Book review: I Ching - wisdom found in translation of Chinese oracle
In China, the is a highly influential classic whose status in any other culture might have been that of sacred scripture.
translated by John Minford
Viking
The oldest existing book of divination dating back 3,000 years, it is widely consulted in both China and the West for answers not just to life's fundamental problems but also in the worlds of business, medicine, leadership and game theory.
A new translation of the oracle by John Minford, a professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, explores the multi-dimensional aspects of this legendary yet largely elusive work in various ways aimed at personalising it and making it more accessible to the English-speaking world.
Minford's 855-page - which is also known as the - puts under one cover what the author refers to as the "Book of Wisdom", the classic as it has been read and consulted for more than 2,000 years, and the Bronze Age "Oracle", which is the text as it existed in all its shamanistic and magical splendour in the mid-Zhou dynasty around 600BC.
The first reached the West in the 18th century, writes Minford. "Ever since that time, Western perceptions of the book have varied greatly, from the highly reverential to the baffled, utterly sceptical, or dismissive."
Minford recounts the reaction of a blind French Jesuit named Claude de Visdelou who dictated the following words about the book from the French Indian enclave of Pondicherry in 1728: "It is not strictly speaking a book at all, or anything like it. It is a most obscure enigma, a hundred times more difficult to explain than that of the Sphinx."
