The I Ching, Legge tr.

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This is a scholarly translation and critical edition of the *I Ching* (Yi Jing), the ancient Chinese classic of divination and cosmology, produced as part of the *Sacred Books of the East* series. The work comprises the full translated text of all 64 hexagrams across two sections, followed by seven appendixes including the Great Appendix (Ta Zhuan), treatises on symbolism, trigrams, and the sequential logic of the hexagrams. The introduction argues that the *I Ching* as it now exists combines an older divinatory text (attributed to King Wen of Zhou, c. 12th century B.C.) with later appendixes traditionally ascribed to Confucius — though the editor challenges that attribution directly, arguing the third and fourth appendixes in particular cannot plausibly be Confucian. A notable claim is that the *I Ching* is not the most ancient of Chinese books, contrary to common assertion, and that the text survived the Qin book-burning intact. The work traces the document's development from its origins in the lineal figures (trigrams and hexagrams), through King Wen's imprisonment when he elaborated the system, up to the Han dynasty. This is a 19th-century Western sinological edition — almost certainly James Legge's — characterized by historico-critical method applied to a text more often treated as mystical or philosophical.

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