Wilhelm, Baynes, and the Transmission

The version of the I Ching most English-language readers meet did not arrive in one step. It passed through a documented chain of scholars and translators, Chinese and European both, and naming that chain honestly is worth an article of its own.

The divinatory core of the text took shape in the Zhou era; dating beyond that is scholarship, not settled fact. Two Chinese commentators mark the poles of how it was read for the next fifteen centuries. Wang Bi (王弼), writing in the third century CE (226–249), founded the yìlǐ reading — the text as philosophical argument. Zhu Xi (朱熹), the Song-dynasty scholar (1130–1200), argued the book back toward its oracular use against that drift. Between them, they set the terms nearly every later reading of the Yijing — including the one you are reading now — still answers to.

James Legge produced an earlier English translation in 1882, read far less today than what followed. Richard Wilhelm's German translation, published in 1924, became the version that shaped the twentieth-century West's understanding of the text — and Wilhelm did not arrive at it alone. He read the Yijing with Lao Naixuan (勞乃宣), his teacher in Qingdao in 1912 and 1913, and it is Lao Naixuan's guidance, as much as Wilhelm's own scholarship, that the German rendering carries. Cary F. Baynes then carried Wilhelm's German into English in 1950, in an edition that included a foreword by Carl Jung — the point at which the text entered the same English-language conversation that also carries Aurathea's own reading of it.

Each of these renderings is a reading made at a particular moment, by particular people, working from a particular understanding of the source. Legge's is not Wilhelm's; Wilhelm's is not the classical Chinese underneath either of them. Aurathea's own gloss of the source text, elsewhere in this track, is built from the public-domain classical characters directly — not borrowed from any one of these renderings — precisely so that naming this transmission does not collapse into treating one twentieth-century translation as if it simply were the Yijing itself. The tradition supplies the text. It also supplies the scholars, Chinese and Western alike, who have carried it forward — and Aurathea names all of them, not only the ones who happen to have published in English.