Eliot Weinberger wrote the essay this account follows. It ran in The New York Review of Books. The issue date is 2016-02-25. He asked how one volume can be pressed into service as an explanation of everything and still withhold a single settled sense. The names, the dates, and the clashing English versions below come from that essay. The reading order does not. Start with the marks you would actually store. The sermons people have hung on those marks can wait until the fields are named.
A line here is not a sentence. It is one of two glyphs. The solid glyph is yang. The broken glyph is yin. Six ordered slots, two glyphs, and nothing else in the figure itself: two to the sixth power is sixty-four. That count is the whole address space. Commentary never enlarged it. What commentary did, for centuries, was argue about the strings written beside the address.
Two glyphs, eight letters, sixty-four addresses
The smaller unit is the trigram. Three slots, still solid or broken, give eight trigrams and then stop. The set is an alphabet, not a list you can append to. Tradition hands each letter a nature-name. Put heaven and earth at the poles. The remaining letters are lake, thunder, and fire, and also water, mountain, and wind. Same eight. Not the same sequence you will see in older tellings, and the sequence of the names is not the encoding. The encoding is the stack.
Fu Xi is the myth attached to that alphabet. Pictures give him a human face on a serpent's body, or a dragon's body. He is said to have watched star-patterns, cloud-motion, breaks in rock, and marks on birds and beasts until the variety collapsed into eight trigrams, read as yin and yang. Out of the same letters he is said to have taught farming, kingship, marriage, writing, and how to find a route. You can refuse the hero and still count the code.
Stack one trigram on another and the figure has six lines. Eight times eight lands on the same sixty-four hexagrams you get by counting six binary places. Direction is data. If the two letters differ, flipping the stack addresses another member of the set. Hexagram 52 is a poor test of that rule, because mountain set on mountain still looks like itself after a vertical flip.
Legend dates the stacking to about 1050 BCE and gives it to Emperor Wen, founder of the Zhou house. He is said to have numbered all sixty-four combinations, arranged them, named them, and attached a short oracle to each. Later readers call those oracles Judgments. The notes on single lines, called simply the Lines, are credited to his son, a poet, the Duke of Zhou. Even if the calendar is doubted, the genealogy keeps three layers apart: the figure, the oracle for the whole figure, and the text for one line.
Five centuries on, Confucius was credited with ethical commentaries on every hexagram, the Ten Wings. "Wing" here is a builder's word, a side hall, not a feather. Wings attach to the six-line figure. They are not the figure. It is nearly sure that Confucius took no part in composing the book. A saying still circulates that, given another century of life, he would have spent half of it on this text. That admits difficulty. It does not fill an author column.
The marks are older than that family tree and older than the glossary. Shang rule is placed near 1600 BCE, and the practice may reach further back. Diviners heated tortoise shells, or ox shoulder bones, and read the cracks. Oracle bones have come out of the ground in the hundreds of thousands. Plenty carry a finished hexagram, or a number assigned to one. Where the figures came from, and how a crack became a reading, is unknown. Encoding and the book that explains it did not ship together.
What an entry must hand over, and what a cast adds
Before the Western arguments, write the columns down. Almost every quarrel in the rest of this piece is a quarrel about which column a sentence belongs in.
Once the Han court had fixed a standard, a hexagram entry carried at least the following.
- A key: a number plus a name. The number is stable only inside one ordering of the sixty-four. The name is a word, and the words in this book move.
- A figure: two trigrams, lower and upper, drawn as six lines. When a cast produces the figure, the earliest result occupies the lowest slot. Call that line 1 if your notes count from one. The last result is line 6, at the top. Position is meaningful. A remark about the calves is not the same remark moved onto the jaws for the sake of rhythm.
- A Judgment: a short oracle for the whole figure, often opaque.
- An Image: a reading of the picture made by the two trigrams. Mountain set over mountain is already a picture, before anyone extracts a moral.
- Six line texts, one per slot, commonly stranger than the Judgment.
- Commentary that may be absent from the file you opened. The Ten Wings are the classical comment layer. A modern translator may print them, digest them, swap in a later scholar, or leave them out.
A cast is a second object. The printed book shows one hexagram at a time. A consultation adds columns the page does not store in advance.
- The question, supplied by the reader. Your question is not in the text.
- A procedure that selects the lines. The classical pair are three coins, or fifty yarrow stalks.
- Lines that change. They hold the sharpest counsel, and they invert. After the inversion you are looking at a second address, the relating hexagram, which the tradition reads as the way the situation is tending.
That is why "six bits" describes the drawn glyph and does not describe a consultation. The glyph is binary, six times. The consultation can also flag a line as moving. Primary figure, set of moving lines, relating figure: that is the result record. A translation of the still book specifies the book. A reading tool has to specify the cast. Mix the two, and a confident paragraph will borrow a field from the wrong layer and present it as the old line.
cast:
question: reader state, outside the book
procedure: three coins, or fifty yarrow stalks
changing: positions that invert; the list may be empty
primary: address of the six marks as cast
relating: address after those positions flip
There is no neutral English for this layout. James Legge, Richard Wilhelm, John Minford, David Hinton, Richard John Lynn, Richard J. Smith, and Arthur Waley are not offering seven styles of one string. They decide, often without saying so, whether the Image may be folded into the Judgment, whether a Han commentator may speak as "the text," whether a Latin tag may sit inside a Zhou oracle, and whether a pictographic etymology may replace the received gloss. Those are specification choices. The history that follows is a history of people making them.
One collision shows why no default English noun was available. Inside the *I Ching*, a single word can name a captive taken in war and can also name sincerity. The captive reading leans toward violence and political fate. The sincerity reading leans toward an inner quality. Both sit in the Chinese tradition. They do not compile to one program, so keeping a single English noun is a product choice and should be labeled as one.
The coin procedure is the cast in its cheap form. Labor is the only cost worth recording. Shells needed a specialist to perform the rite and to read it. Anyone could throw three coins, and anyone could count fifty yarrow stalks. Faces carry numbers. The three coins go up together, and the total of a throw picks a solid line or a broken one. Six throws, six lines: six tosses make the hexagram. Stalk counting is the slow route to that same output. The chances on each throw, and the rule that the first result sits in the lowest slot, are laid out in [steps for the three-coin method](https://ichingonline.pro/blog/three-coin-method). Neither tool prints a meaning. Each tool emits lines.
## Cracks, an oral book, a canon
At some point in the Zhou centuries, the current guess being about 800 BCE, the sixty-four hexagrams received names and a written text condensed out of oral telling. The book was the *Zhou Yi*, the Changes of Zhou. A plastron or a bone stayed an expert's instrument. Coins and yarrow stalks could be used by whoever would perform them, and both are still in use. The output type did not change when the tool did. Only the crack has lost its interpreter.
By the third century BCE, with Confucianism rising, the Ten Wings had been fastened on. The *Zhou Yi* was no longer only a diviner's manual. It had become philosophy and ethics. Han emperor Wu, in 136 BCE, set this volume above the other four Confucian classics and locked one version in place. Rivals remained, some with a different order of figures. Order is part of the spec: the same sixty-four states in another sequence are another index, and number 52 opens only the sequence you standardized. The locked book is the *I Ching*, the Classic of Change, also called the Book of Change. From then on an entry keeps its shape: name, number, a hard Judgment, an often poetic Image taken from the two trigrams, and a dark statement for each of the six lines.
For about two thousand years that small shape was treated as the necessary guide to everything. The philosophy around it said things are tied together and never sit still. The book did not describe the universe from outside. It was taken for the universe's closest miniature. One Sinologist's phrase was "underpinnings of reality." The sixty-four hexagrams hardened into bins other fields were expected to use. Judgments were handled as seeds. Wings and later commentaries grew them into counsel for a ruler who wanted order, and for everyone else who wanted a proper life. The same object was used to meditate, and, because it was said to belong to how the world works, to ask what was coming, favorable or not.
Keep the code and the authority apart. The code is small: eight trigrams, six lines, sixty-four hexagrams, two glyphs. The authority is a repeated decision to treat that code as a total index. Once an observation is coarsened until it fits, a closed set of labels can swallow it. That is how literary criticism and picture criticism could use the book, how mapmakers could, how medicine could, and how several of the sciences could, either as a sorting frame or as a closing proof. Fitting is not the same thing as being precise.
Schools never agreed. Confucians fought among themselves, Taoists did the same, Buddhists added further lines, and Christians arrived later with more. In China and across East Asia no book was consulted more often, or trusted on a wider spread of questions. Western readers have had it for over three centuries. From the 1950s on, it is fair to call it the Chinese book the wider world is most likely to recognize. Weinberger's picture for the center is a void, or a cloud whose outline will not stay put, because the words that do the real work never froze into one sense.
## Overwriting the value column
Jesuit missionaries in China had the book by the late seventeenth century and read it as Christian truth with a universal claim. They kept the indices and replaced the values. Slot 1 became God. Slot 2 became Jesus, taken as a second Adam. Slot 3 became the Trinity. Slot 8 became Noah's household. The series went on in that spirit. Anyone who needs the book to confirm a system already held will run a version of the same cast.
Leibniz, with real excitement, recognized his own binary scheme in the solid marks and the broken ones. His move was narrower than the Jesuit move. He was matching glyphs to a notation he already had, not matching hexagram numbers to scripture. The recognition is real. Two marks, arranged in stacks, are a binary notation. It does not follow that the book is a machine, a program, or a theory of computation. Later centuries wanted that stronger claim. Leibniz does not file it for them. He shows that a mathematician can see the encoding and stop before the oracle.
Hegel, who did not think Confucius repaid the work of translation, brushed the book off as "superficial." What he said he failed to find was a sensuous picture, even in a single case, of universal powers whether natural or spiritual. He wanted universals offered in sensory form. A reader who wants definitions has a different complaint. The book is almost nothing but a formal grid, and the prose on the grid will not behave like a definition. Hegel's irritation and a specifier's irritation are not one irritation. Both come from asking the file for a genre it does not have.
The earliest English translation is by Canon Thomas McClatchie, an Anglican cleric posted in Hong Kong. Weinberger sets him beside Reverend Casaubon. *Middlemarch* had been out four years when, in 1876, McClatchie announced that every mythology now had its key and that he held it. On his telling the *I Ching* reached China with a son of Noah, and the book was an obscene hymn to a hermaphroditic monad, which he matched with Chaldean Baal and with Hindu Shiva. Every sign collapses into the one sign the reader brought. The binary grid sits underneath, idle.
James Legge, a Hong Kong missionary like McClatchie, called that performance "delirious." He disliked China in a broad way, and he remains the earliest English translator who matters for the Chinese classics as a body. The job took twenty years, broken by other work. A wreck in the Red Sea took the manuscript down. In 1882 he issued an English *I Ching* later readers could lean on, unlike the 1876 performance. He was first to call the stacks hexagrams, taking the English word from the star that has six points. Readers now hear a star in a name that, on the page, is six piled lines. The installed word stays.
Legge was professionally horrified by what he took for idolatry and superstition, and he still found the book pulling him in, a fascination he described as gradual and strong. Out of that pull he built a theory of translation. Chinese characters, he argued, were "symbols of ideas" rather than "representations of words." Set in a composition, they showed the writer's thought, not the sentence the writer would have spoken. The translator was supposed to come "*en rapport*" with an author: minds meeting past the written line. This book has no author for that meeting to reach. Legge's version is full of clarifications anyway, dropped into parentheses inside a rendering that is otherwise literal.
Herbert Giles, the next English translator of consequence after Legge, took the *I Ching* for "apparent gibberish." Educated Chinese, he said, would freely grant that the pages looked like nonsense, and would still insist that serious lessons waited for anyone sharp enough to draw them out. Unreadable and mandatory at once: that is why another commentary always looks like a reasonable reply to failure.
Waley's 1933 study stopped short of a complete translation. He called what he had a pile of omens under "peasant interpretation," with specific divinations grafted on later. Tell his example backward, so the migration stays visible. A diviner's rule: a red morning sky is inauspicious, so do not cross by boat. Behind the rule is an older weather saying, shepherds treating a red dawn as a warning. The sky is unchanged. The sentence has gained a prohibition. An omen is a sign. A divination binds that sign to an act. Waley sorted the signs into three bins: feelings and movements nobody chooses, twitches and stumbles and belches among them; signs from plants, animals, and birds; and signs from thunder, stars, and rain. He found all three, and he refused metaphysics on purpose.
Joseph Needham gave the *I Ching* many irritated pages in *Science and Civilisation in China*. He called it a "pseudo-science" that harmed real Chinese inquiry for centuries, because exact notes on nature and on physical things were forced into the hexagrams' vague boxes. His name for the boxes was a "cosmic filing-system." The mechanism is usable without his whole verdict. A closed, socially mandatory set with soft edges will take in an observation it cannot distinguish, and hand back a label that feels like an explanation. He was judging a system that had been allowed to classify the physical world, not reviewing a book of poems.
## A merged build that became the public text
Richard Wilhelm's German of 1924, and especially Cary F. Baynes's English of 1950, carried the book out of specialist hands and made it famous. Unlike Legge, this missionary was a partisan of the Wisdom of the East and ranked China first inside it. Western life, as he saw it, had been mechanized and rationalized without letup. It needed what he took for the East's hold on a natural depth of soul. He wanted the sides joined in mutual completion, on shared human foundations, from a core inside the humane.
His rendering leans on Neo-Confucian comment from the late Song. Referents that were specifically Chinese get widened, in the name of a universal reader. The German printing carried crowds of notes claiming parallels with the Bible, with Kant, with Goethe, and with German Romantic writing. The English printing dropped them. The book is printed twice, once beside brief comments and once beside longer ones. Those comments fuse Chinese works with Wilhelm's own meditations and do not mark the joints. Needham filed the edition under a "Department of Utter Confusion," and added that Wilhelm seemed to be the one person who had the whole thing worked out. If you need to know which sentence is Zhou, which is Song, and which is Wilhelm, the missing seams are the defect.
Carl Jung supplied the introduction. Wilhelm took him for a mind in touch with Eastern findings and with the oldest Chinese wisdom he knew, and he matched Jung's *animus* and *anima* to *yin* and *yang*. One assertion now reads as painful: Jung treated it as curious that a people this gifted had never produced what he meant by science. He also set chance, renamed synchronicity, as the guiding idea of a sacred book. Firm believers answer that the *I Ching* does not run on chance at all. Coins still land either way. A margin that prints "synchronicity" has chosen Jung. A margin that refuses the word has chosen the believers. Neither label is a property of a solid line.
Through the 1950s and 1960s the Wilhelm/Baynes Bollingen volume was a sensation. Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg were among those who turned its phrasing into poems. Fritjof Capra reached for the book inside *The Tao of Physics* when he wanted to talk about quantum mechanics. Terence McKenna thought the geometry lined up with the chemical waves that hallucinogens set off. Some readers took the two-mark notation as an early sketch of computing machinery. Philip K. Dick and Raymond Queneau each built a novel on the book. Jackson Mac Low and John Cage built strict procedures that let the book emit poems, or pieces of music.
The excitement is intelligible without the metaphysics. People who preferred a runnable procedure to a finished art object had a generator. People wary of authority met a religious shape with no exotic gods and no priests, a cycle with no required start or finish, and no author. It arrived from an East many Westerners were inventing as the counter-image of their own civilization. Wilhelm's label for the cargo was "the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years." You could divine alone. It behaved like counsel for readers who would have refused any book shelved as self-help, and it offered a personal future. Bob Dylan's praise was blunt: for him this was "the only thing that is amazingly true."
## Minford's bulk and Hinton's short page
The two recent translations Weinberger sets side by side barely resemble each other. Set together, they work as a complementary *yin* and *yang*. One is maximal and documentary. The other is short, and it aims at a kind of selflessness. Neither is a patch on Wilhelm. Each is a different product on the same six-line substrate.
John Minford is known first for the five-volume English of *The Story of the Stone*, also called *The Dream of the Red Chamber*, generally ranked the greatest Chinese novel. David Hawkes started that project. Minford carried it on. His *I Ching*, plainly many years of work, runs over 800 pages, much of the type small. One binding holds two full translations. The "Bronze Age Oracle" rebuilds the Zhou text from before the later Confucian commentaries. The "Book of Wisdom" is that text as later centuries unpacked it. Each slice has an exegesis digesting older comment, earlier translators, and his own links into poetry, art, ritual, history, philosophy, and myth.
What matters for a record is that the two layers stay apart, joined by hexagram number rather than melted into one paragraph. You can dispute the rebuilt early layer. You can at least see which layer you are reading. Wilhelm's amalgam does not allow that.
David Hinton is grouped with Arthur Waley and with Burton Watson: literary Sinologists who answer to contemporary English. Watson is older by about a generation, and across the last fifty years the pair have mattered most in America for classical Chinese poetry and philosophy. Hinton's *I Ching* goes the other way from Minford's bulk: two pages per hexagram, a few Ten Wings excerpts, and almost no further voice after a short introduction. Read it straight through, like recent poetry, while it remains a translation rather than an imitation. Open it anywhere, as people open E. M. Cioran, or Elias Canetti.
He holds to a Taoist reading, or a Ch'an (Zen) one, and he is not interested in Confucian ethics or politics. The English he wants seats you in nature's Tao, the course of things as the living world enacts it and as he thinks the book enacts it too. He treats the hard Judgment lines as kin to later Taoist and Ch'an writing, devices meant to tease the mind past ordinary assumptions and past the cage of identity. That aim reverses Wilhelm's Jungian hope of realizing a self. Hinton is after selflessness. He also assumes that early Chinese life, closer to the ground and to land that still held wild country, was less cut off from nature's Tao. The assumption is his premise, not a line in the Judgments.
He sometimes reads the oldest graphs as pictures. Ezra Pound had already tried it on the *Book of Songs*, an early collection of Chinese poems, issued by him as *The Confucian Odes*. For Hexagram 32, usually Endurance, Duration, or Perseverance, Hinton prints "Moondrift Constancy," because the graph shows a half-moon held between a stroke above and a stroke below. Observation becomes "Heron's-Eye Gaze": a heron and an eye are both in the character, and his warrant is that a wading bird misses very little. He does this rarely. Weinberger notes that Sinologists will be scandalized. The odd English labels the method. A familiar smooth word would have hidden it.
## Gen, number 52, as a conformance fixture
One hexagram makes the distance measurable. Number 52 is Gen. The figure is not the part under dispute. It is the Mountain trigram doubled, one mountain set on another. In the received drawing, Mountain is a solid line over two broken lines. Read from the lowest slot upward, the six lines of Hexagram 52 are broken, broken, solid, broken, broken, solid. That sequence is an address. It is not yet a doctrine. The address stays put across the translations below. The English verb does not.
Judgment, comment tradition, and the six line texts for this figure are gathered on the page for [Hexagram 52: Keeping Still](https://ichingonline.pro/hexagrams/52-gen-keeping-still). Keeping Still is the name Wilhelm made familiar, so familiar that many English readers think it is simply what the hexagram is called. It is one legal name among several. The exercise is to hold the figure still while the names move.
What follows is a diff, not a ranking.
In the wisdom layer Minford's name-string is "Mountain," tracking the doubled trigram instead of leaping to a mood. His English stays spare, near telegraphese, and he centers lines rather than setting them flush left. A centered line looks like an inscription. He also allows Latin tags from early Jesuit versions inside the entry. His defense is that they ease the approach to a text this old and this foreign, set a contemplative mood outside any one century, and hint at a loose tie between Chinese self-knowledge and Europe's long concern with gnosis.
In the "Book of Wisdom" his Judgment for Hexagram 52 reads:
> The back
> Is still
> As a Mountain;
> There is no body.
> He walks
> In the courtyard,
> Unseen.
> No Harm,
> Nullum malum.
He then writes at length, and well, on mountains as spiritual fact and as poetic image in China. The Latin is not in the Chinese line. *Nullum malum* repeats "No Harm" in an older European specification. If strings are extracted by machine, that token has to be marked as Minford's interface, or the index will think the oracle switched languages.
Hinton's name is "Stillness." He sets the Judgment as ordinary sentences:
> Stillness in your back. Expect nothing from your life. Wander the courtyard where you see no one. How could you ever go astray?
"Expect nothing from your life" and "How could you ever go astray?" are clauses of counsel Minford does not print. His lines name a back, a mountain, a missing body, a courtyard, an unseen walker, and an absence of harm. Hinton reads the scene as instruction about expectation. "Stillness" already interprets the doubled mountain. "Mountain" stays closer to a type name. They answer different questions.
The title Wilhelm prints is "Keeping Still, Mountain." His Judgment:
> KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still
> So that he no longer feels his body.
> He goes into the courtyard
> And does not see his people.
> No blame.
Store the gloss under his name, not as the line. Real quiet, for him, is not a freeze: stop while the moment asks for stopping, and move when it asks for motion, so rest agrees with the time and there is light in a life. He takes the figure as both the end of movement and its restart. The back is named, he says, because nerves that govern motion run there. Halt them and the restless ego drops away, after which a person can face outward and act with larger laws. Spinal nerves are a modern picture, not a Zhou term.
Richard John Lynn's edition, from Columbia University Press, calls itself definitive and treats the English that came before it as a long run of error. Lynn's word for Gen is "Restraint." The Judgment:
> Restraint takes place with the back, so one does not obtain [sic] the other person. He goes into that one's courtyard but does not see him there. There is no blame.
The explanation follows the Han commentator Wang Bi. Picture two people turned back to back. They can stand near each other and still fail to see each other. Neither one restrains the other. Each restrains himself.
"Restraint" is social and ethical. "Stillness" is physical and contemplative. "Mountain" is the trigram's own name. "Keeping Still" joins a verb of quiet to the mountain. Four English types, and the sacrificial readings have not arrived. Lynn's "[sic]" is a small honesty: he leaves "does not obtain the other person" unidiomatic rather than sanding it flat. The strain is data.
The six line statements of Hexagram 52 walk a body: feet, then calves, then the waist, the trunk, and at the top the jaws. Lower lines speak of lower parts, even while the verb stays in dispute. Wilhelm, with no historical warrant, guesses that the wording might be coaching something like yoga. A similar map of attention is not the same institution. The guess is his, and if it belongs anywhere it belongs in a note.
Line 2 is the calf line. It is where the implementations can be checked against one another without a general theory.
Hinton's second line:
> Stillness fills your calves. Raise up succession, all that will follow you, or you'll never know contentment.
Minford, in the wisdom layer, gives:
> The calves are
> Still as a Mountain.
> Others
> Are not harnessed.
> The heart is heavy.
His note hears a possible healing in the stillness, then says the energy of other people will not be brought under control. Retreat is not available. What remains is a grudging acceptance, because the foresight a retreat would need is missing. The last word of the note is a warning: beware.
Wilhelm's line 2:
> Keeping his calves still.
> He cannot rescue him whom he follows.
> His heart is not glad.
His gloss treats the leg as unable to choose an independent path. It goes where the body goes. Stop the leg while the rest of the body is still driving, and the person falls. He maps that onto someone serving a stronger master. The servant may halt on a wrong road and still be unable to halt the other man. When that master pushes on, good intentions do not save him.
Three plots share the calf and nothing else. Hinton's threat is failed succession and failed contentment. Minford's other people cannot be harnessed, and the heart is heavy because retreat is closed. Wilhelm's calf belongs to a follower who cannot rescue the person ahead. Notes that say only "line 2: calves, unfavorable" have thrown the plots away.
Inside the "Bronze Age Oracle," the Zhou book with the later interpretations stripped off, Minford's name for Gen changes. It becomes "Tending." He thinks the hexagram points at older medicine, and at the need to look after the body. The Judgment for the whole figure:
> The back
> Is tended,
> The body
> Unprotected.
> He walks
> In an empty courtyard.
> No Harm.
He reads the empty courtyard as a figure for the body as a whole, left without care. Line 2 in that layer:
> The calves
> Are tended.
> There is
> No strength
> In the flesh.
> The heart
> Is sad.
The gloss stays physical. He hears calves carrying too little meat. Dropping weight is the worry, and it reaches the feelings directly.
Minford's two layers do not even share a name. Wisdom-layer Gen is "Mountain," a scene of stillness. Oracle-layer Gen is "Tending," a body looked after too little. Same six lines, retyped rather than merely annotated. An entry that prints only one of his names has dropped half the finding.
Arthur Waley and Richard J. Smith, whose short monograph on the *I Ching* sits in Princeton's Lives of Great Religious Books series, both carry Hexagram 52 back to sacrifice of humans and of animals, a widespread Shang custom. Smith's verb for Gen is "cleave." On a wholly separate reading, he says the word might instead mean to glare at something. His Judgment is puzzling, and the puzzlement is the point:
> If one cleaves the back he will not get hold of the body; if one goes into the courtyard he will not see the person. There will be no misfortune.
On line 2 he is blunt:
> Cleave the lower legs, but don't remove the bone marrow. His heart is not pleased.
Waley hears "gnawing," and he takes the hexagram to be about reading an omen from what small scavengers do. Rats, mice, and creatures of that sort meet the body of a sacrificial victim that has been put out so an ancestral spirit will come to it. His Judgment:
> If they have gnawed its back, but not possessed themselves of the body,
> It means that you will go to a man's house, but not find him at home.
Line 2:
> If they gnaw the calf of the leg, but don't pull out the bone marrow, their (i.e. the ancestors') hearts do not rejoice.
Put the verbs in one column, next to the people who chose them.
<table border="1" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;width:100%">
<thead><tr>
<th style="text-align:left;padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc">Who prints it</th>
<th style="text-align:left;padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc">Name or verb</th>
<th style="text-align:left;padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc">Which layer they claim</th>
</tr></thead><tbody>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Minford, wisdom</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Mountain</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">later, still</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Hinton</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Stillness</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Taoist or Ch'an surface</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Wilhelm</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Keeping Still</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">his amalgam, mountain retained in the title</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Lynn, via Wang Bi</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Restraint</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Han comment</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Minford, oracle</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Tending</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Zhou reconstruction, medicine</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Smith</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">cleave, or else glare</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">sacrificial</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">Waley</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">gnawing</td>
<td style="padding:6px;border:1px solid #ccc;vertical-align:top">omen taken off a carcass</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
The figure did not change while the verb did. Mountain over mountain stayed mountain over mountain. The back stayed in the sentence. The courtyard stayed in the sentence, empty or merely unseeing. The calves stayed on line 2. What a subject does to the back, and what an empty court means, is the unstable field.
Some of the split is lexical: one Chinese word wide enough that "cleave" and "still" can both be proposed. Some is commentary, Wang Bi's picture of two people back to back. Some is the translator's own frame: nerves, a lesson about expectation, Latin, the yoga guess. "Translations differ" is true and useless. Naming which kind of difference you are looking at can be checked.
## What you can still assert once the face is gone
State the certain part narrowly. The narrowness is the result, not a failure of nerve. Hexagram 52 is two Mountain trigrams. It has to do with the back. It has to do with a courtyard, either vacant or occupied by people who are not seen. Outside that core, these few lines may concern keeping quiet, holding no expectations, restraining oneself, a settled mind, knowing when not to trail after a leader, tending aches and thin flesh, glaring, or the prep and the outcome of sacrifice, human or animal.
None of those readings has to be written off as a mistake or a bad translation. You could say the *I Ching* mirrors whatever the reader arrived hoping to see. Weinberger's correction of that saying is the better image, and it survives contact with the versions above. Think of a Shang bronze mirror. Manufacture and name still say mirror. A dark crust, blue going into green, has killed the reflection. People keep looking, and they keep reporting a face. The face is hard to separate from the hope they brought to the metal.
Minford remembers a last talk with David Hawkes, who was dying. Hawkes told him to pass on the secret: nearly any sentence can be taken in endlessly many ways, and nobody is ever going to know the sense it really has. That is the same property as the token that covers both a war captive and sincerity. No book has been altered as often as the Book of Change. Change is not only the subject. It is what happened each time a school, a dynasty, a missionary, or a poet bound a new specification to the same six marks.
When a new edition shows up, ask five questions of Hexagram 52 before trusting the rest. Whose name is printed: Mountain, Stillness, Keeping Still, Restraint, Tending, cleave, or gnawing? Is the Judgment kept apart from the Image? Are six line texts present, and can you find line 2 without reading the essay first? Is a commentator named when a commentator speaks? Does the page show the six lines, or only the English? A page that fails may still be a powerful essay. It is a poor specification of Gen.
## Run the cast, then attribute the string
Hexagram 52 teaches the larger point in miniature: this classic never froze into one meaning. Whoever consults it brings a question the pages do not contain. The coin procedure makes that input concrete, and it makes the encoding visible in a way commentary does not.
Ask in an open form. A demand for yes or no asks the lines to spell a Boolean they do not spell. Throw three coins, six times in all. Number the faces, add each throw, and let the total choose a broken mark or a solid one. Place the first result in the lowest slot and the sixth at the top. Flag the lines that change. Those flags carry the sharpest counsel. When the flagged lines invert, they address a second figure, the relating hexagram, read in the tradition as the direction things are moving.
Coins plus a notebook are enough. Write the question before anything is thrown, then the six results, then which lines move, then the two names. Fifty yarrow stalks are the slower classical route to the same class of record: a count, not a toss, and more labor, not a different doctrine. Picking the quicker route does not pick a verb for Gen.
A page can own the arithmetic. [Free online three-coin casting](https://ichingonline.pro/) returns the figure you reached, each line that moves, and the relating figure, requires no account, and keeps the reading in the browser. Procedure can be faithful and the English can still be somebody's choice. Mountain stacked on mountain may arrive titled Keeping Still, Mountain, Stillness, Restraint, or Tending. Hawkes is not answered by a correct stack. Counting was never the step that produced "cleave" or "gnawing."
Store a line as a solid or broken mark, plus a flag if it moves. Store a hexagram as six ordered lines, line 1 lowest. Do not use the English name as a key. Keep Judgment, Image, line texts, the Ten Wings, and any translator's note in separate columns. Keep the rival verbs attributed, not averaged: Mountain, Stillness, Keeping Still, Restraint, Tending, cleave, gnawing. "The book says keep still" has dropped Wilhelm's name and kept his verb. Show the six lines with the result. Paz, Ginsberg, Borges, and Olson found beauty in his language, and Cage found a procedure. Those are real uses. They are not a substitute for the stack.
Leave the question in your own notes. The claim worth storing is not that a hexagram already contains a life. A figure reached under a question can be read against that question, and a different question puts the same Gen to different work. The uses never meet: a philosophical sorting of the universe, ethics, a ruler's handbook, an oracle for personal and political futures, then Christian proof, binary arithmetic, a peasant omen, a pseudo-science, Jungian chance, a Beat poem, a generative procedure. Weinberger's question, what the book is, stays open because those uses record reception, not a definition of the six lines.
Hold the split if you hold nothing else. Eight trigrams. Six lines. Sixty-four hexagrams. A cast with three coins or with fifty yarrow stalks, lowest slot first, moving lines opening onto a relating figure. On that small structure, an argument about what Gen does with a back, a courtyard, and the calves at line 2 has never closed. Mountain. Stillness. Keeping Still. Restraint. Tending. Cleave. Gnawing. Under the corrosion the Shang mirror is still a mirror by make and by name. It will not hand back one face.
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