome and desirable man is involved in my query. Or at least a potential romance. Yuan2 ji2 - "supreme good fortune" - says the line! I suppose that depends on the circumstances, doesn't it?

Lindsay

 

[ewald]

black and yellow

Hi Lindsay - These are very interesting references. I'd seen Ode 27 before, while trying to understand the meaning of yellow, but never realized that it did give some useful information.

I noticed something else in this text from Ode 154, regarding 2.6. In 2.6, the dragons' blood is supposed to be black (or dark) and yellow. These are uncommon colors for blood. Perhaps that is what dragon's blood is like, but it seems superfluous to mention it. These same colors are mentioned in Ode 154, in "They make dark fabrics and yellow." What if these colors are referring to clothing?

 

[bruce_g]

Might the color yellow represent “equal temperament” or equanimity?

This may interest someone. http://www.cechinatrans.demon.co.uk/ctm-psm.html

 

[ewald]

Comparing colors to the musical scale, one might say that yellow is halfway the color spectrum. Thus it might represent something like “equal temperament.”
However, I wonder whether the Chinese at Zhou times had an awareness of the color spectrum. They must have seen rainbows once in a while, but was that enough to decide on yellow being "halfway?"

It is my impression that the yellow we are talking about is actually yellow brown, ochre or a golden color. It is the color of cows, bronze and sand. It may not really be what we know as the primary color yellow, and thus it is not really the color halfway the rainbow.

As for line 2.6 and Ode 154, blood is usually red, and in the part of Ode 154 that mentions these colors black (dark) and yellow, there's also mention of red. Legge has " Our red manufacture is very brilliant," but I would translate that as something like "Our scarlet openings are very bright." I envision lines of scarlet red around the openings of the garment for the arms, legs and neck.

 

[ewald]

Lindsay - Perhaps this is the line you're trying to format:

七月鳴鵙，
八月載績，
載玄載黃，
我朱孔陽，
為公子裳。

 

[lindsay]

Thanks, Ewald! I still haven't got the knack of posting Chinese characters to the forum yet. I probably don't really need them now.

Here is a transcription of the "yellow skirt" line in Ode 154, the first of the odes of Bin:

zai4 xuan2 zai4 huang2
now dark now yellow

wo3 zhu1 kong3 yang2
our red very bright [note that kong3 = "very"; see Mathews 3720, where "great" or "very" is offered as the first alternate meaning to "opening" or "hole"]

wei2 gong1 zi3 chang2
to make noble young man skirt

As you can see, xuan2 (dark blue) is paired in the ode with huang2 (yellow) using the particles zai4 – just as the two colors are paired in Yi line 2.6 without the particles for the color of dragon’s blood.

What does this mean?

Well, one little point of contention is whether xuan2 huang2 in 2.6 represents one or two separate colors. Some translators use phrases like "dusky yellow" or "blue-yellow", but I think Ode 154 helps us see that two separate colors are probably meant. Multi-colored blood. That’s a pretty strange idea, isn't it? Kunst is even stranger when he offers "Their blood is dark and yellow-bright." Isn’t "dark and yellow-bright" an oxymoron?

Ewald, I know you don't agree with this, but clearly Ode 154 is referring to two different colors by separating them with particles. And if there are two colors here, why not also in the Yi?

Another thing: xuan2 is a rare word in the Yi – in fact, it occurs only once in 2.6. But in Chinese philosophy, it is big deal, partly because Wang Bi - the Amodeus Mozart of Daoism - called his ideas derived from the Yi and DDJ "xuanxue"("mysterious studies"), and partly because concepts like "xuanming" ("numen, numinous") took on an almost Germanic mystical quality in Neo-Daoism. It is hard to know when all this foggy mysticism started gathering around xuan2 like an impenetrable cloud – maybe it was there from the beginning. The only point I'm making is that xuan2 may have had spiritual qualities even in Zhou days.

Clearly "xuan2" and "huang2" are identified in Ode 154 as manly colors for the bottom garments of attractive and virile young nobles. Here I think some Yi enthusiasts should put aside Jung for a moment and read up on Freud. At the very least, "dark-blue" and "yellow" have masculine connotations. Dare I say it? It seems to me they are symbolic of yang.

Now what beast is the very mascot and poster-boy of yang? Yup, the dragon! How interesting that dragon blood is the exact same colors as a nobleman's undergarments! Isn't it also interesting that strong yang symbols are found in the top line of Kun, the yin-est of all hexagrams? Isn’t Line 6 the changing line where the situation comes to a climax by ceasing to be itself and morphing into its successor?

Bruce, it's great to see you posting again! I don't have any problem with the traditional "Confucian" interpretation of Yi symbols. How can anyone who lives according to the high principles of Confucius go wrong? In fact, I'm a big fan of equanimity, but I've probably experienced about 30 seconds of it in my whole life! There is always that nagging question of what the Yi meant before Confucius, and whether there is anything in the earlier version that might be useful. That's my only excuse for getting into this kind of analysis.

Lindsay

 

[ewald]

Lindsay - The dragons' blood could be both dark/black and yellow, if the black blood is dried up, and the yellow blood is fresh from the wound.
(Muller mentions also "dark red" as a possible meaning of xuan2.)

 

[martin]

Hmm, I was wondering if these "colors" perhaps refer to inner colors that people sometimes see in certain stages of their inner development.

".. and yellow the lower garment! The sorrow of my heart .."

This is interesting because yellow (or rather golden) is the inner color of the heart, of love. It is the "gold" of the western alchemists; their "gold making" was first of all an inner process.

I don't know if there were any alchemistic or similar practices around when this was written but such colors can also manifest spontaneously.
And it is even possible that the authors of these texts didn't actually see them clearly inwardly, but had an intuitive idea about what they represent. Like we have in our time. Golden marriage rings ..

Blue and yellow - yes, perhaps two separate colors, but for the outer eye they are paired as opposing colors.
If you look for a while at a yellow colored object and then close your eyes you see a blue aftereffect and the other way around (same for red and green and for black and white).
As far as I know from my own colored experience blue also pairs with yellow (golden) inwardly. They appear around the same time.
This blue is a deep blue, it is spacious, infinite. You disappear in it.

Now there are probably some who would say that I'm getting too mystical here?

 

[bruce_g]

Hi Lindsay,

Very glad to see you posting again too. Thanks.

Actually, my association with “equanimity” didn’t come from Confucius but from Buddhism. This trait isn’t limited to humans. Certain animal species seem to possess this quality of evenness, such as a carp or deer (the buck during rut notwithstanding!).

Like Martin, I was thinking of this yellow appearing more as golden.

LiSe’s work on chakras and auras may have something interesting to say about this. If you scroll down to the third chakra, it transitions from yellow to a sort of golden color. This is slightly high of center, transitioning from and transcending the base (lower trigram?), to the realm of spirit; “the spirit of man” type thing. http://www.yijicakrang.nl/aura/index.htm

Another possible motif for this idea in 2.6 might be the Biblical Satan falling from grace, or being cast from heaven due to his pride. According to this myth, God’s Shakina Glory shown through Satan, acting as a transformer of spirit to a visible light: the manifestation of God. Beholding himself, he mistook God’s glory as being his own, thus his being, rather than being of spirit, became dense with weight. There was a great warring in heaven, and he and his angels fell from heaven to forever dwell in the manifest world of earth.

In this light, might yellow represent spirit, and black the dense and separated manifest world? Blood doesn’t have to be literal blood, either. It could refer to what a being is made of.

 

[bruce_g]

To correct a technicality, the correct name for Satan before his fall was “Lucifer”, which means “light bearer”. Satan come from satan, which means “adversary”.

There’s two Yi lines this reminds me of: 1.6 and 2.6, both speak to an abuse of power.

 

[lindsay]

Ewald, your explanation of multi-colored dragon's blood is ingenious! It could well be that bright yellow blood dries into dark blue. Let's take human blood, for example. When I look at the veins in the back of my hands, the blood looks blue, even violet. When I cut myself, bright red blood appears. It dries, and then it looks dark red, even brown. The same thing for many warm-blooded animals. Why? Maybe one of the science guys can tell us?

Martin, my wife (who is a weaver) showed me a color wheel. The opposite (or complement) of yellow is violet, dark red-blue. The complement of red is green. Is the after-image of colors, when you shut your eyes, the complementary color? I think, when you mix colored pigments, red + green = black, yellow + violet = black, and so on. Mixing colored light is somewhat different, I understand.

It is easy to see how one can get mystical about this sort of thing. As you say, yellow and dark blue-violet are opposites. Yang and yin. Dualistic poles. What is a dragon doing in the hexagram of the mare?

Why are the dragons fighting in 2.6, anyway? There is fighting, and there is blood. I think about my cat, a neutered male, who loves to fight other cats, even though he frequently loses and gets injured. I think about my self, an old male, who loves to argue and contradict and find fault with others even now. Fighting is so fulfilling, so enticing, so absorbing - the blood, the consequences don't matter in the heat of the struggle - I cannot help it, I am a male. Like my cat. Isn't that why dragons fight? Isn't that why men fight? Ideally, men only fight each other, because fighting is a kind of bond, a fellowship of maleness. Why? Ask my DNA - I don't know.

There is inside us, like our blood, both tendencies, both yang and yin, both dark-blue and yellow. All of us, men and women, share a common human nature. Even dragons, the essential yang beasts, have two kinds of blood - dark and bright, violet and yellow, female and male. They fight, but in doing so, their essential dualism of being pours forth.

And so, I think Martin is right. We all have two kinds of blood. But that is obvious. What is of critical importance for us to know, in all modes of dualistic thinking, is the nature of the mix. That is where concept intersects reality.

Lindsay

 

[bruce_g]

Lindsay, I couldn’t agree more. I find the idea of blending colors into one bland mode of behavior to be a terribly boring way to live. But what I do strive for is the ability to choose, and that the one doing the choosing resides in the center of the army. When the kids have the wheel, things can get ugly.

 

[martin]

The opposite (or complement) of yellow is violet, dark red-blue. The complement of red is green. Is the after-image of colors, when you shut your eyes, the complementary color? I think, when you mix colored pigments, red + green = black, yellow + violet = black, and so on. Mixing colored light is somewhat different, I understand.

Yes, the aftereffect is the complementary color. I just tried it with yellow and the aftereffect seems to be a kind of reddish blue.

Green paint looks green to us because it mainly reflects green light and for the most part absorbs all other colors. Same for red paint. It absorbs all other colors except red. So when you mix red and green paint more colors are absorbed and you end up with something that looks pretty dark.

When you mix colored light the situation is different. In that case you get the opposite effect because there is no absorbtion. You will see more light, more different frequencies, not less.
When you mix red and green light you get yellow and when you add blue light to that mix the result is white.

 

[ewald]

The Lindict dictionary has for 黃 huang2 some interesting entries. (You'll have to set your browser to the Big5 character encoding in order to properly see the Chinese.)

yellow as color of emperor;
黃榜 imperial edict;
黃袍 the imperial robe;
黃馬褂 the Yellow Jacket, rank conferred by emperor;
黃帶子 Yellow Girdle, Manchu nobility.

Notice how three of these are some sort of clothing. So it is not farfetched to see the "yellow lower garment" as some kind of imperial garment. I'd say that this makes 2.5 mean something like there is "imperial" support for what you're doing. Truely "a source of good fortune" or "supreme good fortune" (depending on what you take 元吉 to mean).

 

[lindsay]

Hi Ewald -

There is one problem with identifying the yellows mentioned in the Yi with the famous "imperial yellow" of the Chinese emperors: chronology.

The Yijing was probably compiled sometime around 1000-800 B.C. The first Chinese emperor was Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 B.C.), who declared himself emperor in 221 B.C. Qin Shi Huangdi is the one who had thousands of life-size terra cotta soldiers and horses buried near his tomb in Xian. As you see, the Yi predates the first emperor by at least 500 years. It is true the Chinese sometimes refer to a list of legendary emperors in remote antiquity (Fuxi, Nuwa, the Yellow Emperor, Sheng Nung, Yu the Great, and so on), but these figures are . . . well, legendary.

As far as I can determine, "imperial yellow" - which is a special, vibrant shade of yellow - was established as an official color reserved for the Emperor sometime during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911 A.D.). I cannot trace it back earlier than that, but some of the scholars who frequent Clarity will no doubt know more about this than I do.

Lindsay

 

[rosada]

In my experience 1.6 seems to indicate saying "Yes" has gone too far, as when one keeps on going when it's really time to for bed. 2.6 seems to indicate being passive has gone too far, as when a mother cat jumps up to get away from the nursing kittens, or when you can no longer just say "Yes, Dear," to keep the peace.

Is "lower garment" a skirt or underwear? I thought it was uderwear, hidden. I think of 2.5 as being like a Christain with four aces. You don't reveal what you've got, but it's nice to know that if being pleasant isn't enough, you've got royal connections to call on. Kinda makes it easier to practice equanimity.

 

[lindsay]

Hi Rosada!

Your interpretation of 1.6 and 2.6 may well be on target, but we are a long way from practical divination in this string. Call it idle curiosity if you like, but a few people who post here are fascinated by the historical dimensions of the Yi. People like Harmen, Lise, Bradford, Ewald, Freeman, and several others have spent a lot of time thinking about and studying the Yijing in its ancient Chinese context. A number of them have published very valuable and interesting material on their websites and elsewhere. All of them are also accomplished diviners, and each one would like - no, would love - to be able to shed some light from the past on our day-to-day understanding of the Yi.

One book all the history junkies constantly refer to is Richard Rutt's "Zhouyi: The Book of Changes" (1996), which gives the best summary currently available in English of modern scholarly research on the Yi. Here's what Rutt (p. 16) has to say about clothing in Shang and Zhou times:

"Both sexes wore sleeved jackets or coats, made of woven silk or hemp, and fastened at the right shoulder. The skirt below the jacket was made with seven gores [Q: What's a "gore"?], three at the front and four at the back. A man could also wear a knee-length apron and leggings, buskins or puttees that reached above the knees. (Trousers came with the cavalry, after the fifth century.) For informal wear there was a loose, ample-sleeved robe, worn with a belt. The flap of a garment in front of the chest was used, at least by the common people, for carrying things."

Rutt has more, but from this I picture the "yellow skirt" as a sort of kilt. I'm pretty sure we are not talking about unmentionables.

Ewald, here is what Richard Rutt says about colors (pp. 17-18):

"Colours had not the significance they had in later Chinese culture. In any culture colour vocabulary and sensitivity depend on the development of paints and dyes and are much influenced by the growth of literature. The most primitive colour distinction is that between dark or blackish and bright or light. This appears in ancient Chinese as 'xuanhuang' 'dark and dun', often translated as 'black and yellow'. Used in Shang times to classify animals for sacrifice, it came to represent day and night, heaven and earth, and eventually yin and yang.

"It is probable that during the Bronze Age 'white' included the colour of unbleached cloth, and 'black' cloth was of a deep purplish or 'plum-black' hue.

"Yellow was not yet the distinctive colour of royalty, though as the colour of the life-sustaining loess it seems already to have been highly esteemed in the Shang dynasty. The later assigning of yellow as the imperial colour is typical of Han."

Rutt has a couple of footnotes to document his sources, but nothing we need to think about here. Isn't it amazing how much verbiage two little characters - "yellow" + "skirt" - can breed?

Lindsay

 

[ewald]

Lindsay - So we can safely rule out imperial yellow. The color huang was probably pretty ordinary yellow-brown. I noticed in the Shijing that there were also embroidered kilts/skirts, apparently worn by nobles.

Actually the character 裳 for lower garment (kilt or skirt), can also mean "beautiful." In Ode 214, Legge translates 裳裳者華 with "Splendid are the flowers." (That is not to say that Legge's translation is perfect, though - I found I disagreed with a couple of his translations.)
So it is not unthinkable to translate 2.5 with "beautiful yellow," comparable with 30.2 "Yellow radiance" (both lines have "a source of good fortune").

Huang 黃 can also mean "old man," according to Muller. Legge translates it similarly in Ode 246 , and in Odes 172 and 302 with "grey hair."

 

[rosada]

Very interesting thoughts, Ewald. This morning on another thread Bruce posted a referance to Saint Peter at The Gate. As I read it I got a visual of St. Peter as an old man with grey hair wearing a simple yellow - brown kimono like robe which partially concealed a beautiful radiant yellow undergarment. As I studied the image more closely it became apparent that the undergarment was more like a transparent body stocking while the yellow radiance was actually the light of the soul.
Then I came over to this thread and read your imput on Muller and Legge. Very cool.

 

[rosada]

Lindsay,
A "gore" is a triangular or tapering piece of cloth used as part of a garment, such as a skirt, or an umbrella, sail, or the like.

 

[lindsay]

Rosada, thanks for explaining "gore" to me! I actually looked the word up in a dictionary, but didn't understand the definition. But your explanation is very clear. Thanks - it's a detail, but I'm big on details.

Ewald, I've been thinking about your last post for two days. Like you, I have made several translations of the Yi over the years, and each translation marks a stage in my thinking about what constitutes a good translation the Yi.

What specifically triggered my thinking is that 2.5 is one of the least controversial texts in the whole Yi - and yet, here we are, debating what it means. A few years ago, I spent a whole year compiling a book for myself that contained every text in the Yi with fifteen parallel translations from the best translators I knew about then. My main concern was to include English translators who had a proven mastery of the Chinese language in general and substantial familiarity with traditional literary Chinese in particular. So I listed every text in parallel as it was translated by James Legge, Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes, John Blofeld, Richard Alan Kunst, Greg Whincup, Kerson and Rosemary Huang, Henry Wei, Wu Jing-Nuan, Thomas Cleary, Richard John Lynn, Liu Dajun-Lin Zhongjun-Fu Youde, Richard Rutt, Edward L. Shaughnessy, Chan Chiu Ming, and Alfred Huang. On the basis of this comparative work, I can tell you that every one of them except Chan Chiu Ming offers some variation of the "yellow skirt" translation. This translation represents, in the case of Line 2.5, a consensus of informed opinion for more than the last one hundred years.

Is this enough to say offering some alternative to "yellow skirt", as you propose, is wrong?

No, I don't think so.

First of all, a translator of the Yi has to realize there is not just one Yijing, but several. There is the elusive Zhouyi, the Han Yijing, the Song Yijing, the classic literary Yijing, the popular Chinese divination Yijng, the Western counter-culture I Ching, and many others. We may not like this version or that one, but they all exist for good reasons and all claim legimate attention. Coming up with the "correct" or "pure" or "accurate" translation is not possible without specifying what Yi you are trying to translate. And translating one version of the Yi well may have no bearing on how other versions are translated.

Second, the Chinese language, like all living languages, is in a constant state of flux. Characters are constantly shifting, adding and losing meanings. We can point to the Odes and say that "yellow skirt" is a plausible translation based on evidence more or less contemporary to the Yi. But we cannot prove it is the right translation for 2.6. Nor can we prove that "beautiful yellow" or "handsome old man" is the wrong translation. In history, it is almost impossible to prove a negative.

Third, the Yijing is a living document in the sense that our ideas and opinions about it are constantly changing. Not only that, but the Yi is in constant use throughout the world. Any attempt to freeze it into an Official Version would be harmful to its true value as a protean, shape-shifting, organic world-cultural phenomenon (I really need one of those wonderful German compounds here). All ideas should be welcomed into the marketplace of divination. The good ones will survive.

Fourth, a hundred years of consensus does not mean the consensus is ideal. My favorite example is Line 3.2. My 15 authorities tweak 3.2 this way and that, yet there is general agreement on the broad meaning of the line. However, there is only one truly brilliant translation of 3.2, the recent translation of Bradford Hatcher. Bradford's inspired use of the word "babies" for zi4 suddenly reveals the full meaning of 3.2 more clearly than anything the established experts could come up with. I have rarely seen anything so obviously superior to all previous efforts. I mention this only to make the point that translating the Yi is an ongoing enterprise, and there are still many opportunities to trump established views with a better vision.

Fifth, the Yi is, because of its practical nature, a personal document. It has to make sense to its users, even if that means departing from Chinese tradition or sprucing up the text here and there. A diviner who does not understand the meaning of the text is not going to be successful. Understanding is more important than scholarship. Not that Ewald and Rosada and I necessarily agree on what 2.5 means - but each of us must have some idea how to interpret the line in order to use the Yi at all. This personal understanding of the Yi, however one manages to cultivate it, is the single most important asset in divination. To achieve this, principles of translation may be completely irrelevant.

Sixth, there is no agreement on what a good translation is. Some people think being 'literal' is everything, so you get translations like "See (the) dragon in (the) field. (It is) beneficial (to) see (a) great person." This is ridiculous nonsense. What a Chinese speaker reads in Chinese is as smooth and coherent in his or her mind as a grammatical English sentence is for an English speaker, not choppy and disjointed. It is an absolute and pernicious superstition that Chinese characters must be translated in a slavishly consistent, one-to-one stilted idiom of English words. The same character may mean several things in English depending on context, and many characters have no simple one-word translation into English. Some translators forget the point of language is communication. If the translation of a standard Chinese text reads like nonsense in English, then it most certainly is nonsense, and the translator has failed.

At the same time, a translation can be too free by intoducing a lot of ideas or sentiments that are not present in the text. Here translation becomes interpretation, even editorializing. This can be hard to spot unless you have access to the basic text, but it is more common than you might think.

Finally, and worst in my opinion, a translation can be indecisive. Some translators offer you lots of choices of meaning without offering any guidance. The Ritsema and Karcher "translation" is notorious for this, where the authors essentially abdicate their responsibility as translators to make sense of the texts. As a reader, I can do as much as they do with a good dictionary - but why should I have to this? They claim to be the experts, not me - and yet they offer me no expertise at all. Why? My opinion is they have none to offer. No written work, not even the Yi, can be so amorphous that every character may have a dozen or more possible meanings in each specific context. One looks to a translator to make intelligent and informed choices.

If anybody has any ideas about translating, I would like to hear them.

Lindsay

 

[bruce_g]

Lindsay,

It’s so good to read your thoughts here again; very refreshing.

I can only admire and to some degree follow along with this group’s translators, and my respect has grown since attempting to construct my own very simple Yijing. From this place of ignorance of Chinese history and language I have nonetheless drawn a couple of conclusions.

The Yi can be transmitted (not merely translated or interpreted) in two ways: 1) In great detail 2) in few words. As you pointed out, each hexagram and line needs borders in order to be useful, and one has the choice to elaborate or minimize, to achieve this “breathing” effect. Bradford has found a way to story tell in his commentaries, and I find his method to be effective in the expanding of meaning and value, and also limiting enough to nail down an answer.

What I most admire is when a translator surpasses their translation, when they aren’t mere servants of correct words, and especially when they have lived it long enough to know its delicacy.

 

[stevev]

Text processing

Not having the slightest hope of ever translating the Chinese words, I’m using text processing to try and clean the obscurity. I can’t stand the anglicised Chinese, quotes, brackets, foot notes, alternative views and flowery phrases. Based on a sort of a translated average I choose a single English word as the hard label of the image and then substitute them in the text. I think it’s been fairly successful most of the time although I’ve had trouble substituting Reserve for Well, as you would expect. I don’t really know where I’m taking it, I’ll just have to wait and see, might just turn out to be crap. I dynamically hyperlink these labels wherever they appear back to the Xgram text home and observe the relationship context, if that means anything. I remove references to order, like inverse of the previous. Now I’m having a bit of fun moving the labels in the text eg. Man -> Woman, He -> She and Summer -> Winter, which works fine as long as there is no personal context, Confucius say he, doesn’t move properly.