The I Ching, Legge tr.: Preface

This is the preface to a scholarly English translation of the Yi King (I Ching / Book of Changes), written by the sinologist James Legge, describing his decades-long effort to understand and render the text — a journey stretching from a first translation in 1854 through a manuscript-soaking disaster in the Red Sea to a breakthrough in 1874. Legge's central interpretive argument is that the Text (attributed to King Wăn and his son) must be studied separately from the Appendixes (traditionally attributed to Confucius), because conflating them — as most editions and previous translators did — obscures the fact that they are compositionally distinct by some 700 years and often incongruous in subject matter. He further argues, controversially, that there is no reliable evidence Confucius authored any of the Appendixes beyond passages explicitly introduced as his sayings. On translation method, Legge makes a philosophically notable claim: Chinese written characters are symbols of ideas rather than representations of words, so a literal rendering is inherently futile — the translator must achieve a mental rapport with the author and render thoughts rather than characters, supplementing with parenthetical words where needed to make implicit sense explicit. He reviews three prior Western translations (Regis, McClatchie, Zottoli), finding each flawed by excessive literalism, misattribution of authorship, or misguided interpretive frameworks such as Comparative Mythology. The preface is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Western sinology, the textual criticism of the I Ching, or the theory of classical Chinese translation.

The I Ching, Legge tr.: Preface

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