Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes)
Themes, Imagery, Expressions, and Rhetoric
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Product details:
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
- Date of Publication 11 December 2025
- Number of Volumes Paperback
- ISBN 9781350443532
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages288 pages
- Size 232x154x18 mm
- Weight 420 g
- Language English 678
Categories
Short description:
An elucidation of this enigmatic 3,000 year old classic, combining close readings of its poetic imagery with theoretical approaches to reveal much about ancient Chinese life and thought.
MoreLong description:
The 3,000 year old I Ching is the most esteemed of the ancient Chinese classics, yet also the most enigmatic. Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes) incorporates recent advances in scholarship, such as recently excavated texts, and demonstrates how the Zhouyi (the ancient textual layer of the I Ching) was compiled from mostly oral material and how it was organized to serve as an easily consulted compendium of divination responses.
In this book Geoffrey Redmond clarifies the meanings of the ancient text by examining use of literary devices such as prognostic terms, imagery from daily life, rhetorical tropes, metaphors, proverbs and set phrases. This provides insight on how the Zhouyi was composed and explains its use for divination. It also shows how, centuries later, the Zhouyi was adapted by the Confucians, who believed it to be the creation of ancient sages, and the source of their metaphysics and cosmology. Redmond also analyzes the Changes through a variety of philological heuristics, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, methods of analogy and anomaly, the distinction between argumentative and context dependence, as well as modern approaches such as Jungian psychology, and critical theory. Included are the interlinear Chinese text, and a glossary of key words in English, Chinese, and pinyin, making it essential reading for students studying Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion, and early Chinese history, as well as readers looking for a clear and accessible gloss of this text.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Table
Preface
Note to the Reader
Acknowledgements
Part I. Background
Introduction: Starting to Read a 3,000 Year Old Book
1. Engaging With the Archaic Text
2. Divination: Managing Uncertainty
3. Is The Book of Changes Esoteric?
Part II. Grammar and Structure
4. Divinatory Prognostic Terms in the Zhouyi
5. The Grammar of the Zhouyi
6. Rhetoric and Forms of Expression
Part III. Imagery
7. The Nature of Omens
8. Divining about Numbers and Durations
9. Daily Life: Joys and Hazards
10. Women's Lives
11. Emotions and the Body
12. Hierarchy: Kings, Nobles, Commoners
13. Travel and Its Hazards
14. Ritual Cruelty: Human Sacrifice
15. Animals in Early China
16. Warfare
17. Optical Imagery: The Diagrams
Part IV.
18. Final Reflections
19. Table of Prognostic Terms
20. Glossary of Names and Specialized Terms
21. Hexagram Chart
22. Hexagram Locator
Notes
Bibliography
Index
