Hilary Barrett, I Ching

Back before my computer tried to turn into a doorstop, I wrote:
“I’ve just recently learned of another provider of really good beginner-level I Ching information online. I’ll be writing a review of his current offering soon and posting it here.”
So let me end the suspense: I’m talking about Dr Ron Masa of ‘University of Yourself’, [...]

A book review by Harmen Mesker with explanatory notes from Steve Marshall: ‘The Essentials of the Yi Jing’ by Chung Wu. Worth reading not just for the (uncomplimentary) book review, but for the knowledge to be gleaned of Yi and its tradition.
Another excellent resource I don’t remember noticing before at Steve’s site: his glossary of [...]

Lately, I’ve been exploring ways to immerse myself in readings more completely - and I Ching poetry seems to be a way to do that. Of course the book is poetry itself, but the attempts I know of to translate it directly into rhyme basically reduce it to jingles.
I linked the other day to Thom [...]

My first response when Mark kindly sent me a review copy of I Ching for Beginners was, sadly, a rant. In turning the oracle into a version for beginners, he’s denuded it of imagery, and I really don’t think that’s the best idea.
In fact, reading in more detail, I find the occasional image creeps [...]

As you can tell from the title of Freeman’s latest blog post -
Chameleon Book Chronicles: A Truly Awful Book?
- he’s feeling glum about low sales of his I Ching translation. Actually, we should all feel glum about low sales of his book, as it’s remarkably good one. I wrote about it once here, and [...]

Mark McElroy, of tarottools.com, has kindly sent me the proofs of his upcoming book, I Ching for Beginners. And as beginners’ books go, it’s pretty good, with some useful, thought-provoking ways of approaching the hexagrams. I’ll review it later on its own merits - but first, I need to get this rant out of my system. Because Mark swells the growing numbers of ‘modernisers’ and ’simplifiers’ who carefully remove all the oracle’s imagery.

The Original I Ching Oracle is Ritsema’s revised version of the Eranos Yijing, first published in 1994 with Stephen Karcher, as ‘I Ching, the Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, the First Complete Translation with Concordance.’ I owe a huge amount to that book: it first gave me license to absorb the words, internalise a reading, without being told what it meant or what to do. Without that initial freedom, I doubt I would ever have been drawn to the Yi at all. So I really have Ritsema and Karcher to thank for this website and my work.