The I Ching, Legge tr.: Contents

This is a scholarly edition of the *I Ching* (Yî King), the ancient Chinese classic of divination and cosmology, presented in the 19th-century Sacred Books of the East translation series tradition. The work comprises two main parts: a full translation of the 64 hexagrams (the Text, divided into two sections) and seven Appendixes traditionally attributed to Confucius, including treatises on symbolism, the trigrams, and the sequential ordering of hexagrams. The introductory chapters argue carefully about the text's historical layering — distinguishing the older core Text (dating to King Wên's imprisonment, around the 12th century B.C.) from the later Appendixes, and questioning the traditional attribution of those Appendixes to Confucius, noting that internal evidence rules out Confucian authorship for at least some of them. A distinctive scholarly claim runs throughout: that the Yî's lineal figures originated as divination tools whose 64-hexagram system was a deliberate, bounded construction, not an arbitrary accumulation. The work situates the I Ching within Chinese intellectual and political history, tracing its survival through the Qin book-burning and its engagement by generations of native commentators, while also critically assessing prior Western sinological scholarship. Readers interested in classical Chinese religious texts, the history of divination, or 19th-century comparative sacred literature scholarship will find this a foundational critical edition.

The I Ching, Legge tr.: Contents

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