Ebook: The original I Ching oracle: The pure and complete texts with concordance

The Original I Ching Oracle represents the most substantial advance in I Ching scholarship since Richard Wilhelm introduced the oracle to the West in the 1920s. The tradition concerning the birth of the I Ching is intertwined with myths about the origin of Chinese civilization. According to the traditional narrative, the book came into being through the insights of three legendary sages. The first sage is a fully mythical being, Fu Xi, the first emperor, sometimes represented with a serpent body and a human head. The third sage, who is supposed to have carried the work to completion, is a fully historical person, although surrounded by a legendary aura: Confucius, the “master of ten thousand generations.” Between the two Stands the man who is considered the principal author of the book, a figure straddling history and legend: King Wen, the founder of the Zhou dynasty, which ruled China during most of the first millennium BC, the time when the I Ching actually came into use.

And now Rudolf Ritsema and Shantena Sabbadini have produced the only translation from the original Chinese that offers the I Ching in its original purity, freeing it from any specific interpretation. The innovative translation method used by the authors consistently renders each Chinese ideogram by a “core-word” and amplifies this by an associated “field of meaning,” thus creating — for the first time in a Western language — a concordance to the oracular texts. Furthermore, the “fields of meaning” allow the Western reader to access the full wealth and subtlety of imagination held within these texts, just as a Chinese reader would, without being confined by the specific interpretation chosen by a translator.

The Original I Ching Oracle is a book of divination and a psychological tool, the like of which has not been seen before in the Western world. In it the divinatory texts do not have a fixed meaning, but resonate, once the user has selected an appropriate image within the “field of meaning,” with the Specific question and situation submitted to the oracle. By recovering the original shamanic images, often veiled by years of later philosophical interpretation, The Original I Ching Oracle puts the reader in contact with a deep universal dimension of the psyche, as present for us today as it was in China more than 3,000 years ago.

[Note: red color text portions are rendered in black in order to keep pdf size within reasonable limits ]