Vol. 17 No. 3 · 9 February 1995
page 20 | 2745 words
What the Yarrow Stalks Foretell
Brian Rotman
- The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi translated by Richard Lynn
Columbia, 602 pp, £15.50, November 1994, ISBN 0 251 08294 6
In those heady days more than twenty years ago, a slew of foreign invaders – Tibetan prayers, the Katmandu trail, ancient Chinese manuals, Yogic trances, the sayings of Chairman Mao, Zen koans shamanism, Egyptian rituals, Warrior cults, and the dreamscape of Mexican mushrooms – burst through the Eurocentric enclosure of our upbringing, announcing the age of Aquarius. Then times changed, and we and/or history drew a line in the sand under these alien forms of discourse. Most of us were left with traces of them, though. Where Chinese things were concerned, there was Sun Tzu’s Art of War, for example. I wasn’t a Maoist, but I got a frisson from the idea that in the period of the Waning States, jobbing intellectuals like Sun Tzu were boiled, pickled, sawn in half or otherwise executed, if their manuals gave bad advice to the prince Sun Tzu’s book survived courtesy of the Chinese principle of paying the doctor only if he cures you. I wasn’t a hippy either, but I encountered the I Ching. My meeting with it wasn’t a prolonged one, and this was a pity, for it, too, is seriously in the advice business and has somehow survived from an even more remote time than Sun Tzu. Now, the repressed returns and I have to take the great classic seriously.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
From T.H. Barrett
Brian Rotman’s account of the transmission of the I Ching misses out some quite important information (LRB, 9 February). The problem lies in his repeated use of the word ‘translation’, a process which, according to him, was carried out many times during the history of the I Ching in China itself. In fact, the text of the I Ching has remained unaltered and in exactly the same language for about two millennia, and some parts of it for perhaps as many as three – any much older dating even for the hexagrams is no longer generally accepted. What has changed has been the nature of the commentaries written upon the main text, but here again there has been no shift in the language used: until this century all commentary was written in ‘Classical’ Chinese, an artificial literary medium maintained with even less change than Latin while spoken Chinese diverged from it as radically as any modern Romance language. On the other hand, the text has been constantly re-interpreted through commentaries in this medium to suit the changing zeitgeist. It may be legitimate to call this process ‘translation’, but only when one has made clear that the term is not to be taken literally.
As for the interpretation decreed by the Kangxi Emperor in 1715, which Rotman correctly identifies as a distinctly moralising effort which has had undue influence on Western readings of the text, this was in fact the outcome of a conservative strain within Chinese thought itself, albeit one particularly gratifying to the Manchu autocrat, rather than the result of conflicts between Manchu and Chinese scholars. The new ruler was trying to keep the mailed fist hidden as far as possible so as to win over a broader following of Chinese intellectuals, and so, for example, he was at the same time prepared to bestow tokens of Imperial favour on a radical critic of earlier I Ching scholarship named Hu Wei.
I appreciate that Brian Rotman disclaims any particular interest in Chinese culture or history; I also appreciate that it is very difficult to come by accurate information in these areas: perhaps less than half a dozen of our so-called ‘university’ libraries could furnish the basic bibliography of books listed at the end of Richard Lynn’s translation, and I fear that many might come up with none at all. But surely to gloss over such problems is to treat Chinese civilisation as a willow-pattern world in which nothing of consequence ever took place and to which normal standards of accurate description do not apply. An honest admission that one is ‘making do’ in the absence of reliable guidance would, I hope, find more sympathy with your readers than misinformation presented, no matter with what good intentions, as fact.
T.H. Barrett
School of Oriental and African Studies
