Richard Kunst’s Yijing dissertation

I’ve finally bought myself a copy of Richard Kunst’s 1985 dissertation, The Original Yijing: a text, phonetic transcription, and indexes, with sample glosses, and I’ve been seizing every spare moment to read it. I wish I’d got it years ago!

Anyone with a strong interest in the early Yi will find this utterly fascinating. Richard Kunst offers it simply as “a kit of tools for the future analysis of the original Yijing” – and it’s one that the community of Yi diviners has been woefully slow to put to use.

In 1985, he was pointing out not only that hexagrams came in pairs, but also that their lines did, in such conspicuous cases as 43.4 with 44.3, and 63.3 with 64.4. The first book to look into the practical use of this for divination, so far as I know, was Stephen Karcher’s Total I Ching, in 2003. (And we are still waiting for a book that would offer suggestions and pointers for interpretation of the line pairs.)

(Kunst also points out some cases where apparently ‘paired’ lines are in adjoining hexagrams that aren’t inverted pairs at all.)

In other words, this may be 20 years old, but it still contains a whole lot of ideas just waiting to be ‘discovered’ and developed for divination. I delayed getting it this long because I thought its ideas and discoveries must be available by now in the other books I’ve read. Some are, but by no means all. I’ve read only the first 100 or so pages so far, and there are…

• insights into the use of contrasting pairs of words to describe a concept – a very useful habit of mind to be aware of when exploring the finer nuances of meaning in the recurrent key phrases
• a count of words associated with ‘high’, ‘low’ and ‘centre’ and which lines they predominantly occur in
• details on how the Yi uses rhyme to create further associations, parallels and distinctions within the text – and the translation actually makes the rhyme scheme clear
• fascinating stuff on puns and ‘word magic’
• examples illustrating the oral-literary quality of the Yi, with parallels from the Shijing, the Book of Songs
• an explanation of the history of the text, and how it’s evolved through copying

…and so on. I’m just getting into the part on the syntax of Early Old Chinese, and looking forward to the sections on particular characters. Quite some ‘tool kit’, this.

Kunst’s interest is purely scholarly: there’s no sign that he’d be interested in a conversation with his object of study. And of course, his is only one (sometimes contested) view of a single stratum of the oracle we work with today. But he does respect this ‘original Yijing’ as an oracle, and offers really intriguing suggestions as to how it might have worked, with the diviners using the written words as a cue for recitation of further songs or sayings from a much bigger oral tradition.

(I can recognise something of this in the way I work myself – expanding historical and mythological references to give people a story to find themselves in, for instance, and the way apt quotations and ideas naturally cluster around the lines for me. Come to think of it, it’s surprising how many people seem to find themselves gathering a repertory of quotations from their own tradition for each hexagram.)

The dissertation is available from UMI. Stand by with a stalwart hole-punch and binder to protect the 600+ loose A4 pages! By the way, ordering from UMI is a bit laborious (they have a very antique shopping cart system). I think that once you’ve chosen your delivery method at the outset, you won’t be able to change it without starting the whole order over again. Delivery was very prompt, though: the people there are obviously more efficient than their website.