易學

The prospect of spending more than three hours on a train & bus was not very tempting but the journey that I was about to make had been on my wish list for many years and so it became a matter of  ‘its-now-or-never’. I took an early train to Ulm, changed trains to  Göppingen and took the bus to Bad Boll. It is the place where Richard Wilhelm worked and lived. And it is the place where he is buried. Continue reading →

You might wonder why I am making such a fuzz out of something that seems to be a minor detail in Wilhelm’s translation of the Yijing. Is it really important whether ⚍ and ⚎ are either called shao yin 少陰 or shao yang 少陽? Are the names really that important? Continue reading →

Munich is a beautiful city, especially with the sunny weather that it has today. My mobile informs me that it is 25°C outside but it feels much warmer. When I arrived in Munich, last Monday, it was much cooler. The archive of the Akademie can only be visited on Wednesday and Thursday so I spent Tuesday by playing the tourist, walking through the center of Munich and finding out how I should walk to the Bayern Akademie der Wissenschaften. In theory this should be a 15 min. walk but because of my complete lack of any sense for direction -which even brought Google Maps to the verge of despair- the 15 minutes became half an hour. At least I knew how long it would take me to get there. I was prepared. Continue reading →

A few months ago publisher AnkhHermes, who publish the Dutch translation of Richard Wilhelm’s Yijing, asked me if I wanted to be the chief editor of the new edition. This new edition will have a new layout but also some corrections, a change from Duyvendak transcription to pinyin, years added to persons & dynasties and other minor adjustments to the text.

As editor I had to read Wilhelm’s translation from the first page to the last. Literally. Even though I had the book for more than thirty years on my shelves this was the first time I had to read it completely, as if it was a novel.

I wish I had done this earlier. Not only do Wilhelm’s comments to the text tell a lot about his view of the Yi and its usage, they also contain references to names and sources that I never heard of before: Xiang Anshi 項安世 and his book Zhouyi Wan Ci 周易玩辭, Liu Yuan 刘沅 and his book Zhouyi Heng Jie 周易恒解, to name but a few. Wilhelm didn’t stick to the mainstream books like the Zhouyi Zhezhong 周易折中 that he used as the main source for his translation and commentary. His library of books on the Yi was extensive and he used it to the fullest.

But reading his translation also raised some questions. How did he write his translation? Where did his commentary to the text come from? And most importantly, were certain deviations from the Chinese view made intentionally or were they mistakes?
The last question mainly concerns one topic: why on earth did Wilhelm switch the names of the two symbols ‘young yin’ and ‘young yang’? Continue reading →