Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes)

by Redmond, Geoffrey; Hon, Tze-Ki

• ISBN13: 9780199766819
• ISBN10: 0199766819
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-10-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Chinese traditional culture cannot be understood without some familiarity with the I Ching, yet it is one of the most difficult of the world's ancient classics. Assembled from fragments with many obscure allusions, it was the subject of ingenious, but often conflicting, interpretations over nearly three thousand years. Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes) offers a comprehensive study at a time when interest in Asian philosophy and the culture of China is on the rise. Still widely read in China, it has become a countercultural classic in the West.

Recent scholarship has radically altered our understanding of this foundational work. Geoffrey Redmond and Tze-Ki Hon present an up-to-date survey of recent studies including reconstruction of the early meanings, excavated manuscripts, the New Culture Movement, and the Cultural Revolution. To facilitate introducing the classic to students, the necessary background is provided for university teachers and students, even non-China specialists. The teaching approaches described will foreground the otherness of the classic, yet engage the interests of twenty-first-century students. Rather than dismissing the text's popular association with divination, they explain why this mode of human thought has persisted for millennia. Thus, Redmond and Hon mediate between the two extreme views of the classic: a source of timeless ancient wisdom on the one hand, and a historical curiosity on the other.

Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes) makes this important classic accessible to a broad readership, thus providing a crucial service for those interested in China, early civilization, and world religion. Now anyone with a serious interest can understand a text that continues to have a decisive influence on Chinese and world culture three thousand years after its original composition.

Author Biography

Geoffrey Redmond's dual background is in textual criticism, which he studied at the University of Virginia under the eminent philologist Fredson Bowers, and biomedical science, which he studied at Columbia and Rockefeller Universities. His research concerns the origins of systematic thought about the cosmos and the persistence of traditional thought in the era of science. He has found the 3,000 year old Yijing of unique value as the primary source for this work as it containing early cosmological speculations and continues to have followers today.

Tze-ki Hon is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He was chair of the History Department from 2007-2010. He is the author of The Yijing and Chinese Politics: Classical Commentary and Literati Activism in the Northern Song Period, 960-1127. A specialist of the Yijing commentaries in premodern and modern China, his articles and book reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review, China Review International, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Journal of Chinese Studies, Modern China, Monumenta Serica, and Philosophy East and West.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Chronology of Chinese Dynasties
Structure of the Yijing
List of Illustrations


Introduction: Studying an Ancient Classic
Chapter 1 Divination: Fortune-Telling and Philosophy
Chapter 2 Bronze Age Origins
Chapter 3 Women in the Book of Changes
Chapter 4 Excavated Manuscripts
Chapter 5 Ancient Meanings Reconstructed
Chapter 6 The Ten Wings
Chapter 7 Cosmology
Chapter 8 Moral Cultivation
Chapter 9 The Yijing in Modern China
Chapter 10 The Yijing's Journey to the West
Chapter 11 Reading the Book of Changes
Chapter 12 The Future of the Yijing


Bibliography
Index