I Ching/Talk

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

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

Great work on the Chinese characters, thanks. -- Bignose

It may be a problem with my browser's font, but of all the ideogram characters on this page I get a question-mark for the name of hexagram 44 (U+23012, pinyin "gou4"). All other Unicode characters in the article display fine. Is it an error, or is my font incomplete? -- Bignose

Yes, it is a font issue, because my browser displays it fine. By the way, it is an uncommon character. To see the graphic of the character, click [here]

Since pinyin seems to be the de facto standard for Chinese romanisation on Wikipedia, and appears more precise anyway, I'm removing most of the redundant and confusing Romanisations (which were merely copied from my reference). -- Bignose

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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.

You are correct on the direction of reading Chinese text, but incorrect on the issue of I Ching hexagrams. They are constructed from the bottom up, their lines are numbered from the bottom up (the bottom line is numbered "first", the top line is numbered "sixth" or "last"), and they are read from the bottom up (the lower trigram, or "inner" trigram, is seen to be changing to the upper, or "outer" trigram). All the literature I have on I Ching confirms this, and I will discuss it in the Divination section. -- Bignose