The Original I Ching Oracle represents the most substantial advance in I Ching scholarship since Richard Wilhelm introduced the oracle to the West in the 1920s. The tradition concerning the birth of the I Ching is intertwined with myths about the origin of Chinese civilization. According to the traditional narrative, the book came into being through the insights of three legendary sages. The first sage is a fully mythical being, Fu Xi, the first emperor, sometimes represented with a serpent body and a human head. The third sage, who is supposed to have carried the work to completion, is a fully historical person, although surrounded by a legendary aura: Confucius, the “master of ten thousand generations.” Between the two Stands the man who is considered the principal author of the book, a figure straddling history and legend: King Wen, the founder of the Zhou dynasty, which ruled China during most of the first millennium BC, the time when the I Ching actually came into use.
And now Rudolf Ritsema and Shantena Sabbadini have produced the only translation from the original Chinese that offers the I Ching in its original purity, freeing it from any specific interpretation. The innovative translation method used by the authors consistently renders each Chinese ideogram by a “core-word” and amplifies this by an associated “field of meaning,” thus creating — for the first time in a Western language — a concordance to the oracular texts. Furthermore, the “fields of meaning” allow the Western reader to access the full wealth and subtlety of imagination held within these texts, just as a Chinese reader would, without being confined by the specific interpretation chosen by a translator.
The Original I Ching Oracle is a book of divination and a psychological tool, the like of which has not been seen before in the Western world. In it the divinatory texts do not have a fixed meaning, but resonate, once the user has selected an appropriate image within the “field of meaning,” with the Specific question and situation submitted to the oracle. By recovering the original shamanic images, often veiled by years of later philosophical interpretation, The Original I Ching Oracle puts the reader in contact with a deep universal dimension of the psyche, as present for us today as it was in China more than 3,000 years ago.
[Note: red color text portions are rendered in black in order to keep pdf size within reasonable limits ]
Author(s): Shantena Augusto Sabbadini, Rudolf Ritsema
Publisher: Watkins Publishing
Year: 2005
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor + ocrmypdf
Pages: 872
City: London
Tags: I Ching;Yi Jing;divination;chinese oracle
The Original I Ching Oracle
Contents
Part One: Introduction
I. The Oracle
The Book of Yi
The Name Of The Book
Synchronicity
A Kaleidoscope Of Images
A Mirror Of The Present
Interrogating the oracle
Lines, trigrams, hexagrams
The Consultation Procedure
The coins method
The yarrow stalk method
Primary and potential hexagram
Reading Your Answer
The Language of the Yi Jing
Chinese as an imaginal language
Basic Features Of The Eranos Translation
Core-words
Fields of meaning
Oracular and exegetic texts
Sections Of A Hexagram
Image of the Situation
Outer and Inner Trigram
Counter Hexagram
Preceding Situation
Hexagrams in Pairs
Additional Texts
Patterns of Wisdom
Transforming Lines
Image Tradition
Additional Remarks About The Eranos Translation
Romanization of Chinese characters
Sources of the Fields of meaning
Composite entries
Special cases
Idiomatic phrases
Great and small
The Concordance
II. Myth and History
The tradition
The first emperor
The Pattern King
Modern views of the origins of the Yi
Bones and tortoise shells
The yarrow stalk oracle
The Evolution of the Book
The Book of Encompassing Versatility
The canonization of the Yi
Philosophical and oracular tradition
The Palace Edition
The Mawangdui manuscript
The Yi Jing Comes To The West
The Yi Jing At Eranos
III. Correlative Thinking
The Universal Compass
The yin-yang cycle
The yearly cycle and the four directions
The five Transformative Moments
The Eight Trigrams And Their Attributes
Chronological Table
Notes
Index
Part Two: The 64 Hexagrams
List of Hexagrams
The 64 Hexagrams
1 ENERGY | Qian
2 SPACE | Kun
3 SPROUTING | Zhun
4 ENVELOPING | Meng
5 ATTENDING | Xu
6 ARGUING | Song
7 THE LEGIONS | Shi
8 GROUPING | Bi
9 THE SMALL ACCUMULATING | Xiao Chu
10 TREADING | Lü
11 COMPENETRATION | Tai
12 OBSTRUCTION | Pi
13 CONCORDING PEOPLE | Tong Ken
14 THE GREAT POSSESSING | Da You
15 HUMBLING | Qian
16 PROVIDING | Yu
17 FOLLOWING | Sui
18 DECAY | Gu
19 NEARING | Lin
20 OVERSEEING | Guan
21 GNAWING AND BITING | Shi He
22 ADORNING | Bi
23 STRIPPING | Bo
24 RETURN | Fu
25 WITHOUT ENTANGLEMENT | Wu Wang
26 THE GREAT ACCUMULATING | Da Chu
27 THE JAWS | Yi
28 THE GREAT EXCEEDING | Da Guo
29 THE GORGE | Kan
30 THE RADIANCE | Li
31 CONJUNCTION | Xian
32 PERSEVERING | Heng
33 RETIRING | Dun
34 THE GREAT’S VIGOR | Da Zhuang
35 PROSPERING | Jin
36 BRIGHTNESS HIDDEN | Ming Yi
37 HOUSEHOLD PEOPLE | Jia Ren
38 POLARIZING | Kui
39 LIMPING | Jian
40 UNRAVELING | Xie
41 DIMINISHING | Sun
42 AUGMENTING | Yi
43 PARTING | Guai
44 COUPLING | Gou
45 CLUSTERING | Cui
46 ASCENDING | Sheng
47 CONFINEMENT | Kun
48 THE WELL | Jing
49 SKINNING | Ge
50 THE VESSEL | Ding
51 THE SHAKE | Zhen
52 THE BOUND | Gen
53 INFILTRATING | Jian
54 CONVERTING MAIDENHOOD | Gui Mei
55 ABOUNDING | Feng
56 SOJOURNING | Lü
57 THE ROOT | Sun
58 THE OPEN | Dui
59 DISPERSING | Huan
60 ARTICULATING | Jie
61 THE CENTER CONFORMING | Zhong Fu
62 THE SMALL EXCEEDING | Xiao Guo
63 ALREADY FORDING | Ji Ji
64 NOT YET FORDING | Wei Ji
Part Three: The Concordance
Concordance to the Oracular Texts
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Bibliography
