The Book of Changes

The oldest and strangest of the Chinese classics. The Book of Changes began as a diviner's manual of sixty-four hexagrams, each built from six broken or unbroken lines, with terse judgments about crossing great rivers, catching foxes and marrying off a younger sister. Over centuries it gathered commentaries, the Ten Wings, which turned it into a philosophy of change, timing and the patterns linking heaven, earth and human life. This complete new English translation gives every hexagram from Qian, the Creative, and Kun, the Receptive, to Before Completion, with its judgment, line statements and traditional commentaries, followed by the Great Commentary and the shorter appendices on the trigrams and the order of the hexagrams. It can be read straight through, consulted for divination, or explored as the root text behind two thousand years of Chinese thought.