The I Ching
trans. James Legge · 1882
4.9 · 7 ratings
About the book
Three thousand years of Chinese divination in sixty-four figures, each one a situation with its line-by-line advice. Legge translated the text together with its ancient commentaries, which is why this edition reads like the book plus its arguing footnotes.
Try the short course
Part 1 · A book that began as marks. The first six slides, free.
1 / 6
Open any hexagram in Legge's edition and the first thing on the page is not a sentence. It is a stack of six lines, some whole, some broken in the middle. The words sit underneath it.
That layout is the history of the book in miniature. The old Text, Legge notes, "says nothing about their origin and formation." The figures are simply there, and the writers take them up one after another. The figures came first, the words after: people were looking at these marks, and using them, long before anyone wrote down what each one meant.
So when we call the I Ching a book, we are describing its latest form. Before it was a book, it was a set of shapes that diviners laid out and read.
Inside the course
20 parts- What the I Ching is, and what it was before it was a bookFree above
- Legge's introduction: King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius
- Yin, yang, and the six lines of a hexagram
- Consulting it: yarrow stalks, coins, and moving lines
Questions
Is The I Ching free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The I Ching is waiting in the app’s library.
