Preliminary Remarks and Acknowledgments

 

The curse of China studies for Westerners has always been the transliteration of Chinese sounds. For many years the scholarly (and popular) convention was to use the so-called Wade-Giles system for rendering Chinese names, terms, and titles, which is why so many people in the West know the Classic of Changes as the I Ching. I have retained this long-standing usage in the title of this biography, but in the body of the book I have rendered it according to the more current Pinyin system of transliteration: hence, Yijing. I have employed similarly standard conventions for the transliteration of other Asian names but have eliminated most diacritical marks and have tried to keep technical terms and titles to a minimum. For instance, although the two characters for Yijing are pronounced (and therefore transliterated) in sometimes radically different ways in Japanese (Ekikyo), Korean (Yokkyong), Vietnamese (Dich Kinh), and Tibetan (Yi Kying), I have used only the Chinese (Pinyin) transliteration of this title in the text, regardless of the culture area under discussion. In the same spirit, I have translated into English (or used already common renderings of) virtually all the technical words, expressions, terms, and titles in the main part of this book, relegating transliterations to the index, in parentheses that follow the translated terms and titles.

Since this book is designed primarily for nonspecialists, I have not burdened it with detailed descriptions, elaborate footnotes, discussions of arcane scholarly debates, or extensive bibliographies in Asian and Western languages. Material of this sort may be found in my 2008 book, Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I-Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China. I am grateful to the University of Virginia Press for permitting me to draw from parts of this work in my discussion of the domestic development of the Changes. I might add that the acknowledgments, notes, and bibliographies of Fathoming the Cosmos reveal abundantly the profound debt I owe to my teachers in the China field, my many valuable friends and colleagues at Rice University, and a host of other scholars around the world, several of whom also deserve special mention here for their specific contributions to this volume: Joseph Adler, Alejandro Chaoul, Howard Goodman, Tze-ki Hon, Pei Jin, Yung Sik Kim, Livia Kohn, Liu Dajun, Richard John Lynn, Naturaleza Moore, Benjamin Wai-ming Ng, Bent Nielsen, Valrae Reynolds, Hyong Rhew, Dennis Schilling, Edward Shaughnessy, Shen Heyong, Kidder Smith, Benjamin Wallacker, Wang Mingxiong, and Zhang Wenzhi.

There are literally hundreds of Western-language translations of the Yijing (also known as the Zhou Changes), several of which I discuss in chapter 5. For this biography I have drawn upon, and modified when necessary, five well-known renderings that reflect different understandings of the work as they developed at different periods in Chinese history: (1) Richard Kunst’s dissertation, titled “The Original Yijing” (1985), which offers a heavily annotated translation of the earliest layers of the so-called basic text (c. 800 BCE); (2) Richard Rutt’s Zhouyi (1996), which has a similar chronological focus but is less technical and more accessible; (3) Edward Shaughnessy’s I Ching (1996), which translates a second-century BCE version of the Changes that was discovered at Mawangdui (Hunan province) about four decades ago; (4) Richard John Lynn’s The Classic of Changes (1994), which not only provides a rendering of the work after it became a classic in 136 BCE but also offers a highly influential third-century CE commentary on the Yijing, as well as abundant notes on later interpretations of the work; and (5) Richard Wilhelm’s The I Ching or Book of Changes (1967), based on a Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) understanding of the text that became the orthodox interpretation from the fourteenth century into the early twentieth.

For a reference book on Yijing scholarship and technical terminology, there is no better English-language resource than Bent Nielsen’s A Companion to Yi jing Numerology and Cosmology: Chinese Studies of Images and Numbers from Han (202 BCE–220 CE) to Song (960–1279 CE) (2003), which is organized alphabetically by Pinyin transliterations of names, terms, and titles. Another extremely useful reference work, in German, is Dennis Schilling’s Yijing: Das Buch der Wandlungen (2009), which attempts to capture the earliest meaning of the Changes while also offering valuable information on the complex history of the classic.