The I Ching, Legge tr.: Appendix VII: Appendix VII

This is a scholarly translation of one of the traditional appendixes to the *I Ching* (Book of Changes), rendered in English verse — specifically the "Treatise on the Hexagrams taken promiscuously," a classical Chinese rhyming text that pairs or groups the 64 hexagrams to illuminate their contrasting or complementary meanings. The work proceeds through the hexagrams by thematic opposition: strength against weakness, joy against anxiety, giving against seeking, scattering against consolidating, and so on, with each couplet or cluster distilling the essential lesson of one or two hexagrams into a phrase or line. The translator notes the original Chinese rhymes and line lengths are highly irregular and frankly untranslatable in their exact form, so the English version imposes a looser regularity. The distinctive interpretive claim running through the whole is that the hexagrams are best understood relationally — their meanings emerge through contrast and pairing rather than in isolation. The piece closes with a moral summary: the way of the good man prospers, while small or base men come to grief. It would interest readers studying I Ching hermeneutics, classical Chinese cosmology, or the history of Sinological translation.

The I Ching, Legge tr.: Appendix VII: Appendix VII

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