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Recommendations please

44bob123

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I have just come across an article by McElhearn called "The Key to the I Ching",
http://www.mcelhearn.com/2007/01/04/the-key-to-the-i-ching/. His thesis is that we need to get back to an understanding of what the texts meant to the original authors, or at least an informed approximation.

He gives the example of 48, The Well. A Chinese well was shared by eight families who took turns to maintain it. It was also a meeting place where news was shared. Unless we are aware of this we would use our western idea of a well, which would miss some of the salient factors.

Are there any versions of the YiJing which unpack the cultural background to the texts? Or maybe other books or websites?

What would you recommend?
:confused:
 

bradford

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There are a lot of authors who believe they have, many of them are academics.
But I haven't seen any with logic that isn't specious.
In general, read the most scholarly and well-researched versions you can find,
but don't believe anything you read, even when several scholars agree.
 

hilary

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Richard Rutt's Zhouyi is good for cultural background - the introduction and footnotes are thoroughly informative. The actual translation is more or less useless for divination IMO - but then, Rutt never intended it for that, and doesn't seem to have given any thought to the kind of sense a text would need to make to be halfway useful as an oracle. But yes - for correcting misunderstandings born of the historical and cultural distance, I like Rutt.

:hide:

Further suggestion: read the Shijing.
 

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