May 07, 2007

• 'Yijing' is the more modern pinyin transliteration of the two Chinese characters, 'yi' (change) and 'jing' (book or classic) that used to be represented in the old Wade-Giles system as 'I Ching'. Mandarin (putonghua) pronunciation of both – since they are merely alphabetic variants of the same Chinese characters – is 'ee jing' rather than 'eye ching'. Some diehards still refer to the text as 'Yi King', which often reflects that their interest stems from the works of Aleister Crowley, who used the James Legge translation (Peking was always pronounced Beijing in China). The things ya learn. Thanks Ay Cee!
• I remember Barnabas Collins using the I Ching to go back to the 1890's. Good times, bad toupées. Awooooooooooo!
• I took an Asian Philosophy class back in college, and I remember my prof (who was willing to try anything, and prayed often at a local ashram... and was thus let go from my rather conservative Catholic Uni) saying that he once asked the I Ching the path to ultimate knowledge. It told him to stop asking stupid questions!
• It gets even more complicated pete, as China is so big that sometimes westerners were often transcribing dialects quite different from Mandarin (e.g. Beijing in Cantonese sounds more like Bak-ging). Then pronunciation also shifted over time, so it's hard to say exactly how ancient Chinese sounded when spoken, though there is some interesting research and convincing reconstructions.
• Peking was always pronounced Beijing in China As I recall, the phoneme that is now pronounced as (something resembling) J was the subject of a fairly recent pronunciation change, before which it was more like K. So, whilst Beijing was never 'pee king', it was once 'beiking' (and the pinyin b is really an unaspirated P, not a B as such).
• I was going to post something about the 'pee king' but I changed my mind.
• Arf. That would have been my cat in his younger days.
• Like wow, man, I was into the I Ching back in the 70s in a dilettante way, shortly before I got into astrology. I remember agonising because I didn't have yarrow sticks to cast, or even chinese coins, but it was a journey to interpret the results. The thing I liked about both, and my deck of Morgan's Tarot, was that it gave me the chance to meditate on questions outside the day-to-day, just-the-facts world. I found them helpful, but your mileage may vary. So, Abiezer, what's your take on the I Ching, in all its spelling glory?
• I'm fairly ignorant about it all really, path. I came across this researching something, as the Book of Changes is one of those profound sources in the Chinese tradition that you really need a little familiarity with to get the full sense of much later work; like the Bible can be to the Western canon. It's the locus classicus of one of those underpinnings of the Chinese world-view that makes for the sharp difference from the Judeo-Christian world - a concern with then immanent mutability of inter-related phenomena in a reality that is at once unitary and various, rather than the transcendent theology that mostly prevailed in the West. I have done readings from time to time, in a similar spirit to you, that "journey to interpret the results," which is very well put. processes are in many ways more the point than outcomes. I must admit to being baffled by a fair amount of it though and not one to take it seriously in any prognostic sense.
• Thinking a bit more about that last (no possibiltiy of knowing the future), there's part of me that is still a child and believes in magic; and would not be surprised if there is some mountain hermit in the Kunlun who sees what has past and what is to come spinning away through the dharma web and can access it with techniques like this. It's just not something I'll ever achieve, so I stick to the prosaic but preserve a sense of wonder.
• Ah, yes, I hope I'll never lose that child in me. And "a concern with then immanent mutability of inter-related phenomena in a reality that is at once unitary and various" is perfect.
• Path, you are a constant source of interest.
• She's a wigged-out beatnik, is what she is! :D
• Ever since I've turned 30, I've cast the I Ching on my birthday (and have been getting the results tattooed on my calf... I need to update that project, actually, so I think this is my cue to visit a tattoo artist this week). It's a pretty significant work for me. Fantastic links, Abi. Thanks for posting... I kind of needed to read this today.
• I felt a tremor in the Force, calling me to post, dear Bone. We will need pics of those tattoos, I should think.
• I would also appreciate the community's view of the last, clearly drug-induced, link. Because, in a way, I'm all about the I Ching and communism.
• Flickr. The tattoos feature the hexagram and jin wen for each result. A friend, who was learning Chinese, emailed me about the Chinese-ish characters when I first started doing this (in 2005), and I'm reprinting our email exchange. FROM: theron rad. much better than the bart simpson. [ED: he's referring to a "goatse Bart Simpson" tattoo link I had sent him a few days before] the bottom character looks like jia, family, only with extra strokes on top, which makes little sense to me. is it family/home? or something else? FROM: bone According to Taoist master Alfred Huang's translation of the I Ching, the ideographs traditionally associated with the "gua" (the hexagrams and corresponding fortunes) are from an ancient Chinese script called jin wen dating from the Zhou dynasty. The symbols I used were culled from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (interesting fact: Wilhelm's original German translation was the one Jung used in his experiments with the I Ching). I haven't been able to locate source material on the ideographs in that volume, as it is pretty dense. I therefore don't know if the symbols I used were the traditional jin wen or a modern Chinese script, although I imagine the former. The Wilhelm/Baynes ideographs looked more traditionally "Chinese" that the ones in the Huang translation, which is why I went with them... aesthetics over accuracy forever!
• The first two are definitely 革 gé and 離 lí. I can see where the confusion might arise on the last one; but I'd say with the extra strokes that it's likely 蒙 méng mēng mĕng.
• Abeizer: not just LOL, but gales of laughter for the "beatnik" nomination. I haven't felt so young since I was young. And dear fishtick, thank you! Though I think you might be confusing "interesting" with slightly cracked. Ah, life has lovliness to sell. (Thanks to Henry Miller for that realization, and to both of you for reminding me.)
• As for that last link, I'd guess it would be more understandable if I spoke Chinese and were back translating. As it stands, it sounds like an idealistic youth's take on something he wants to defend and assumes we have the same thoughts in our heads that he does, so no exposition is needed. The presentation of yin and yang balancing could have been stated in relation to capitalist markets. I wonder what his image of capitalism looks like. Now that would be an interesting discussion. Do you think he'd be willing to debate it here? (The "he" assumed above is the generic "he" and does not contain any gender-specific illusions that males are always wrong.)
• I believe Leibniz interpreted the hexagrams as six-digit binary numbers, and was deeply impressed. Possibly the whole thing resonated with his own project of a kind of semantic calculus which would reveal the answers to all sorts of questions.
• Unfortunately, he was mistaken.
• Or so he led you to believe.