The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi

Richard John Lynn’s translation of the I Ching through the lens of Wang Bi’s third-century commentary. Wang Bi is the founder of xuanxue (玄學, dark learning), the Neo-Taoist philosophical movement that read the Confucian classics through Daoist metaphysics. His commentary on the I Ching was, for roughly a millennium, the orthodox reading of the classic in China and the one that shaped the I Ching’s transmission through the medieval and early-modern periods.

Wang Bi’s contribution is interpretive rather than textual. He furnished the classical statement of how the hexagram should be read: each hexagram is “a unified entity” whose meaning resides in a “controlling principle” expressed by its name and amplified by its Judgment; the controlling principle typically resides in one ruler line among the six; the other lines relate to the ruler and to one another through resonance, correspondence, and opposition, producing the dynamics of change (Wang Bi / Lynn, Classic of Changes). “Change occurs because of the interaction between the innate tendency of things and their countertendencies to behave in ways opposed to their natures.”

Lynn’s translation is significant because the dominant Western I Ching editions — including Wilhelm’s — derive largely from the Neo-Confucian commentaries of Cheng Yi (1033-1107) and Zhu Xi (1130-1200), which moralized the text to a degree Wang Bi did not. Lynn’s Wang Bi offers the philosophical rather than the ethical I Ching, the book as it was read by the philosophers of the Six Dynasties and Tang periods. The result is a reading in which the I Ching is closer to a metaphysics of change than to a manual of Confucian self-cultivation.

Concepts introduced or developed

• hexagram
• the-ten-wings
• archetypal-situation

Cited by

• rudolf-ritsema
• richard-wilhelm