Translation of ancient chinese texts

The question sounds bibliographic but carries something underneath it: which translation do I use, and does it matter? It matters enormously — not because one version is "correct" and the others wrong, but because every translation of a classical Chinese text is simultaneously a translation of its dominant commentary tradition, and those traditions disagree about what the text fundamentally is.

The clearest case is the I Ching. Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German translation — rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes and published in 1950 — remains the foundational Western rendering. Its authority derives from Wilhelm's unusual position: two decades of residence in China, mastery of both spoken and written language, and direct instruction from the Qing scholar Lao Nai-hsüan, one of the last custodians of the living commentarial tradition. Jung, who wrote the foreword to the Baynes edition, described what this meant:

His grasp of the living meaning of the text gives his version of the I Ching a depth of perspective that an exclusively academic knowledge of Chinese philosophy could never provide.

But Wilhelm's translation, for all its depth, consistently reads the I Ching through a Neo-Confucian lens — specifically the commentaries of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, which became the orthodox interpretive framework of traditional China after the thirteenth century. This is not a flaw unique to Wilhelm; as Richard John Lynn observes in his 1994 translation based on Wang Bi's third-century commentary, "the contemporary reader of the Changes, regardless of the language in which it is read, will usually know it in some version largely shaped by Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi." Lynn's Wang Bi translation recovers an earlier and philosophically distinct reading — one in which each hexagram constitutes a unified situation governed by a single controlling principle, displacing the Han-dynasty apparatus of yin-yang numerology and image-catalogue divination in favor of structural philosophical analysis.

Alfred Huang's The Complete I Ching (1998) approaches the problem from a different angle entirely. Huang's authority is biographical: classical training in Shanghai, tutelage under Yin Shih Tzu in Taoist internal alchemy, and twenty-two years of imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. His indictment of existing translations is direct — all of them, he argues, are "Westernized," having added interpretive glosses that limit the text's constitutive openness. His governing principle is the classical Chinese injunction shu er bu zuo — "narrate, don't write" — and its companion: ning xing bu da, "better to stick to the truth than make the translation smooth." The result is English that sometimes reads strangely, but Huang's point is that the strangeness is the text's own: the ancient Chinese language presents images without tense, gender, subject, or object, and any translation that smooths this into proper English has already made interpretive decisions the reader cannot see.

Ritsema and Karcher's Eranos I Ching (1994) pursues a related but distinct strategy: recovering the oracular core before it was domesticated by any philosophical school, rendering each character by a single consistent English equivalent throughout the entire text to produce what they call a concordance-in-translation. Their aim is to restore the multivalence that commentary traditions — Confucian, Neo-Confucian, Taoist alchemical — progressively narrowed.

Thomas Cleary's several translations (the Taoist I Ching, the Buddhist I Ching) foreground specific internal commentarial traditions — Liu Yiming's alchemical reading, Zhixu's Buddhist reading — making explicit what Wilhelm's version obscures: that the I Ching has never had a single meaning, only a succession of interpretive commitments.

What this means practically: the Wilhelm/Baynes translation remains indispensable for depth-psychological work, because it is the text Jung worked with and because its Neo-Confucian harmonization produces the kind of synthetic wisdom-language that speaks to the Western reader's existing categories. But it should be read alongside Lynn's Wang Bi for philosophical precision, and alongside Huang for a corrective to the Westernizing tendency. No single translation gives you the text; the text emerges in the tension between them.

The same principle holds for Daoist texts. Burton Watson's Zhuangzi (2013) argues for maximum fidelity to the Chinese wording even at the cost of English awkwardness, on the grounds that Zhuangzi uses language "in the manner of a poet" and that paraphrase into smooth English destroys the very quality that makes the text irreducible. The translator's task, on this view, is not to explain but to preserve the encounter with something genuinely strange.

  • Richard Wilhelm — portrait of the sinologist whose I Ching translation shaped the Western reception of the text
  • Alfred Huang — portrait of the classical scholar whose Complete I Ching recovers the Chinese interpretive voice
  • Thomas Cleary — portrait of the prolific translator of Zen, Taoist, and Buddhist classics
  • synchronicity — Jung's concept of acausal meaningful coincidence, developed in direct dialogue with the I Ching

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Wilhelm, Richard, and Baynes, Cary F., 1950, The I Ching or Book of Changes
  • Lynn, Richard John, 1994, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi
  • Huang, Alfred, 1998, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation
  • Ritsema, Rudolf, and Karcher, Stephen, 1994, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change
  • Watson, Burton, 2013, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi