Royal Academic Institute

Chung’s “I – Ching 易經” 6 – The Interpretation and Translation of I-Ching

If your conversation is recorded and will be played thousands of years later, I can imagine that not too much people will understand the content regardless of the language used. It is because the terminologies and grammars that we use today are different than thousands of years later. Some of the daily products we used today will also be different.



If you agreed with my conclusion above, then there is no doubt some I-Chung terms that were once easily understood are difficult to learn now. Therefore I-Ching relies on the interpretation from scholars in different dynasty scholars to keep current. Unfortunately, many scholars have made the same mistake; they twisted the original meaning of those terms as they only reference the terminology to the ones they used in their time. The original environment and style were neglected. Moreover, the biggest damage done to the field is that some interpreters want to improve their own fame and recognition by writing I-Ching even though they have little or no knowledge about it. In fact, refer to the I-Ching scholar Mr Li Kan Chi said, “There are two schools and six lineages 兩派六宗that have used I-Ching to promote their own interpretation, it does not see too much of their interpretation are matched I-Ching”. Hence, you need to be very careful to select the materials.

The other bad habit for some scholars is that they are lazy; they had not verified the source of materials before they started writing book or teaching others. There is a Chinese old saying for this, “not to seek deep understandings and verification of the content 不求甚解”. If the first translator had the errors, the rest of translators would pass on the same mistakes.

If you don’t believe my analysis, you can buy several I-Ching books from different scholars in different dynasties and you will find their translation are almost the same. Only the organization of the content and their writing method are different. It is clear that they copied each other without performing any deep research. As a beginner, one should never blindly attach to one scholar’s interpretation before one did enough research in the field. As a Chinese saying, “Understanding is coming from hearing all兼聽則明”, always keep yourself open-minded.

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