The Forest of Changes Yi Jing: A New Version of an Ancient Chinese Oracle

After at least a thousand years in a broken state the Forest of Changes once again functions as an oracle.

This book combines two works,A translation of the 3,000 year old Zhou Yi (Yi Jing), the most important divination text of early China and one of the foundation texts of Chinese civilization.An arrangement of verses from the Forest of Changes (Jiao Shi Yi Lin), a 2,000 year old divining text from the Han Dynasty. This radical rearrangement of texts drawn from the Forest make this work a usable oracle, providing several layers of divinatory text to work with. The full version of the Forest of Changes is available from the same translator. When it was issued in 2016, it was the first complete translation of the Forest of Changes in a western language.The Zhou Yi, the original ancient text beneath the layers of commentary built up over the centuries, has been interpreted by many, many students over the centuries. I have translated the Yi as closely as I can to the ancient traditions of 1,000 BCE, an oracle used to determine the auspiciousness of rituals, particularly the rituals of the cult of the Ancestors.

The Jiao Shi Yi Lin, written some 1,000 years after the Zhou Yi, expands the text of the Yi by providing a verse for each of the 4096 combinations of the 64 hexagrams. Unfortunately if there was some correlation between the texts of the Yi and the Forest it has been lost over the years, along with a large chunk of the Forest text.

This book resolves the problems with the Forest of Changes as an oracle by realigning it with the Yi Jing using the favorability of the texts, as well as keywords and images drawn from the Yi. In addition I have divided up the Forest texts into three layers for each Yi text based on portions of society for whom the Forest was used: Merchant/Traveler, Farmer/Shaman and Noble/Scholar. These can also be viewed as the Three Powers, Earth, Heaven and Humanity. By providing three texts, along with an extra 'All Lines Change' text for each Yi Jing hexagram, the book is able to offer more detailed answers to questions.