I CHING:
Recommended Reading
Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes,
The I Ching or Book of Changes. Princeton University Press:
Bollingen Series.
The classic first important "working" version of the Book of Changes, first
published in German in 1924. This edition includes an important foreword by
C.G. Jung on I Ching and synchronicity.
R.L. Wing, The I Ching Workbook. New York: Doubleday Main Street
Books.
A good beginner's guide to reading the hexagrams, with the caveat that
readers may wish to substitute the old numerical system for identifying the
fixed and changing lines in a coin reading.
Albert Huang, The Complete I Ching.
Translation by Taoist Master Alfred Huang. Rochester, Vermont:
Inner Traditions
A clean and clear modern Taoist version, beautifully designed, with
interesting commentaries on what is revealed by the Chinese ideograms used
to write the names of the hexagrams.
Jack M. Balkin,
The Laws of Change: I Ching and the
Philosophy of Life. New York: Schocken Books.
A luminously clean and clear discussion of the Book of Changes by a Yale law
professor, comprehensive and eminently practical. It is a constant
invitation to self-awareness and to effective action to embody the
challenges and opportunities that are defined in the readings. I find myself
reaching for this book very frequently.
Edward L. Shaughnessy, I Ching: The
Classic of Changes. New York: Ballantine Books
The first English translation of the oldest text of the Book of Changes,
dating from the 2nd century BCE, but discovered only in 1973 at the Mawaldui
site. The arrangement of the hexagrams is different from the familiar "King
Wen" version, and some have distinctly different - and revealing - names.
For example, here Heaven (Zhen) is often called The Key, and Earth (K'un) is
called Flow. Some of the language of the "Appended Statements" evokes a
primal shamanic level of the oracle; thus
“The sage…drums
the movements of all under heaven and causes them to reside in the
statements." Or again: “The sage established images... d rummed them and
caused them to dance in order fully to express their spirituality.”
S.J.Marshall, The Mandate of Heaven:
Hidden History in the I Ching. New York: Columbia University
Press.
A marvelous piece of scholarly detective work into the "hidden history" of
and within the Book of Changes, in which the author turns up a previously
neglected clue to a solar eclipse circle 1070 BCE (in hexagram 55, Feng) and
brings alive the fierce and protracted struggle between the Tyrant of Shang
and the founders of the Zhou dynasty from which many of the line readings
are drawn.
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