The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text by Geoffrey Redmond

Abstract

Reviewed by: The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text by Geoffrey Redmond David J. Lebovitz Geoffrey Redmond, The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017. xxix, 464 pp. US$26.95 (PB). ISBN 978-1-4725-1413-4 In the opening to his translation of the Shujing 書經, the Chinese Book of Documents canon, the great linguist and philologist Bernard Karlgren remarked that owing to its “lapidary style” and “exceedingly obscure,” archaic language, the Shujing “frequently offers passages which, from the point of view of grammar, allow of several widely different interpretations,” such that “every new translation will be nothing more than a new attempt at interpretation.”1 So much for certitude in translating the Chinese classics. And if the Shujing’s relatively concrete political oratory is difficult to decipher, the Yijing 易經 (I Ching; Book of Changes), which originated as a pastiche of divinatory oracles, is so much more difficult; while the Yijing’s core text shares the same distantly archaic language of the Shujing, there is no reason to believe its oracles ever strove to be unambiguous. At the very least, Geoffrey Redmond’s new translation of the Yijing, which seeks to excavate plain meaning from the book’s oracular phrases, augurs well for new attempts at interpretation. The translation aims to cut away the moralizing, philosophical façade erected by the commentarial tradition and to liberate Yijing translation from the blend of neo-Confucianism, Jungian psychology, and new-age spirituality that made the 1950 translation of Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes so popular in the following decades.2 The core of the Yijing consists of a set of sixty-four oracular texts which may date as early as the late Western Zhou (ca. eighth-century BCE). Each of the texts is associated with a unique hexagram figure of six lines, each line being either broken or unbroken in a binary fashion, so as to yield sixty-four permutations. The texts have several parts: (1) a name or “tag” identifying the hexagram; (2) a “judgement” that responds to the hexagram as a whole; and (3) line statement texts for each of the six individual lines of each figure. The interpretation of the texts has for at least two millennia been transmitted and read under the influence of the “ten wings,” a set of closely associated early commentaries of uncertain origin, which [End Page 215] elaborate a metaphysical and moral framework for understanding the Yijing, and have traditionally been integral to the text. The primary aim of the new translation is to read the Yijing’s core oracular texts as they may have been read sometime during the Western Zhou 周 dynasty (1048–771 BCE). The textual layer that Redmond translates is thus more appropriately called the Zhouyi 周易 (Zhou [dynasty] Changes). The translation regards this layer primarily as a pre-axial book of divination, rather than as the philosophical manual or spiritual guidebook that it became under the influence of later commentaries and interpretive practices. This historical approach is not new: dissertations by Richard Alan Kunst (1985) and Edward L. Shaughnessy (1983) are pioneering efforts to treat Western Zhou layers of the Yijing historically, and the former translates the entire core text.3 A 1996 translation by Richard Rutt, a priest and former missionary to Korea, also sought to present the early, core text of the classic.4 Redmond takes a secular and critical—yet optimistic—approach to the Yijing. He sees profound value in the book yet does not regard it as universally true,5 nor does he make any claim to explicate a timeless truth. His concern is largely historical, and he is indebted to prior studies and scholarly translations that are both historically conscious and “sinologically sound” rather than “new age” or “literary” (pp. 408– 409). Among “sinologically sound” translations, Redmond counts those of Kunst, Shaughnessy, and Rutt mentioned above (Redmond reserves a special affection for the latter). As a model of this historically conscious approach to later interpretive traditions, he includes also the work of Richard John Lynn, whose translation reads the Yijing historically through the profoundly influential...