The I Ching or Book of Changes Read Online Free PDF

whole.
    In the parts of the German text that render the Chinese, I have tried to be as literal in my translation as possible, in order to establish a guideline in the highly allusive and symbolic language. (One need only compare passages in Wilhelm’s version with the same passages as rendered by Legge in order to see how completely different two interpretations of the same Chinese sentence may be.) When I have deviated from this rule, it has been in the few places where Dr. Wilhelm pointed out that a paraphrase is needed to cover the Chinese meaning.
    The great age and unbroken continuity of Chinese culture are wonderful to contemplate; to keep this perspective before the reader’s mind, I have given, where possible, dates for the works and authors mentioned by Wilhelm. All footnotes added by me are inclosed in square brackets.
    Wherever the English names of the hexagrams appear in the body of the text, they are printed in small capitals; in this way they can be distinguished from trigrams of the same name. The Chinese characters for the names of the hexagrams have been rewritten for this edition. I have to thank Dr. Shih Yu-chung for this contribution. Wade’s system of transliteration has been used in putting the German version of Chinese words into their English equivalents. The excellent key to the hexagrams was brought to my notice by Carol Fisher Baumann.
    The Chinese title page is from the hand of Professor Tung Tso-pin of the Academia Sinica.
    There are few sentences in this translation that were not discussed again and again before they took final form, and the work as a whole has been revised many times. For aid in the early stages of my undertaking I am indebted to Emma Jung and to Frieda Hauswirth. Later, when I returned to this country, I received very great assistance from Dr. Erla Rodakiewicz and from my daughter, Ximena de Angulo. For help at that time on matters of style I am also grateful to Elizabeth M. Brown and to Mary E. Strong. Dr. Wilfrid Lay, who learned Chinese for the sole purpose of reading the I Ching , brought to my attention a number of points that I would otherwise have missed. Dr. George H. Danton read the manuscript two years before it reached its finished form, and gave me valuable suggestions. For the final truing up of the translation with the German text, and for rescuing it from the ever-present threatof translator’s English, I cannot give praise and appreciation enough to my editor, Renée Darmstadter.
    Accuracy and intelligibility have been the goals set for this translation, but it must prove itself in a still more vital test. If the reader is drawn out of the accustomed framework of his thought to view the world in a new perspective, if his imagination is stimulated and his psychological insight deepened, he will know that Wilhelm’s I Ching has been faithfully reproduced.
    CARY F. BAYNES
    Morris, Connecticut, 1949
    T RANSLATOR’S N OTE FOR THE T HIRD E DITION
    This edition presents the I Ching in an entirely new format, more compact as a book, and clearer in its typographical distinctions. Professor Hellmut Wilhelm, of the Far Eastern and Russian Institute in the University of Washington (Seattle), has contributed a preface to the new edition, in which he comments on recent research and on other translations of the Book of Changes and elucidates the principles that guided his father’s work. Professor Wilhelm has approved the editors’ additions, rearrangements of some of the secondary material, and revisions of bibliographical information in footnotes. The rearrangements consist in placing a chart, “ The Major Divisions of the Material ,” adjacent to the new preface, with which it is interrelated; and moving a section “On Consulting the Oracle” to the end of the volume, for convenience. An index of the hexagrams by pattern has been taken over from the German edition, and a general index has been compiled.
    As I remarked in a Translator’s Note to the second