The I Ching: A Biography: A Biography

303 Pages·2012·2.63 MB·English

by  Smith

Lives of Great Religious Books
The I Ching
Lives of Great Religious Books
The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty
The I Ching, Richard J. Smith
Augustine’s Confessions, Garry Wills
Forthcoming:
The Book of Revelation, Bruce Chilton
Confucius’s Analects, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence
The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins
The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis
Josephus’s Jewish War, Martin Goodman
John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon
The Book of Genesis, Ronald S. Hendel
The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs
The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore
C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, George Marsden
Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Bernard McGinn
The Greatest Translations of All Time: The Septuagint and the Vulgate,
Jack Miles
The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa Ochs
The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes
Rumi’s Masnavi, Omid Safi
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, David Gordon White
The I Ching
A Biography
Richard J. Smith
PRInCETOn UnIVERSITy PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, new Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Richard J. (Richard Joseph), 1944–
The I Ching : a biography / Richard J. Smith.
p. cm. — (Lives of great religious books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBn 978-0-691-14509-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. yi jing. I. Title.
PL2464.Z7S63 2012
299.5′1282—dc23
2011041070
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the literary members of my family, Lisa and Tyler,
in celebration of negative Capability, and with
unbounded admiration, gratitude, and love
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
The Hexagrams xi
Chronology of Chinese Dynasties xvii
Preliminary Remarks and
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
Part One The Domestic Evolution
of the Yijing 15
Chapter 1 Genesis of the Changes 19
Chapter 2 The Making of a Classic 48
Chapter 3 Interpreting the Changes 75
Part Two The Transnational Travels
of the Yijing 125
Chapter 4 The Changes in East Asia 129
Chapter 5 The Westward Travels
of the Changes 170
vii
Concluding Remarks 211
Notes 225
Bibliography 251
Index 265
viii contents
List of Illustrations
Figure 2.1 Detail from Zhu Da’s Fish and Rocks
(Chinese, 1624–1 705) 52
Figure 2.2 Five Agents Sequences 58
Figure 3.1 Correlations among the Trigrams,
Hexagrams, and Twenty- Four Segments of the
Solar year (attributed to Jing Fang) 80
Figure 3.2 Trigram and Five Agents
Correlations 91
Figure 3.3 The Luo River Writing and the yellow
River Chart 94
Figure 3.4 The Later Heaven and Former Heaven
Sequence 95
Figure 3.5 The Luo River Writing and the Former
Heaven Sequence 98
Figure 3.6 Triangular Diagram of yellow River Chart
Correlations 99
Figure 3.7 Production of the Eight Trigrams from the
Supreme Ultimate 101
ix