Why you need a concordance

I’m plodding steadily through the work of compiling the multi-translation index I promised for the ‘Words of Change’ glossary. I’m realising various things as I go along…

• This is a much bigger job than I thought. Erk. If no-one buys it after this I’m going to kick myself into the middle of next week.
• Yi has some nice discussions going on between adjacent hexagrams, unwrapping the meanings of particular phrases
• You will miss all this – and much more – completely, unless you have a translation with concordance, and/or one that uses the same word each time for the same character.

For instance…
you are making things beautiful, there’s some small harvest in having a direction to go. When you move on to a time of Stripping Away, there’s no harvest in it; turn around and return to your path, and there is; fail to correct yourself and blunder on, and once again it’s no good. In other words, every Judgement from 22 through 25 has something to say about ‘having a direction to go’, 有攸往. (The same is true from hexagram 40 through to 43.)

And if you only experience the Yijing through Wilhelm/ Baynes, you’ll never know this. Hexagram 22 talks about ‘undertaking something’, 23 says ‘it does not further one to go anywhere’, 24 that ‘it furthers one to have somewhere to go’ and 25 that ‘it does not further him to undertake anything.’ There’s no way to tell that these are all discussing the same attitude or action.

You might be forgiven for thinking, though, that 22 and 25 are talking about the same kind of thing as 41.2, ‘to undertake something brings misfortune.’ But this is actually translating a completely different word, zheng, which you can trace through the Ritsema/Sabbadini concordance as ‘disciplining’.

And also… suppose you asked Yi what it thought of a project and received 54.0. ‘Undertakings bring misfortune’ – clearly not a good idea. After some circumstances change, you ask again, and receive 47.6. ‘If one feels remorse over this and makes a start, good fortune comes.’ It sounds as though things have changed, but how to weigh that up in the balance with the unequivocal ‘undertakings bring misfortune’? If you have a concordance to turn to, you’ll know that these two lines use the same character. Precisely the kind of action that was a bad idea in 54.0 is a good one at 47.6, despite your doubts.

I find that Yi often re-uses the same words like this, in readings, to convey a specific message. Until I started this project, I hadn’t realised how impossible it would be to get these messages from a ‘normal’ translation. You need either a concordance, or a translation that uses the same word for the same character every time.

You can get yourself a Yijing glossary free from Bradford Hatcher, along with a matrix translation that you can search for recurrences of the same character. (Scroll to the end of his download page and then hit ‘page up’ to find his ‘donate’ button.)

There’s a printed concordance in the back of the The Original I Ching Oracle: The Pure and Complete Texts with Concordance by Ritsema and Sabbadini. (And also in earlier editions of what’s essentially the same book, barring a few tweaks: the original Ritsema/Karcher I Ching, and Karcher’s I Ching with concordance.)

All those books, and also Karcher’s more compact How to Use the I Ching, consistently translate the same character by the same word.