Here’s the hardback for £10 (opening bid) plus p+p. At £8.75 cheaper than Amazon UK at this opening price, and the author will even sign it for you. (Another hardback and two paperback copies to come later: he’s selling them one at a time.)
Someone asked me in an email about what special qualities you need to read the Yijing, and about how intuitive I am. Eeek. 😯 When I first started out with Yi, I would have had a short and simple answer to that second question: not in the least intuitive. The… Read more »What gifts do you need to read the Yijing?
Two quick news bulletins:
First, I’ve finally got the recording and transcript online. It’s only £4 for the downloadable version or £9 to get the CD posted to you – that’s in the region of $16 US. You can get your copy here. I’ve also put some free excerpts online as Flash files, for you to get a flavour of the event: the section on yin (possibly my personal favourite), part of what she had to say about Hexagram 44, and the discussion on lines 2 and 5 of hexagram 28. Click here to go straight to the free clips.
The biggest story arc of the Yijing is the Conquest story: how the Zhou people inherited the mandate of heaven and overthrew the Shang dynasty. It’s a great narrative of Change: the decay of the Shang; the preparations of the good Zhou ruler Wen, making his people worthy of the… Read more »Fathers and sons II: carting corpses
Look at this! http://www.appositive.net/oysterbay/ichingtitle.html I’ve barely started reading, but I feel like a child in a sweetshop already. Very, very good work on the Sequence, on trigrams, and individual hexagrams. Saving the whole lot to my computer now.
Horses in ancient China http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~baojie/history/chinese/2002-12-02_horse.en.htm A nice, long article on the role of horses, basically in the military, from pre-Shang to post-Zhou times. Why would we be interested? It casts new light on why horses are so important in the Yi: why Prince Kang would be especially honoured by a… Read more »Horses in ancient China
I dropped into Oxford today on the way home from a friend’s, and found my way into Blackwell’s – the university bookshop. And down to the Chinese history section, where I came across an intimidating-looking tome called To become a god: cosmology, sacrifice and self-divinisation in Early China. And with about 7 minutes to closing time, took it over to the desk to find out what it cost. £17. Hmmm. On the one hand the chapter headings are fascinating: ‘Transforming the spirits: sacrifice in the Shang’; ‘A moral cosmos: Zhou sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven’; ‘Spirits within humans: the issue of shamanism in early China and early Greece.’ On the other hand, these are 300 very dense and scholarly pages, and what are my chances of getting through them without getting lost?
