Seba.Health
Figure · Seba Knowledge Graph
Alfred Huang
Alfred Huang
Chinese-American scholar whose The Complete I Ching (1998) is the most philologically careful English-language translation of the Yi after Wilhelm’s. Huang was trained in classical Chinese at Shanghai universities in the 1940s, studied under Yin Shih Tzu (a master of Taoist internal alchemy and the I Ching), and was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for twenty-two years. After emigration to the United States in 1979 he taught the I Ching at Temple University and the Pacific School of Religion.
Huang’s significance for the Seba KG is the counterweight he provides to the Wilhelm-Jung reception. Where Wilhelm translated through the Neo-Confucian harmonization and opened the text to Western psychology via Jung’s foreword, Huang restores the Chinese exegetical voice — the fourfold yuan, heng, li, zhen, the trigram-pair structural logic, the Chinese character presented alongside the translation. The two editions together give the English-speaking reader the full range of the text: Wilhelm for the psychological reception, Huang for the Chinese interpretive tradition.
Within the depth-psychological lineage Seba traces, Huang functions as the philological authority that grounds claims about what the I Ching says. His translations of hexagrams 1 and 2 (Qian and Kun) remain the reference points for any serious Western engagement with the text.