I Ching Study Guide

The reader will find a detailed presentation of hexagram images, symbols, and illustrating links at Hexagram Images and Symbols in Detail. If you are a beginner, begin there. If you begin with these images, you may be saved years of wasteful digressions.

If you are a more advanced student of The I Ching and are skeptical, jaded, and cynical of all efforts to achieve any definite interpretation, then try How Images and Symbols Were Discovered. Give hope one more chance.

A reader with only one book is likely to think that his translator is the one, true translator. If the reader has two translations and compares them, he will quickly learn that there is extraordinary variation from translation to translation. A cynical person might suppose that it is impossible for two translators to meet without laughing, but let us be more charitable and suppose that a corrupted text makes any definite interpretation based on the text alone impossible.

Some translations are better than others, however, and I recommend:

• James Legge. Ignore what others say; they are just jealous of his extraordinary achievement.
• John Blofeld. Neat, modern, and valuable appendix.
• Richard Wilhem. The book is bulky and Jungian, but something of a standard.
• Gregory Whincup. This book has valuable appendices.
• Edward Shaughnessy. The Mawangdui and received texts with the Chinese characters and English translation.
• R.G.H. Siu. An interpretation with excellect examples from world literature.
• Alfred Douglas. His "How to Consult the I Ching," apparently a paraphrase of Legge, is nevertheless helpful.

If the reader ventures far beyond these, he will quickly enter the realm of the intellectually nebulous.

The I Ching is not an alien thing. There is no phase of life to which it does not apply, and no situation for which it cannot supply an archetype. Life is short, words many, images few. Skill in the I Ching is really skill in applying it to the affairs of daily life.