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About this site
| This site is a study aid for the I
Ching. It will be of interest mostly to
intermediate- to-advanced students of the text. The
basic structure of this web starts from the Hexagram
square, where each Hexagram (diagram with 6 lines) links
to the complete text associated with that hexagram. From
the text, every chinese character links to its
definition, where related information such as radical,
stroke count, tone, pinyin, and sometimes comparative
english translations.
|
Frequently asked questions about this page:
9. What are all those
garbage characters on the screen?
"For more than two thousand years, the oracular,
enigmatic pronouncements of the I Ching (The Classic of
Changes) have intrigued and inspired readers. In the West,
scholars have long regarded the volume as one of the seminal
texts of Chinese culture, comparable to the Bible or the
Upanishads, and readers everywhere have turned to the hexagrams,
line statements, and commentaries for guidance on every
imaginable life situation." -- from the liner notes, I
Ching, Classic of Changes, © 1996 Edward L.
Shaughnessy.
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This site embodies a Chinese-English lexicon of the I Ching,
created to support a new English translation. We hope that
persons interested in the text will be assisted in their studies
through the use of this tool. It is also hoped that the lexicon
will be improved by their generous feedback and comments.
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A special-purpose, limited collection of words such as this is
not a dictionary. A dictionary can be expected to
contain all common words of the language. Even the smallest
Chinese dictionaries have many times the number of definitions
than this lexicon contains.
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The stringing together of basic english word equivalents
alongside the text is not intended to be a translation.
A given Chinese word often can't be translated by a single
English equivalent. The English words are intended to guide the
reader, not to provide the precise meaning of the text. If you
compare different english translations of the I Ching you'll
appreciate the impossibility of using pure substitution to
translate from chinese to english.
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Send e-mail to Chuck Polisher at cpolish@attbi.com
I am especially interested in: How did you learn of this site?
What computer hardware and software are you using? What
difficulties are you having, if any, in viewing the Chinese
characters? What is your interest in the I Ching? How can this
site can be improved?
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In the best traditions of the World Wide Web, this site is
still under construction. The most frequently used characters
have been worked on first, leaving about 15% of the text
remaining.
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There is no "best" translation. Among the many
choices, my personal favorites are by John Blofeld, James Legge, and Richard Wilhelm. Some recent
translations that have appeared are very loose, personal
interpretations of the text; some have no discernable
relationship to the chinese original.
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The original word list was kept on paper
in a 3-ring binder. It became unmanagable very quickly, and was
transferred into Microsoft Word on a Macintosh computer. When
that became too hard to maintain, a Hypercard stack was created
to house it.
Next, custom software was written to analyse
the text of the book as a whole. Every character was broken out,
and a concordance was constructed. Then the english romanization
was identified using UNIX-based software that converts B5 coding
to pinyin, and custom software was written to look up the
conversion to Wade/Giles. Custom software was used to identify
and tag the structure of the text.
In a process that is still underway, each character was
researched. Radical, stroke count, grammer, usage, and
translation are identified. Many of the small-seal
representations have been created for the characters.
The final step used custom software to
generate the radical, stroke, and phonetic indexes, the chapters,
and the individual lexicon pages. A few pages (such as this one)
were created using Microsoft's Front Page software, and by hand
coding.
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9. What are all those
garbage characters on the screen?
I you see something like this when you click on a hexagram:
it means you need special software to view the
chinese-language characters.
It should look like this:
For more information, see: Viewing Chinese on the World Wide Web
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