It is interesting to see how hypertext has gone from being a grand possibility to a never-finished chore. --Ted Nelson
http://www.yitoons.com/
What are Yi-Toons and the I Ching?
The intention of
Yi-Toons is to humorously present,
perhaps not always successfully, some graphical figments of my
imagination based on a combination of I Ching imagery and my present
state of mind. As for the I Ching, let’s just say that a few millennia
and countless books and essays later, the subject remains inexhaustible.
Being that so, please excuse me –or be grateful– for sparing you many
particulars.
http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/member.php?u=345
http://www.yitoons.com/yiblog/2011/10/17/yijing-cards-just-a-version/#comments
http://i-tjingcentrum.nl/wp/the-lost-work-of-wallace-andrew-sherrill
The lost work of Wallace Andrew Sherrill
A few years ago
Frank Coolen
told me he had bought a book by W.A. Sherrill which was quite unknown
in the world of Yijing students. Indeed, the book is so rare that isn’t
even listed in
I Ching – An Annotated Bibliography.
Naturally I also wanted to have a copy of this curious book, so with a
lot of searching on the internet, and by paying way too much money, I
was able to obtain this book.
Sherrill is mostly known by his co-authorship with W.K. Chu. They wrote
An Anthology of I Ching, which gives some divination techniques that are (sometimes loosely) associated with the Yijing, and
The Astrology of I Ching,
which is their adaptation of Heluo Lishu, a kind of numerological
system that calculates birth and life hexagrams. They were both good
friends with
Nan Huaijin 南懷瑾, a well-known Buddhist teacher.
Sherrill’s book
Heritage of Change – a Background to Chinese Culture and Thinking
is written as an introduction in the Yijing and Chinese culture and
philosophy from a Westerners point of view. I must confess I have never
read it thoroughly. The contents does not really appeal to me, I am not
interested in philosophical explanations. But I am sure others will find
it a joy to read and many might find the book stuffed with a lot of
intriguing concepts and information.
That is why I made a scan of the book. It can be downloaded here:
Heritage of Change (571)
http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=4&bid=507
The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the Yi jing
By Scott Davis
*This book is in the Cambria World Sinophone Series
(General editor: Victor H. Mair)
The
Classic of Changes (
Yi jing) is one of the most
ancient texts known to human civilization, always given pride of place
in the Chinese classical tradition. This venerable text is difficult for
readers; with terse, archaic written statements; a divinatory
orientation to the world; and a special formal framework. Focusing
narrowly on philology or translation often exacerbates the puzzles it
presents. Over millennia of reflection, answering to varying interests
in various epochs of Chinese history, a voluminous commentary tradition
has grown up, itself posing challenges for modern readers who may not
share the unspoken assumptions of the interpreters over the ages. And
yet the powerful fascination exerted by the
Classic of Changes
has preserved the archaic text, widely attracting readers with a
continuing interest in trying to understand it as a source of reflection
and guide to ordinary circumstances of human life. Its monumental
influence over Chinese thought makes the text an indispensable element
in any informed approach to Chinese culture.
Accordingly, the book focuses on the archaic core of the
Classic of Changes and proposes a structural anthropological analysis for two main reasons.
First, unlike many treatments of the
Yi jing, there is a concern
to place the text carefully in the context of the ancient culture which
created it, allowing a fuller appreciation of its divinatory mission, a
unique orientation towards writing and literature. Employing a
comparative method honed in analysis of ritual and symbolic practice
from a wide range of human groups, structural analysis brings certain
strategic advantages to addressing the organization of an archaic
cognitive system. The explicit structural approach finds excellent
resonance in the conceptualization of the text itself, as a verbal and
imagistic field of expression arising from the formal, binary structure
of lines, and from the symmetries, dynamically formed and broken,
between hexagrams.
Second, the approach differs from traditional exegesis which did not and
ultimately could not address problems of textual understanding in a
holistic sense. Research on compositional problems leads necessarily
from the whole to its parts, discovering distributional patterns in the
overall text. Resembling treatments of mythological and ritual symbolism
in other cultures, structural analysis proves apt in isolating design
modules which articulate the organization of a profoundly unique effort
to model the society and worldview of the people who consolidated
millennia of ancient thought into an intriguing expression of the
circumstances of the tradition. This book is not a translation of the
Classic of Changes; it is a careful interpretation, or rather method of exploration, of the connectivities and topography of the text as a whole.
As a result of this deliberate methodological choice of approach to the
classic, one is better able to visualize multiple domains of designed
modules ingeniously integrated as a comprehensive structural model of an
entire cultural universe, including social experience in an archaic
culture, or the trajectory of an individual through the age ranks
successively traversed in the lifetime of any member. By isolating the
social forms of an individual life, against the background of the
archaic cosmology, as the structural preconditions for each randomized
divination, this analysis succeeds in illuminating dimensions of early
Chinese life that would not otherwise be accessed through other
historical or archaeological materials. This provides a penetrating
anthropological view into the conditions of thought in an archaic
society to a degree previously unavailable.
Indeed, the
Classic of Changes is a bold and powerful attempt at
modeling an ancient culture in a way never before conceived
sociologically, a profound auto-ethnography teaching us about the
philosophical anthropology of its makers and preparing the way for
further understanding of later classical texts. One must acknowledge an
astonishing level of sophistication in textual structuring and draw
insights from it concerning the ways a divination culture classifies and
comes to terms with the fluctuating, omen-bearing historical material
of individual human experience.
This book will be of interest to all those engaged in seeking
philosophical anthropological understanding of culture and writing, and
especially contributes to the study of cultures of antiquity and their
modes of thought. Anyone interested in complex, formalized
classification systems would want to consider this analysis. It sheds
light upon ancient Chinese culture and is important for demonstrating
methodologically grounded research on the foundational texts of its
classical tradition. The results of this work will appeal to those
pursuing better comprehension of the
Classic of Changes, as an
instance of writing under the paradigm of a divination culture, as an
outstanding representative of pre-Qin cultural tradition, and as a guide
for living.
http://www.biroco.com/yijing/davis.htm