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The Complete I Ching
The Complete I Ching
Alfred Huang’s translation, distinguished in the English-language I Ching literature by two features: its author’s classical Chinese training (Huang was a university professor of the Yi in pre-Cultural-Revolution Shanghai) and its preservation of the full fourfold apparatus yuan, heng, li, zhen as the attributes that open the reading of the Creative and run through the entire text.
“The first section analyzes yuan, heng, li, and zhen, the four qualities and characteristics of Heaven, which is the Chinese concept of God. It indicates that the sublime virtue of Heaven is seen in these four attributes” (Huang 1998, Qian commentary). The translation renders each hexagram with the Chinese characters, the Pinyin and Wade-Giles names, the judgment, the image, and the line texts, with commentary that draws on the traditional Chinese exegetical apparatus rather than on the German-sinological synthesis Wilhelm represents. Huang’s reading of hexagram 2 (Kun) — “All sixes indicates that all yin lines alternate to yang lines” — exemplifies the structural precision the edition preserves.
The book is the counterweight to the Wilhelm-Baynes edition in the English-language reception. Where Wilhelm gives the Neo-Confucian I Ching, Huang gives the more classical Chinese reading. For Seba the two editions are complementary: Wilhelm carries the Jung foreword and the synchronistic charter; Huang carries the structural precision and the Chinese interpretive voice.