The Elemental Changes: The Ancient Chinese Companion to the I Ching (Suny Series, Chinese Philosophy & Culture) [Paperback]

Yang Hsiung (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Chinese

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (December 31, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791416283
• ISBN-13: 978-0791416280
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,236,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beware the careless errors in this book!, July 22, 2004

By 

D. Goodyear (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Elemental Changes: The Ancient Chinese Companion to the I Ching (Suny Series, Chinese Philosophy & Culture) (Paperback)

I was very happy to encounter this book, the first translation of one of the Chinese philosophical classics, considered a companion to the I Ching.

Just as the I Ching contains 64 unique Hexagrams, the T'ai Hsuan Ching contains 81 unique Tetragrams.

However, looking at the chart of Tetragrams in this translation, I saw that there are duplicates (for example, #5 and #31, and there are some others as well). I counted about 7 misprinted Tetragrams, taking into consideration the duplicates, and also taking note of the logic of how the Tetragrams progress and change in the chart as a whole.

Okay, so the chart at the beginning of the book was carelessly made and has numerous errors. But then the same errors are repeated throughout the entire book in printing the Tetragrams at the beginning of each chapter!

This makes it very difficult to study the work, when Tetragrams are mis-printed, and then the reader is depending on accuracy to study the commentary to the Tetragram.

For example, if Tetragram #5 and #31 are printed the same (as they are in this translation--also #13 and #17 are printed the same, and then there are the other errors), and you have two completely different commentaries for these identically written Tetragrams, what is a poor layman (non-specialist in Classical Chinese) to think?

Unless you take the trouble on your own to figure out the correct forms for these misprinted Tetragrams, it will completely throw you off. Just like if you had a book on the I Ching, and it printed Hexagrams #5 and #31--or #7 and #13--the same, as duplicates (yet with the different commentary each has). You can see the confusion.

I have never encountered an I Ching book which misprinted and duplicated Hexagrams. It is very disappointing that the scholar who translated the work, those who edited it, and a University Press publishing a series on "Chinese Philosophy and Culture", would allow such errors to go into print (however that may have happened).

I hope that is the extent of the errors, and I hope they will correct them in the next edition. It's very important that they care enough to do so.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Valuable Text, October 4, 2000

By 

Roger B. Clough (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Elemental Changes: The Ancient Chinese Companion to the I Ching (Suny Series, Chinese Philosophy & Culture) (Paperback)

I recently purchased a copy of this book [ "T'ai Hsuan Ching", by Master Yang Hsiung, published as "The Elemental Changes" , translated by Michael Nylan, SUNY Press (1994).]

This text has a powerful application, namely the reconstruction of the Enneagram nine-fold personality typology into a complete world. That is, not only personality or man, but man plus nature. This can be achieved by using the Mystery as a tool, which I will try to explain below. With it, all of the power of this I Ching-like text-- transforms and the the generation of new metaphors with new meanings -- is now possible. This was a potentially very wide application because of the large world-wide use of the enneagram for personality studies, transformations, and spiritual growth. It would be a revolutionary advance to Enneagram study. It would permit transforms, derivation of meaning, story sequences, musical applications. etc. Improved psychological evaluation (since it would include situations, context). It would also permit fortune-telling, similar to that of the I Ching, although I personally have no interest in that.

I have been applying the I Ching to the semiotics of music and drama, so that I work mostly with the I Ching. However, I have always been a little partial to the enneagram because the imagery and social code are western, as I am. The I Ching has more of a moral tone (essentially Confusian) than the enneagram as well. But the enneagram, however, because of its construction, is limited to a single plane of nine personalities, so that it is really just a personality typology.

The I Ching differs from this because it is a complete world-- that is, there are 8 types of personalities and 8 situations (nature, mood, the physical world) which these personalities can exist in. Moreover, the line structure of the I Ching permits transformations of personalities and situations by changing of line types from yin to yang.

This text provides a means of completing the enneagram project by introducing a line structure and 9 digrams of situations (nature, mood, etc.). It can do this because it has a base 3 line structure rather than the binary line structure of the I Ching (which therefore will not map directly to the enneagram) .

Let me try to explain how this can be done: ====================================== The Elemental Changes.

Your book contains I Ching-like sets of line graphs in base 3.

The Elemental Changes is made up of three types of lines:

- (a single long line, yang ) corresponding to Heaven - - (once broken line, yin) corresponding to Earth - - - (twice broken line, yin) corresponding to Man.

These are combined into digrams of which there are 9, the number of personality types in the enneagram. Apparently there is no evaluation of the digrams given in the Mystery. Obviously these could be interpreted as the 9 personality types in the enneagram, and with some imagination and help from the IC trigram interpretations, one could then create 9 "nature" or situation interpretations and then proceed as with the I Ching, ultimately feeding this back into the enneagram format. A simpler way to do this would be to use two personality type digrams, so that they are in interaction. These interactions have been well-characterized in enneagram theory.

You then have an 9x9 digram matrix similar to that of the I Ching (which uses trigrams). Using this, the digrams are stacked to form tetragrams, of which there are 81. These are constructed and read top to bottom, opposite to that in the IC. One could for example have the 9 personality types as the column numbers and 9 situations as the row numbers, giving 81 the tetragrams that would expand the enneagram to another dimension-- in other words, instead of just 9 personality types, you would have 81 mixtures of personality in a situation.

The 81 tetragrams have all been interpreted by Hsuing in the text. Each has 9 line appraisals and fathomings, apparently obtained with line changes as in the IC.

Interestly, the translator equates 64 of the tetragrams to the IC hexagrams.

It's essentially a done deal, one would only have to carry out the leg-work.

5 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars another gate widenning the basis for living cyclical symbols, April 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Elemental Changes: The Ancient Chinese Companion to the I Ching (Suny Series, Chinese Philosophy & Culture) (Paperback)

this is another brick of cultural basis regarding the oracular mentality in action after the codification of the IJING during the Han dynesty. I've found the book 'workable' enough and more; Still, there are some mistakes regarding the graphic attributions to the text; moreover - as a historical textbook, asserting the flow of seasons and a specific arena of anciant chinese polity - the prospect of "modern" usage is quite limited but with a pointed analogy to the more formal Chinese atmosphere of a confucian cleric in the first century A.D; thus, i would like to see this book as being the first in a row of unfoldment-vehicles of symbols unto our era as "users". Keep On Translating this!!