Comments on: Stephen Karcher: Shuogua

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:31:27 +0000

Thank you for reviewing Stephen’s Shuogua. I am very pleased that you liked it so much.

Answering some of the points you made:
First on finding a precise translation. I am not so sure that there can be such thing in English. The old Chinese loved word play using words which referenced other texts and stories as well as words which sound like other words. Additionally each Chinese character may have nine or more meanings of which a few might be part of the ‘field of meaning’ at any given point in the text. So it is that careful translation into single English words might be less accurate than Stephen’s freer translation. He draws on thirty years of reading Chinese texts, in their original language, to express some of the complex, and often beautifully evocative, meanings. These might otherwise only be available to readers of Chinese.

Re. the pairing of hexagrams in the King Wen Bagua. Oh, dear it was an editors error! The full list of hexagrams which represent, “Special sites of transformation” should have been: 9:10, 42:44, 17:18, 53:54, 23:24, 15:16, 31:32, 42:42. The reason for the seemingly extra hexagrams is that hexagrams occur in complementary / contrasting pairs and so the hexagrams generated by the bagua necessarily evoke a pair of hexagrams. Apologies for the confusion here, needless to say it will be corrected and folk will be able to download the error free copy.

Thanks for the review – it is appreciated.

By: Hilary

Hilary — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:11:53 +0000

That would make absolute sense, except that he actually describes this in his ‘Later Heaven’ section and talks about inverting the trigrams. So I’ll be looking out for the second edition.

By: Togan Muftuoglu

Togan Muftuoglu — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:32:54 +0000

Hilary wrote:
“But Stephen opts to read straight across the axis and see hexagrams 31-32 (gen and dui, or xun and zhen) here. I’d love to know why he’s chosen to do this, and what effect he feels this bagua-based input has on the interpretation of the hexagrams. There’s some information on this in the Bagua section of the book, where he briefly mentions trigrams that work together and the hexagrams they form. I’d just like to read more.”

Short answer:
Because he is using using the earlier heaven, same for Qian and Kun 11 and 12. It is a tool to study hexagrams, key is relationship between the meanings of hexagrams in each pair.

Long Answer:
I-Ching Mandalas by Thomas Cleary
(side note: unless the one I have is misprinted, Cleary has a mistake on the later heaven version

Best wishes
Togan