Name: I Ching
ISBN: 9780691097503

I Ching

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the 1st efforts of the human mind to place itself within the universe. It has exerted a living influence in China for 3000 years and interest in it has spread in the West. Set down in the dawn of history as a book of oracles, the Book of Changes deepened in meaning when ethical values were attached to the oracular pronouncements; it became a book of wisdom, eventually one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, and provided the common source for both Confucianist and Taoist philosophy. Wilhelm's rendering of the I Chinginto German, published in 1924, presented it for the 1st time in a form intelligible to the general reader. Wilhelm, who translated many other ancient Chinese works and who wrote several books on Chinese philosophy and civilization, long resided in China. His close association with its cultural leaders gave him a unique understanding of the text of the I Ching. In the English translation, every effort has been made to preserve Wilhelm's pioneering insight into the spirit of the original. This 3rd edition, completely reset, contains a new forward by Hellmut Wilhelm, one of the most eminent American scholars of Chinese culture. He discusses his father's textual methods and summarizes recent studies of the I Chingboth in the West and in present-day China. The new edition contains minor textual corrections, bibliographical revisions and an index.

What Hacker News says

henrychannelJun 2026

Classical Wilhelm-Baynes translation, three coin method, 64 hexagrams. No signup, no ads, free to use.

It also has an optional AI interpretation layer - but the classical text is always shown first, fully intact. Built it because I wanted something that treated the tradition seriously.

Carl Jung wrote the foreword to this exact translation and credited the I Ching with shaping his theory of synchronicity.

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sho_hnJan 2025

Leveson's fantastic Therac-25 paper is probably the most important document in the formative years of my young sweng career.

I still re-read it every couple of years, and it's held up a lot better than one of my other early favorites, which was Feynman's appendix to the Challenger report. In the sense that I still draw new thoughts and realizations from it as I re-read it with additional experience in some of the engineering and organizational disciplines it touches. Sad as it is, it's got a little bit of everything.

It's definitely got my vote for the I Ching of critical systems engineering.

Spend the time. Chances are you'll remember it.

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stryanNov 2023

FYI I'd skip the Tao of Pooh if you're trying to learn more about Taoism; it's more of a pop-culture, western philosophy inspired by eastern take then actual Daoism.

Otherwise, my recs are:

First find good translations of the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi. For the former I recommend Victor Mair or Thomas Cleary. For the latter, Brook Ziporyn.

There's also the Lieh-tzu, which is often considered to be "authored" by Laozi as well, though isn't talked about as much. I've only read AC Graham's translation but liked it well enough.

Taoist Body by Kristofer Schipper is a fascinating look into Taiwanese Taoism. Kristofer was even ordained as a Taoist priest, one of the few Westerners to do so.

Early Daoist Scriptures by Stephen R. Bokenkamp is borderline a textbook but I found it gave a great historical understanding of how Taoism has developed through the ages.

Original Tao by Harold Roth is actually a translation and commentary of a text that pre-dates the TTC and was very interesting to me.

Taoist Meditation by Thomas Cleary is another neat collection of translations that cover a broad range of Taoist thought with decent of annotations to help you understand.

And finally, I'd recommend grabbing a copy of the I-Ching (I like David Hinton's translation) and some Taoist T'ang dynasty poets (Li Bo or Li Bai is a good one to start with) to round it all out. I've found that reading relevant poetry helps me put the philosophical stuff into a real-world context without falling into the trap of re-contextualizing it into Western culture.

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stryanAug 2023

You're welcome! I realized I'd be remiss in not mentioning David Hinton as well: he's an American poet who's also a professional Chinese translator and has produced many excellent translations[0] over the years. He has a very distinct translation style were he translates as much of it as directly as possible (which is already difficult going from Ancient Chinese to Modern Chinese, let alone English) and really helps you get how different the thought really is while still keeping the originals poetic quality.

[0] I recommend his translations of the inner Chuang Tzu chapters and the I-Ching, as well as his book China Root.

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keiferskiJul 2023

Copying a post I made a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28388844

Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.

However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.

If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.

- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.

- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.

- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.

- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.

- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.

- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and anything by Dostoyevsky. For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.

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JenrHywyMar 2023

I'm not so sure about the patriarchy part, but it's certainly wrapped up in the move towards narrowly scientific thinking. Or as Nietzsche would put it, we're too Apollonian and not enough Dionysian.

FWIW I'm also fond of the Tarot, and the I Ching, and find both surprisingly insightful and useful (me of 10 years ago would not believe that I just wrote that).

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