Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes)
eBook - ePub

Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes)

Themes, Imagery, Expressions, and Rhetoric

  1. 288 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes)

Themes, Imagery, Expressions, and Rhetoric

About this book

The 3,000 year old I Ching is the most esteemed of the ancient Chinese classics, yet also the most enigmatic. Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes) incorporates recent advances in scholarship, such as recently excavated texts, and demonstrates how the Zhouyi (the ancient textual layer of the I Ching) was compiled from mostly oral material and how it was organized to serve as an easily consulted compendium of divination responses.

In this book Geoffrey Redmond clarifies the meanings of the ancient text by examining use of literary devices such as prognostic terms, imagery from daily life, rhetorical tropes, metaphors, proverbs and set phrases. This provides insight on how the Zhouyi was composed and explains its use for divination. It also shows how, centuries later, the Zhouyi was adapted by the Confucians, who believed it to be the creation of ancient sages, and the source of their metaphysics and cosmology. Redmond also analyzes the Changes through a variety of philological heuristics, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, methods of analogy and anomaly, the distinction between argumentative and context dependence, as well as modern approaches such as Jungian psychology, and critical theory. Included are the interlinear Chinese text, and a glossary of key words in English, Chinese, and pinyin, making it essential reading for students studying Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion, and early Chinese history, as well as readers looking for a clear and accessible gloss of this text.

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Yes, you can access Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes) by Geoffrey Redmond in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Series Page
  5. Title Page
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Preface
  9. Note to the Reader
  10. Acknowledgments
  11. Part I. Background
  12. Introduction: Starting to Read a 3,000-Year-Old Book
  13. 1 Engaging with the Archaic Text
  14. 2 Divination: Managing Uncertainty
  15. 3 Is the Book of Changes Esoteric?
  16. Part II. Grammar and Structure
  17. 4 Divinatory Prognostic Terms
  18. 5 The Grammar of the Zhouyi
  19. 6 Rhetoric and Forms of Expression
  20. Part III. Imagery
  21. 7 The Nature of Omens
  22. 8 Divining About Numbers and Durations
  23. 9 Joys and Hazards of Daily Life
  24. 10 Women’s Lives
  25. 11 Emotions and the Body
  26. 12 Hierarchy: Kings, Nobles, Commoners
  27. 13 Travel and Its Hazards
  28. 14 Human Sacrifice: Ritual Cruelty
  29. 15 Animals in Early China
  30. 16 Warfare
  31. 17 Optical Imagery: The Diagrams
  32. Part IV
  33. Final Reflections
  34. Appendix
  35. Glossary of Names and Specialized Terms
  36. Hexagram Chart
  37. Hexagram Finder
  38. Notes
  39. Bibliography
  40. Index
  41. Copyright