I Ching/Talk

I will be fleshing this article out over time. One thing I would really appreciate, though, is for someone to place all the Chinese characters for the names of the hexagrams before the Romanised name. Oh, and the name of the text itself (I Ching). And a partridge in a pear tree, please. -- Bignose

For those interested, my primary reference is I Ching, The Classic Chinese Oracle Of Change by Rudolf Ritsema and Stephen Karcher of the Eranos I Ching Project, an astonishingly complete translation with loads of cross-reference material. Published by Element Books, ISBN 1-85230-669-6 (amazon.com, search). -- Bignose

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SJC changed the term "Classic of Change" to "Book of Change". In Chinese, Zhu and Jing are books. But Jing (or Ching as in I-Ching) is more of the Classic (or Sutra, e.g. all buddhist scriptures are called Jing in Chinese, the Holy Bible is also a Jing), Zhu is just regular book. So Bignose's use of "Classic of Change" is more appropriate as the proper translation of I-Ching, though "Book of Change" is the more well-known name of the classic. Ancient Chinese scholars studied the four books and five classics. Confucius' lun yu was one of the four books, I-Ching was one of the five classics. But to westerners, they are just nine books in total.

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Bignose,
I see some problem in the way you present the hexagrams textually. For example,
|||::: (地天泰 or earch + heaven = tai4) T'ai (Prevading)
is earth on top of heaven. When you rotate the text anti-clockwise, it look right. But if you read the text from left to right, you will read heaven ||| before earth :::, hence it may be confusing. The hexagram (like traditional Chinese text) are usually read from top to bottom, but in your notation, you read from bottom to top.