I.

I emigrated from China to the United States in 1980. After sixteen years in America I found that people in the Western world are interested in the I Ching: The Book of Changes. But there was a different story in its native land.

From the time I was very young I heard that the I Ching was a Tian Shu, a Heavenly book; without the verbal instruction of a competent scholar, no one can understand it. After the Communists took over China in 1949, the I Ching was denounced as a book of feudalism and superstition. It was banished from the market, and reading it was not allowed. In the early 1960s, before the so-called Cultural Revolution, Dr. Ting Jihua, a most eminent Chinese physician in Shanghai; professor Liu Yenwen, a well-known professor of Chinese classical literature; and I attended the revered Master Yin’s private gatherings, where he taught us the I Ching. It was absolutely an underground activity. At that time, all of us had been labeled as antirevolutionary right-wing advocates. If our meetings had been discovered by any Communist Party member or the police, we would no doubt have been imprisoned. Master Yin was more then eighty years old. He sensed that a calamity would soon befall China and he wished to pass his teachings on before he died. He offered on his own initiative to teach us the esoteric knowledge of the I Ching, which he had inherited from his own revered master. As we studied, the situation in China grew worse, and our hearts grew heavier and heavier. We realized that many families would be broken up and countless people would be persecuted.

Although we knew that after the long night there would come the dawn, the dawn did not come soon enough. In two years Master Yin and Dr. Ting passed away one after the other. Professor Liu lost his desire to live. He attempted suicide several times. Although I encouraged him to persevere, deep in my heart I knew that those who died were the blessed ones. They had ended their suffering and were able to enjoy everlasting peace. Those who were still living had to face unimaginable suffering and strive for survival.

According to the I Ching, every country has its destiny and every person has his or her fate, but everyone still has freedom to make his own choices. Of the four scholars, I was the youngest. The others were of my father’s generation. Being with them I realized that I had much to learn and experience. From the bottom of my heart I chose to live, to live as long as I could and see the destiny of China, no matter what hardships I might endure. In July 1957 I was forced to do manual labor every day and in September 1966 I was put into jail. During nine years in jail, I was interrogated almost every day about my “counterrevolutionary” activities. Because I graduated from a missionary school and had been the principal of a Christian high school, my captors pressed me to confess that I was an American spy. On every occasion I denied the charges against me. At last they become desperate, and sentenced me to death. However, because I was a popular figure with the Chinese people, they did not dare to follow through with the death sentence immediately, although they repeatedly told me that I would be put to death.

During twenty-two years of confinement, even though I could not remember the sixty-four gua (hexagrams), I fully comprehended the Tao of I, the essence of the I Ching, which holds that when events proceed to their extremes they give birth to their opposites. Every day I read the official six-page newspaper as carefully as I could, not missing a single word. As I saw the situation of my country deteriorating, my heart became lighter. I knew after the long darkness there would be a dawn. When the darkness grew darker and darker, the dawn grew closer and closer.

II.

The I Ching is a very ancient book. It existed more than two thousand years before Confucius (ca. 551-479 B.C.). In the beginning, the language of the I Ching was simple and easy to understand. Unfortunately, this ancient language became antiquated long, long ago. At that time, the number of Chinese characters was small. As a result, many characters had the same form but shared the same sound. Their usage was interchangeable. Thus the text is open to many interpretations. Moreover, the old Chinese written language had no punctuation. Depending on how one punctuates a clause or a sentence, different meanings appear. For this reason, even the Chinese are rarely able to truly and fully understand the I Ching without the verbal instruction of a competent teacher. When I came to the United States I was surprised that there were so many translations of the I Ching in English. I cannot imagine how these translators all found the I Ching scholars and did the decades of study necessary to truly learn the I Ching.

To the Chinese, the I Ching is like a Holy Bible written by the four most honored sages in history – Fu Xi, King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius. The Chinese translations of Holy Bible is Sheng Ching, Sheng is equivalent to “holy”, and Ching means “classic”. Chinese underand that Ching is the Tao, the Truth, the holiest of the ancient books, and because they revere and respect the sacred writings of the Jews and the Christian church, they honor the Bible by calling it Ching. For this reason, Chinese translations of the Holy Bible never depart from the original text. On this ground, I think that any translation of the I Ching should not depart from the original text; otherwise, it is not the I Ching.

Among all the translations Richard Wilhelm’s (published in English in 1950) and James Legge’s (publied in 1882) are the best. But all the traslations, according to my Chinese point of view, are not absolutely true to the original Chinese I Ching; they are Westernized. To smooth out the English or to capture a concept, they have added their own understanding of the text in a way that limits possible interpretations of a work that is famously open-ended. The ideal translation should be English in form, but Chinese in essence. As a book of divination, Confucius’s commentaries are crucial. The Chinese call Confucius’s commentaries the Ten Wings. They believe that the I Ching depends on the Ten Wings to be able to fly. In other words, without Confucius’s commentaries the I Ching cannot be understood. This is a typically Chinese orthodox point of view. Consequently, every time I read translations that show little concern for Confucius’s wisdom, I feel that something is missing. Sometimes when I used English translations to divine, I was so depressed that I had no desire to do it again. When I used the Chinese text it is entirely different; there is always hope.

The I Ching is a truly profound book. It is the source of much of the Chinese culture. Originally, the I Ching was a handbook for divination. After Confucius and his students had written the commentaries, it became known as a book of ancient wisdom. It is a book that not only tells one who consults it about the present situation and future potential but also gives instruction about what to do and what not to do to obtain good fortune and to avoid misfortune. But one still retains free choice. The guidance is based upon comprehensive observations of natural laws by ancient sages and their profound experiences of the principle of cause and effect.

In 1979 the Chinese Supreme Court declared me innocent. I was release from prison weighing eighty pounds and barely able to walk. I decided to emigrate to the United States. During my sixteen years in AmericaI have known people who have devoted their whole hearts and mminds to consulting the I Ching, but they could not comprehend its authentic essence or embrace its ancient wisdom because an authentic translation was not available.

I waited for a translation that would truly reveal the essence of the book. My wish was not fulfilled. When I moved to Maui in July 1993 my plan was to write a series of seven books on Taoist Chi Kung. One morning early in July, during my meditation, a voice came to me, urging me to make a new translation of the I Ching. At first, I ignored it. I had never entertained such an idea, and I had doubts. I understood that to work on it one first had to translate the ancient dead language of the original pictographs and ideographs into contemporary Chinese, then translate it again into English. If I made the commitment, the task would be extremely arduous. Nevertheless, the voice grew louder and louder. I could not escape it. I felt I had no choice because the more I meditated the more I felt that I had an obligation to work out a translation of the I Ching based entirely on Chinese concepts. I began to realize that during his last years, Master Yin’s proposal to teach me the I Ching was not accidental. There was a reason. I sense now that in this great time of change, when people are longing to transform and the situation is ripe, a new translation of the I Ching based upon ancient Chinese wisdom and expeirence would be helpful to those making their own choices in this dynamic world of changes.

III.

After I accepted the challenge, the first thing I decided was to keep the book small – a small book is much easier to work with. Confucius said that the I Ching is a book one should keep close at hand. A small book is easier to carry. It is readily available for obtaining ancient wisdom as guidance in daily life. Obviously, I failed in this goal. The project grew beyond my expectation. As I made several revisions, the book became bigger and bigger. By the seventh revision, the book was larger than I could have imagined.

The original I Ching consist of only sixty-four Decisions made by King Wen and three hundred and eighty-six Yao Texts composed by the Duke of Zhou. The Decisions are brief summaries of the meaning of each gua, dense in symbolic meaning but succinct in style. The Yao Texts are analyses, employing parables and metaphors, of each of the six lines in a given gua, which correspond to the six stages of a particular situation. Altogether there are less than five thousand Chinese characters. Translated into English it is at most forty pages. However, this tiny book reveals an ancient Chinese cosmology of Heaven and human beings integrated into one union. And it further reveals the Tao of Change or, in Chinese terminology, the Tao of I. These two concepts have been the source of Chinese culture and have permeated Chinese thinking for thousands of  years. To truly understand the original language and the spirit of the I Ching, one must realize that its structure is extremely well knit and its wording is absolutely strict. Most translations do not understand this linkage.

As I tried to share the unique features of the I Ching as clearly as I could, the book expanded. Finally I realized that a complete volume that unfolds the essence of the I Ching is preferable. Once readers have come to a true understanding of the symbols, names, texts, and interrelations of the I Ching, they can fly on their own wings, ignoring the commentaries and explanations.

The Complete I Ching : The Definitive Translation – 10^th Anniversary Edition by Taoist Master Alfred Huang, Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT, 2010.