The Elemental Changes: The Ancient Chinese Companion to the I Ching. The T'ai Hsüan Ching of Master Yang Hsiung Text and Commentaries translated by Michael Nylan

SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

by Michael Nylan

Composed in 2 B.C., as "The I Ching revised and enlarged," The Elemental Changes is a divination manual providing a clear method for distinguishing alternative courses of action. Structured in 81 tetragrams ( as opposed to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching), the book offers much to the modern reader. Today in the West, The Elemental Changes is an essential tool for understanding the Tao as it operates in the Cosmos, in the minds of sages, and in sacred texts. It is also one of the great philosophical poems in world literature, assessing the rival claims on human attention of fame, physical immortality, wealth, and power while it situates human endeavor within the larger framework of cosmic energies.

The complete text of The Elemental Changes and its ten autocommentaries are here translated into accessible and, whenever possible, literal English. Following the Chinese tradition, supplementary comments are appended to each tetragram in order to indicate the main lines of interpretation suggested by earlier commentators.

Genres: Philosophy

391 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Michael Nylan is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work includes The Art of War and China’s Early Empires with Michael Loewe, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China, The Five “Confucian” Classics, Lives of Confucius with Thomas A. Wilson, and several essays on feminism and Confucianism.

Reviews

[Sue Dounim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book ("EC") is a version of the translator's definitive "The Canon of Supreme Mystery by Yang Hsiung: A Translation with Commentary of the t'Ai Hsuan Ching by Michael Nylan Canon of Supreme Mystery (CSM)", a translation of the Tai Hsuan Ching (Pinyin: Tai Xuan Jing) of 2 B.C., aimed more for the general reader than the specialist. See my review of CSM for more details.
Some other major differences between this edition and "CSM":

1. EC is about 390 pages, CSM is 680

2. EC omits the 200 pages of exhaustive footnotes and detailed bibliography.

3. The basic translation of the Tai Hsuan Ching, including the original author's commentaries, is exactly the same in both books.

4. The method of divination in CSM follows Yang Hsiung and uses manipulation of a set of yarrow stalks. In EC two methods are given using coins with "heads" and "tails" sides. The first is simpler and uses 4 coins; the second is a version of the yarrow stalk technique described in CSM and uses 36 coins.

5. Unfortunately, the error in the table of tetragrams discussed in the review of CSM is perpetuated in EC (pp. 25-8).

6. On p. 21, the text refers to a "Table 2" which does not seem to refer to the matter discussed--but the matter is discussed in CSM.

7. There is a minor typo on p. 11 where the Chinese ideogram for "qi" is described: the word "stream" is printed when "steam" is clearly meant (the corresponding sentence is correct in CSM).