The Transnational Travels of the Yijing
Everyone knows how rapidly religious ideas and works of art and literature circulate in the modern world. We sometimes forget, however, that the globalization of culture has been occurring for centuries, and without it there would obviously be no “world religions” or even the concept of “world literature.” How, we might ask, do texts and ideas travel across boundaries of space and time, and what happens to them in the process? Clearly, for an idea or a text to move from one culture area to another, and to have staying power, it must have some sort of intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, or spiritual appeal. By definition great religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism—and their foundational texts—meet this standard. But the circumstances under which they travel, and the conditions under which they take hold, vary enormously from time to time and culture to culture.1
Texts and ideas constantly evolve, and as they move across borders the process accelerates, often dramatically. Nowhere is this process more obvious than when texts are translated. Proverbially, all “translators are traitors,” but there are different forms of literary treason, and different motives that lie behind them. In the hands of some translators, a text can become nothing more than a device for promoting a certain political, social, intellectual, or religious point of view, a form of “cultural imperialism.”2 But a skilled translator can offer a version of the text that captures both the allure of its ideas and the beauty of its language without significant distortion, thus opening new avenues of cross-cultural understanding.3 Goethe once claimed, for example, that a French translation of his masterpiece, Faust, made the work “again fresh, new and spirited.”4
With these basic ideas and issues in mind, let us look now at the transnational travels of the Yijing, paying special attention to how and why it moved, and how it became domesticated in various environments, both Asian and Western. We will also look briefly at some of the many and sometimes surprising ways that the Changes has influenced world culture, past and present.