Penguins on Parade: The I Ching!

Some Penguin Classics remain every bit as impenetrable no matter how often you come back to them – especially if they were more or less designed to be impenetrable. I know of no better example of this than the ancient Chinese classic called the I Ching or Book of Change; I’ve now grappled three times with this text, in two very different translations by two obviously intelligent people, and I remain every bit as befuddled as if I’d been trying the whole time to read the back of an upholstered chair, or the grain of a park bench.

The wonderful folks at Penguin have now transformed John Minford’s gigantic annotated translation of the I Ching into the prettiest Deluxe Classic they’ve ever produced, a copy to own and use and treasure. But for me at least, it’ll still ever be a copy to understand: happy to get this Deluxe Classic, I dropped everything and delved into it one more time, and I bounced off the whole experience like pebbles off a tin pan. Achillomancy – the art of yarrow divination – is very likely to remain a mystery to me, alas, even though this paperback Minford edition is solicitous enough to list the basic steps right there on the back cover:

Step One: Focus calmly on the question you want to present to the I Ching

Step Two: Toss three coins six times, once for each of the six lines of a Hexagram.

Step Three: For each toss, add the value of the heads and tails (heads = 3, tails = 2)

Step Four: The resulting combination of values for the six tosses will lead you straight to one of the I Ching‘s sixty-four Hexagrams

Step Five: Approach the Hexagram with total sincerity, and embrace the wisdom of the I Ching‘s response.

Minford’s translation presents all those ancient Hexagrams and many of their variations and a huge amount of the commentary that’s accrued on them over the centuries (it was the absence of most of this commentary that allowed the recent English-language translation by David Hinton to be a fraction of the length of this book). In picking and choosing commentary, Minford leans heavily on “generous extracts” from the eighteenth-century Taoist Liu Yiming, the Mater Awakened to the Primordial (Wuyuanzi) (try fitting that on a business card), but neither the Master Awakened nor any of his celestial brethren can shed much light on a system intended to be murky.

Take one Hexagram out of the many presented here. You take your coins – or your yarrow stalks – and you hurl them about. They eventually give you a combination that takes you to a corresponding Hexagram, and it tells you this:

Sighted:

Dragon in a field.

Profits.

To see a big man.

And a fraction of the commentary elaborates:

The Horn Stars (in the Dragon cluster) became visible above the horizon in early March. “From the perspective of one looking forward toward the horizon, it would indeed appear as if the Dragon were lurking in the distant fields.” Or, according to Marshall’s reading, Dragon-like storm clouds are seen to gather over the fields at the time of the Rituals for Spring Rain. “Big man,” daren, and “little man,” xiaoren, occur throughout the I Ching. “Profits to see a big man,” is a recurring formula, like “Profits to cross a big stream.” As with the Dragon, we have no way of telling if the “big man” is singular or plural. In Classical Chinese no such distinction was made. Throughout this Hexagram, and throughout the I Ching, we cannot tell whether we are talking of one Dragon, one field, one man, or several of each. It could just as easily be several Dragons sighted in several fields …

In other words, the commentary is carefully, helpfully pointing out that the Hexagram – which you arrived at by totally random means – could signify virtually anything. Contrary to Minford’s very enthusiastic glossing, you do not consult the I Ching; it contains no ancient wisdom. Instead, its disconnected gibberish codifies random chaos, and its net is so wide and so open that anything you find in it can be shaped to fit decisions you’ve already made or seek to make. It is the strangest of all the “sacred” texts of the world, quite possibly the strangest book in the world, in that it is neither text nor book nor sacred – it’s the ultimate expression of the pernicious human need to surrender control of life to outside forces.

When faced with any big decision, me sainted Ma always used to say, “Make a list of the pros and cons.” If you’d told her you were going to throw vegetables on the floor instead, she’d have said, “The place’ll be crawlin’ with mice.” So maybe ancient wisdom’s not for me.