Customer Reviews

The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the "I Ching" as Interpreted by Wang Bi

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Richard John Lynn's translation of the I Ching has become one of my most precious books. He has found the style that brings back a very distant voice of ancient China: Wang Bi, a philosophical geenius who died at the age of 23 after having written the most outstanding commentaries ever of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching. R.J.Lynn brings out the taoist touch of Wang Bi's philosophy by keeping the word "dao" in the English text. Some of his expressions are fun, like when someone's situation has come to a point of decline, Lynn translates Wang Bi with: "this one's dao has petered out". Somehow Lynn has brought Wang Bi's thought back to life.

The reviews on the Lynn book appear to break down to a partisanship between John Richard Lynn and Wilhelm. There's room in the library of the I Ching enthusiast for both. I happen to prefer Lynn, but refer frequently to Wilhelm. It's difficult to imagine either of the two absent from the shelf. I'm particularly grateful to Lynn for the comprehensive footnotes and historical notes to put each item in context.

This translation of the I Ching is the best of the non-popularized versions. While it is a scholarly work, it is also accessable to the average reader who wishes to access the original text. While any translation of this seminal work must have some bias in extracting the meaning from the Chinese, this version seems to take the "middle way" in presenting a translation that is faithful and flexible. Highly recommended

I first found Wang Bi's commentary in the main Library at UC Davis, and instantly lusted after a copy of it. When, 2 years later, I found it available at Amazon, I "went for it". This is a much more accurate translation, the text notes provide info on textual debates, it is a synthesis of thought to that time, not Confucian, not neo Daoist, is closer to the classical daoism and well worth using. Combined with Ritsema-Karcher text, you have a mine of self-development and of oracular divination.

This is an outstanding blend of scholarship backed by a depth of research and expertise, melded with a sensitivity to what an oracle means to people, and how it is properly to be used. Lynn has recreated and organized the Wang Bi text of the I Ching (Wang Bi was a scholar and writer in ancient China who died at a tragically young age but accomplished extraordinary things on a truly Mozartean scale--his version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is still the most read and cited version of that work, and his insight into the I Ching, thanks to Prof. Lynn, deserves as much study). For those who are drawn to the ancient oracle as an insight guide rather than a parlor game or fortune-telling tool, Prof. Lynn's presentation of the Wang Bi I Ching is an essential first step. I would further recommend the work of Carol Anthony ("Guide to the I Ching") and her latest exploration of the I Ching from the perspective of helping one's inner learning to inform and enrich one's outer life, which has been written with Hanna Moog: it is called "I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way."

This is primarily a sentence by sentence breakdown of the I Ching by Wang Bi. For oracular purposes, it is essentially useless. Wang Bi was primarily interested in the movement and placement of the yin/yang lines that create a hexagram. Now, for some, that is the purpose of the I Ching, and you can understand the meaning of the individual hexagrams [gua] by nothing more than this. Having many translations of the I Ching, I find the book to be dry, and without any real oracular use. It does not "speak" to the question, which puts it in the same class as the very heavy and largely useless "Original I Ching" by Ritsema, et.al., which is nothing much more than an I Ching "concordance and thesaurus." For scholars, it has its uses, and yes, I do own it. But I would never turn to it to answer a real question of any kind.

I am not a very wordy person. It was simple enough for me to understand but not follow. These are things that some people like me have to read over and over again. Each time it is like reading a new book. I'm afraid this review will not do the book justice for it's immence content.

Awesome translation. Wang Bi now exists as a definitive source of the Dao alongside Wilhelm's still trustworthy version. Wang Bi provides a refreshing spring to Wilhelm's world-weariness. This is the I Jing from the heart - the way we were meant to see it!

[...]

This is a terrible book. The translation juxtaposes English words that are presumably equivalents of the original Chinese ideograms. The result is incomprehensible. The English words appear to flow in gramatically correct sentences but they make no sense. The translator appears to have no idea of what the I Ching is about or how it was used in Chinese culture. Unfortunately, I bought this book and wasted my money.