Mountain, Stillness, or a Rat at the Sacrifice: English Versions of Hexagram 52 Set Side by Side

*This comparison opens on one figure and only later walks back through the whole book. The translators, the dates, and the English set in quotation marks are the ones Eliot Weinberger assembled for "What Is the I Ching?" The New York Review of Books ran that essay on February 25, 2016 (2016-02-25). He moved from the cosmos inward and saved Hexagram 52 for a late demonstration. Here the demonstration is the front door.*

Open two English copies of the *I Ching* to the same number and you are not looking at one Chinese sentence dressed in two typefaces. You are looking at a choice made before the sentence starts. Hexagram 52 is the clearest place to watch the choice. The figure under the words is blunt. Its name is Gen. It is the trigram Mountain set upon the trigram Mountain. Six lines, then a title. After the title, the English books stop agreeing about a back, a courtyard, and a pair of calves.

Lining them up is not a contest with a prize at the end. Weinberger already declined to award one. The use of the lineup is narrower: what each English name commits a reader to, what each Judgment actually prints, and how line 2 turns one body part into medicine, loyalty, yoga, an omen, or an ancestor's disappointment. Only with those sentences on the table does the rest of the classic become readable — a book asked to account for everything, still unwilling to let its crucial words mean one thing.

Seven Names Before They Share a Sentence

Begin with the labels. A label is already a reading. The Chinese name is Gen. The English printed beside it tells you which century, which school, and which human trouble the translator has assigned to the figure.

John Minford, in the half of his work he calls the Book of Wisdom, prints "Mountain." He is naming the picture the lines make. Two Mountain trigrams, one above the other, so the picture's name becomes the hexagram's name. The word is a landform before it is a moral. Stop at "Mountain" and you have been handed ground, not yet an order.

David Hinton prints "Stillness." In his version the mountain may be quiet, but the mountain is no longer the title. The title is a condition. Stillness can sit on a ridge, in a back, or in a life that has stopped waiting for news. By picking the condition instead of the landform, Hinton has already left the Confucian habit of turning the figure into public ethics, and stepped toward a Taoist or Ch'an reading whose aim is to step out of the busy self.

Richard Wilhelm, in the German of 1924 that Cary F. Baynes brought into English in 1950, refuses to choose between landform and command. His title is "Keeping Still, Mountain." The first half tells you what to do. The second half shows the image that measures the doing. That double name is a small model of his method everywhere else. Picture and counsel arrive together, and the counsel is something a person can fail. You are not merely near a mountain. You are supposed to keep still, and the mountain is how still.

Richard John Lynn, in the Columbia University Press *I Ching* presented as a "definitive version" after "decades of inaccurate translations," prints "Restraint." The mountain is gone. So is the quiet. What remains is a social and moral brake. Restraint is something one person exercises toward another. Lynn follows the Han commentator Wang Bi, and the name already predicts the note he will write: two people can stand close, backs turned, and still not be ruling each other. Each holds himself in. On this reading the hexagram is that holding.

Minford is not done. In the other half of the project, the Bronze Age Oracle, he drops the later philosophical titles and prints "Tending." He takes the old Zhou wording to be about the body in the way traditional medicine is about the body. To tend is to look after, to dress, to notice the hurt. "Mountain," "Stillness," "Keeping Still," and "Restraint" can all be lived as spiritual postures. "Tending" can be lived as a visit to someone who is ill. Same six lines. A different room.

Richard J. Smith, whose monograph on the *I Ching* sits in Princeton's Lives of Great Religious Books, prints "cleave." He also notes a wholly separate possibility: the word might mean "to glare at." A cut, or a hard look. Neither is rest. He is hauling Gen back toward Shang sacrifice of humans and animals, where flesh is not a metaphor for an ego.

Arthur Waley, who in 1933 wrote a study without ever translating the whole book, thinks Gen means "gnawing." The agent in his reading is not a person meditating. It is rats, mice, or creatures like them, at a sacrificial victim left out as bait for an ancestral spirit. Gnawing is an omen. What the animals do to the corpse tells the diviner whether the living will find the person they went to see. If a mountain is still in the picture at all, it stands far behind the teeth.

Seven labels, and the quarrel is already awkward. Mountain names stacked trigrams. Stillness names a condition. Keeping Still, Mountain names an act measured by a landscape. Restraint names a discipline between people. Tending names care of flesh. Cleave names a cut, or possibly a hard stare. Gnawing names animals at a sacrifice. No later paragraph in these books is free of that first pick. A translator who has printed "Stillness" cannot, without changing books, let line 2 become a remark about bone marrow. A translator who has printed "gnawing" cannot, without changing books, let the Judgment become a sermon on the ego. Hexagram 52 is where that limit shows, because the Chinese figure is one figure.

The judgment, the commentary, and the six line texts of this hexagram, under the name Keeping Still, are gathered on Hexagram 52, Gen, Keeping Still. The English argument does not stop on that page. The page only holds the figure still long enough to set the versions next to each other.

The Judgment, Version Against Version

Names are titles. The Judgment is the sentence a reader actually consults. The same slot, filled by different centuries of English, follows.

Minford's Book of Wisdom sets the lines in the center of the page, a clipped telegraphese rather than a paragraph. He has also done something exceedingly strange: he folds in Latin tags taken from early Jesuit translations. Those tags, he writes,

can help us relate to this deeply ancient and foreign text, can help create a timeless mood of contemplation, and at the same time can evoke indirect connections between the Chinese traditions of Self-Knowledge and Self-Cultivation…and…the long European tradition of Gnosis and spiritual discipline.

For Hexagram 52 in the Book of Wisdom, his Judgment reads:

The back

Is still

As a Mountain;

There is no body.

He walks

In the courtyard,

Unseen.

No Harm,

Nullum malum.

His book then spends a long stretch on mountains as spiritual places and as images in Chinese poems. The Latin close, *Nullum malum*, is not ornament. It tells a Western reader that "no harm" is an old ritual verdict, cousin to a language the Jesuits already trusted, not a casual shrug. The body, in this wording, has gone. "There is no body." Someone walks the courtyard and is not seen. Stillness here is close to vanishing.

Hinton turns the same slot into prose, and the prose says "you":

Stillness in your back. Expect nothing from your life. Wander the courtyard where you see no one. How could you ever go astray?

The back is still, as it is for Minford. The courtyard holds no other person, as it does not for Minford's walker who goes unseen. Then Hinton adds a line the others do not put inside the Judgment: expect nothing from your life. That addition changes the job of the hexagram. It becomes a practice of wanting less. "How could you ever go astray?" answers the old question — auspicious or not? — by removing the road on which a person could stray. Expect nothing, and error has no place to stand. This is not a manual telling a ruler whether a river can be crossed.

Wilhelm's Judgment keeps a diviner's cadence and a moral one in the same breath:

KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still

So that he no longer feels his body.

He goes into the courtyard

And does not see his people.

No blame.

"No blame" is cooler, and more like a finding, than "No Harm," and it is nothing like Hinton's question. Blame is what a court assigns. Wilhelm's man does not feel his body. He does not see his people. The yard has people in it. The achievement is that he fails to register them. Minford's Wisdom text erased the body and left the walker unseen. Wilhelm numbs the body and leaves the people unperceived. Who is invisible has been reversed.

He then unpacks the sentence. True quiet, in his words, means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward. Rest and movement then match what the time demands, and life has light in it. He takes the hexagram to mark both the end of movement and the start of movement. The back is named, on his account, because the nerve fibers that mediate movement run there. Still those spinal nerves and the restless ego, as it were, drops away. Calmed like that, a person can turn outward and no longer watch individual beings struggle. The peace of mind that follows is what he needs if he is going to grasp the large laws of the universe and act along with them. Action from that depth, Wilhelm holds, makes no mistakes. The gloss shows what the double title was for.

Lynn's Restraint is colder, and it keeps a snag in the English that the Columbia text itself flags:

Restraint takes place with the back, so one does not obtain [sic] the other person. He goes into that one's courtyard but does not see him there. There is no blame.

The "[sic]" leaves a clumsy grab at the Chinese instead of sanding it into spirituality. Wang Bi's note is spatial. Two people with their backs turned do not see each other, though they stand close. Neither restrains the other. Each restrains himself. The yard is a particular other person's ground, not an allegory of extinguished hope.

Minford's Bronze Age Oracle, built from the Zhou book before later commentaries were fastened on, changes the verbs and empties the yard:

The back

Is tended,

The body

Unprotected.

He walks

In an empty courtyard.

No Harm.

"Tended" stands where "still" stood. "Unprotected" stands where "there is no body" and "he no longer feels his body" stood. The courtyard is not merely a place where people go unseen. It is empty. Minford reads that empty courtyard as a figure for the whole body, left without care. On that reading the Judgment is a diagnosis. Someone has looked after the back and neglected the rest. No Harm is not enlightenment. It is the diviner's report that the neglect has not yet become disaster. The same three words, "No Harm," close his Wisdom version and sound there like a spiritual clearance. One translator, two books, two temperatures for a verdict that looks identical if you only skim.

Smith's cleave makes the Judgment a puzzle even after it has become English:

If one cleaves the back he will not get hold of the body; if one goes into the courtyard he will not see the person. There will be no misfortune.

The logic is sacrificial, and a little grotesque. Cut the back and you still do not hold the body. Enter the yard and you still do not see the person. The miss is the omen, and the omen, surprisingly, is no misfortune. A reader arriving from Wilhelm will try to moralize this into "do not grasp, and you will be blameless." Smith's sentence does not offer that comfort so readily. It records a failed hold and a failed meeting, then cancels the disaster you would expect next.

Waley's gnawing takes the human being out of the subject position:

If they have gnawed its back, but not possessed themselves of the body,

It means that you will go to a man's house, but not find him at home.

"They" are animals at sacrificial bait. The back is a corpse's back. The courtyard has turned into a house whose owner is out. Observation first, then a verdict about a wasted visit. That is Waley's whole method, and the 1933 weather proverb he uses elsewhere — red sky at morning, then do not cross the river — works the same hinge.

Across the seven Judgments a few slots still agree. Every version touches the back: still, tended, restrained, cleaved, or gnawed. The body is what gets missed. The courtyard, or the house that replaces it, is where a meeting fails. The close stays mild: No Harm, no blame, no misfortune, a denial that you could go astray, or *Nullum malum*. The agent does not agree. Sage, a "you" told to expect nothing, a numb man, two neighbors, a neglected patient, a sacrificer, a rat. The book did not have to change for all of them to appear. It only had to be translated.

Line 2, Where the Calves Will Not Sit Still

The six line statements of Hexagram 52 travel a body: feet, calves, waist, trunk, jaws. The figure climbs, or it cuts, according to the verb already chosen in the title. Line 2 is the calf. It is the best single line for a comparison, because every major English version says something sharp there, and none of them say the same sharp thing.

Hinton:

Stillness fills your calves. Raise up succession, all that will follow you, or you'll never know contentment.

Stillness moves from the back into the calves, then becomes an order about whoever comes after you. Fail to raise that succession and contentment stays out of reach. Anatomy has turned into a duty toward descendants.

Minford's Book of Wisdom keeps the mountain simile and then turns toward other people:

The calves are

Still as a Mountain.

Others

Are not harnessed.

The heart is heavy.

His note is a small drama of a retreat that fails. There is a potential healing, a Stillness. But the Energy of Others cannot be mastered and harnessed. No Retreat is possible, only a reluctant acceptance. One lacks the foresight for Retreat. Beware. The capitals are his, and they matter. Stillness, Retreat, and Others are terms in his system, not casual nouns. Line 2, told this way, is the moment your own legs have learned to stop and the people around you have not. The heavy heart is the weight of seeing that. You will not get the clean withdrawal you wanted.

Wilhelm:

Keeping his calves still.

He cannot rescue him whom he follows.

His heart is not glad.

Wilhelm treats the calf as a limb with no motion of its own. Stop it while the torso is still driving forward and the person goes down. He then maps that onto service. Someone walking behind a stronger master can refuse a wrong path and still fail to halt the man ahead. Good intentions do not rescue the leader, and the heart stays unhappy. He also guesses, weirdly and without historical warrant, that the climb from feet to jaws might be yoga instructions. Nothing in the Zhou scene requires the guess. It shows how fast "Keeping Still" recruits a body-practice the translator already knows.

The Bronze Age Oracle, still Minford but no longer the wisdom book, gives the calves back to flesh and loss:

The calves

Are tended.

There is

No strength

In the flesh.

The heart

Is sad.

He reads it as a wasting. There is not enough flesh on the calves. Loss of weight is the worry, and it reaches the emotions directly. Put this next to his Wisdom rendering of the same line and the gap inside one scholar's study is as wide as the gap between scholars. Wisdom-Minford: others will not be harnessed, beware, no retreat. Oracle-Minford: the calves are too thin, and sadness follows the failing body. Both are line 2 of Hexagram 52. Own only one half and you will think the line is obviously about leadership, or obviously about wasting.

Smith keeps the knife in the verb:

Cleave the lower legs, but don't remove the bone marrow. His heart is not pleased.

The caution is not "be still." The caution is "cut, and stop before the marrow." Whoever "his" is, the heart is displeased, either by how deep the cut went or by the refusal to go deeper. This is butcher's language. It belongs with sacrifice, not with a courtyard meditation. A reader who wants Keeping Still can of course turn marrow into a figure for the inmost self. Smith does not force that turn. He lets the sentence stay bloody.

Waley is bloodier, and he names the subject Smith leaves hanging:

If they gnaw the calf of the leg, but don't pull out the bone marrow, their (i.e. the ancestors') hearts do not rejoice.

"They" are again the creatures at the bait. The ancestors are the ones whose hearts fail to rejoice. The omen is not that you feel sad. The omen is that the dead are unsatisfied, because the gnawing reached the calf and stopped short of the marrow. Divination here reports on a ritual meal that did not please the guests it was meant for. "No blame," the mild close of the other school, has no air in this sentence.

Those counsels cannot all be true together: raise succession, or do not count on retreat, or fail to save a stronger master, or mourn thin calves, or cut short of the marrow, or leave the ancestors unsatisfied. Wilhelm's yoga guess sits beside them, a later body-practice read back onto the sequence. The line will not throw that reading out.

What the Comparison Cannot Dissolve

After the names, the Judgments, and line 2, say plainly what the comparison does not melt away. Hexagram 52 is two Mountain trigrams. It has something to do with the back. It has something to do with a courtyard that is empty, or with people in a courtyard who are not seen, or with a house whose owner is not home. Those three sticks are in every serious English version, even Waley's, once "a man's house" is allowed to stand where the courtyard stood.

Beyond those sticks the lines have been asked to carry quiet, a life that expects nothing, holding oneself back, a settled mind, knowing when not to follow a leader, care for pains, a hard stare, and the setup and aftermath of sacrifice. None of that is simply a blunder. The pressures come from different centuries, and they do not cancel. Multiply this one figure by sixty-four hexagrams and by six lines, and the same quarrel is the whole classic. The rest of the essay leaves the doubled mountain for the book that contains it.

From the Doubled Mountain Back to a Book With No Fixed Meaning

Gen is one address in a book that has been given nearly every job a book can hold. For a very long stretch of time the *I Ching* has sorted the universe into kinds, counseled ordinary conduct, instructed rulers, and answered questions about a person's future and a state's. Critics of writing and of pictures, mapmakers, physicians, and workers in many sciences have used the figures to organize a field, or have cited them as proof meant to end a dispute. Confucians commented, and so did Taoists, Buddhists, and later Christians, and each camp broke into rival schools. In China and across East Asia it has been the volume people actually consult. The West has had it for more than three centuries, and since the 1950s it has surely been the Chinese book the wider world is most likely to know by name. No other book has agreed to carry so many uses, and the words that would pin it down have never settled.

The culture's own story of the lines starts with a hero, not a year. Fu Xi is shown as a dragon, or as a snake with a human face. He watched patterns overhead and underfoot — marks on birds, rocks, and animals, clouds in motion, stars in their places — and the tale says he reduced all of that to eight trigrams. Three lines, solid or broken, make a trigram. The eight together express *yin* and *yang*, the pair said to drive the universe. They stood for heaven, lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, mountain, and earth. Mountain, doubled, is Hexagram 52. From those blocks, the myth continues, Fu Xi drew kingship, marriage, writing, navigation, and agriculture, and taught them to human descendants. Culture, on this account, is nature already read.

Legend then names a founder. Around 1050 BCE, tradition says, Emperor Wen, who established the Zhou, stacked each trigram on another, so three lines became six lines. He numbered and arranged all sixty-four combinations, named them, and attached a short oracle, the Judgment. His son, the Duke of Zhou, a poet, wrote the compressed notes on individual lines, simply called the Lines. Five hundred years later, Confucius himself was said to have composed the ethical layer, the Ten Wings. "Wing," in that name, is architectural: a side hall built onto a main one, not a feather.

Digging disagrees with the family tree. The Shang dynasty begins around 1600 BCE, perhaps earlier. Diviners heated tortoise shells or ox shoulder blades and read the cracks. Hundreds of thousands of oracle bones have come out of the ground. Many bear a full hexagram, or the numbers assigned to one. Where the figures came from, and how a crack was interpreted, remains completely unknown. The six-line mark is older than the lectures attached to it. Smith's cleave and Waley's gnawing at least gesture at Shang sacrifice, a practice that dynasty had. They still cannot show that this figure, on a particular bone, meant marrow and ancestors.

Somewhere in the Zhou — the working guess is around 800 BCE — names were given and oral material became a book, the *Zhou Yi*, the Zhou Changes. A shell still needed an expert. Coins or yarrow could be used by anyone, and both rites continue. Three coins were thrown together; numbers on heads and tails summed to a solid or broken line; six tosses made the hexagram. The other rite counted out fifty yarrow stalks, slower work that still produced a number per line. The labor differs. The output does not. Neither rite prints a meaning. Meaning is what a later school hangs on the lines, which is why Mountain and gnawing can share a figure. The odds of a toss, and the rule of building upward from the bottom line, are spelled out as steps in the three-coin method, from the toss to the line. Once the shell gave way, a professional diviner was no longer required.

By the third century BCE the Ten Wings were attached, and the *Zhou Yi* had become philosophy and ethics as well as divination. In 136 BCE Emperor Wu of the Han placed it first among the five canonical Confucian books and standardized one copy. Rivals had used other sequences. Sequence matters: fifty-two is an address in one official order, and a different order opens a different door. The standardized book is the *I Ching*, the Book or Classic of Change. Its shape has held: a named and numbered hexagram, an arcane Judgment, an often poetic account of the image made by the two trigrams, and an enigmatic statement for each of the six lines.

Confucius almost certainly had nothing to do with making it. The same tradition that credits him keeps a remark that undercuts the credit. Offered another hundred years, he supposedly said, he would give fifty to studying the book. A man who still needs fifty years has not finished the commentary. For the two millennia after the Han settlement, the *I Ching* was treated as the necessary guide to the universe. The philosophy around it held that everything is connected and that everything is in restless change. The book did not describe that universe from outside. It was taken to be the universe's most perfect small copy. One Sinologist called it the "underpinnings of reality." The sixty-four hexagrams became categories other disciplines were expected to treat as fixed. Judgments were handled as seeds, grown through the Ten Wings and further commentaries into advice for rulers seeking an orderly state and for everyone else seeking a proper life. It was a tool for meditating on the cosmos, and, because it was thought to lie flush with how the world works, a way of asking what was coming, auspicious or not.

One lexical fact belongs here. The same word can mean war prisoner and can mean sincerity. A captive and a virtue share a graph, which makes a mountain, a stillness, a restraint, a tending, a cleaving, and a gnawing less shocking than they look. No book has passed through as many changes as the Book of Change.

What Europe Did When It Picked the Mirror Up

Jesuit missionaries, by the late seventeenth century, were reading the book as Christian truth with a universal claim. Hexagram one was God, two was Jesus as the second Adam, three was the Trinity, eight was the family of Noah, and the series continued. Leibniz gladly recognized his binary arithmetic in the solid and broken lines. The counting is real — six lines, two states, sixty-four hexagrams — and it does not need him. The lines were already binary.

Hegel would not spend the labor of translating Confucius, and he set this book aside as "superficial." His charge is specific: "There is not to be found in one single instance a sensuous conception of universal natural or spiritual powers." Hexagram 52 makes an awkward answer. Back, calf, marrow, courtyard, mountain, and rat are sensuous past the point of comfort. The versions simply cannot agree which sensation is the true one.

The first English translation is Canon Thomas McClatchie's. An Anglican in Hong Kong, he has the air of Reverend Casaubon in *Middlemarch*, the man who believed he held the key to all mythologies. In 1876, four years after that novel, McClatchie announced that he had found it. One of Noah's sons, he said, had brought the *I Ching* to China, where it celebrated, pornographically, a "hermaphroditic monad" known to Chaldeans as Baal and to Hindus as Shiva. James Legge called this "delirious." Legge was also a Hong Kong missionary. He loathed China in general, and he is still the first important English translator of the Chinese classics. His own work took twenty interrupted years. A shipwreck in the Red Sea lost the manuscript. In 1882 he published the first somewhat reliable English *I Ching*, and the first to borrow "hexagram" from the six-pointed star and apply it to the Chinese stacks. This essay's name for the figure is his noun.

Appalled, as a professional, by what he took for idolatry and superstition, he nevertheless found himself "gradually brought under a powerful fascination." From that double feeling came a theory. Characters, he claimed, were "symbols of ideas," not "representations of words," so a page showed thought rather than speech. The translator had to get "*en rapport*" with the author, a "seeing of mind to mind," a "participation" beyond the words. The *I Ching* has no author to meet that way. Legge's English is full of parenthetical explanations anyway. Lynn's "[sic]" and Hinton's added command to expect nothing are two other answers to the same fright: leave the phrase ugly, or write the implication as if it were the text.

Herbert Giles, next among important English translators, thought the book "apparent gibberish." He added: "This is freely admitted by all learned Chinese, who nevertheless hold tenaciously to the belief that important lessons could be derived from its pages if only we had the wit to understand them." That sentence still describes a tradition that can call one word both captive and virtue.

Waley, in 1933, never translated the whole. He called the text a set of omens in "peasant interpretation," with divinations added later. His sample turns "red sky in the morning, shepherds take warning" into "red sky in the morning: inauspicious; do not cross the river." He proposed three classes — involuntary sensations such as feelings, twitchings, stumbling, and belching; signs from plants, animals, and birds; signs from thunder, stars, and rain — and he found all three in a deliberately unmetaphysical reading. Gnawing fits the animal class. A stilled back could be pushed into the class of involuntary motion. The grid does not prove the rat. It shows how both an omen scholar and a metaphysician can claim Gen without inventing the Chinese.

Joseph Needham spent many exasperated pages on the book in *Science and Civilisation in China*. He called it a "pseudo-science" that had damaged real Chinese science for centuries by forcing exact observations into the "cosmic filing-system" of vague hexagram categories. On those terms Hexagram 52 is a wide drawer later readers mistook for depth. The width is real. Yoga and sacrifice both fit. Needham wanted the drawer narrowed. The book declines.

The Edition That Made the Book Famous, and the Two Editions That Split Again

Celebrity begins with Richard Wilhelm's German of 1924, and especially with the English Cary F. Baynes issued in 1950. The text left the specialist shelf. Wilhelm, too, had mission work behind him in China. Where Legge resisted, Wilhelm believed. He was ardent about the Wisdom of the East and took China as its wisest case. Western life, in his view, suffered "relentless mechanization and rationalization," and needed an "Eastern adhesion to a natural profundity of soul." He hoped to "join hands in mutual completion," to reach the "common foundations of humankind," and to "find a core in the innermost depth of the humane, from where we can tackle…the shaping of life." That hunt, more than any grammatical note, is why Keeping Still grew nerves and an ego. He wanted a core that could reshape a life.

He relied on late Song Neo-Confucian commentary, and he generalized specifically Chinese references so the sense could travel. The German footnotes recorded "parallels" to Goethe, Kant, the German Romantics, and the Bible; the English edition dropped them. The text appeared twice, oddly, first with short commentaries and then with longer ones. The commentaries mixed Chinese works with Wilhelm's own meditations and did not keep them apart. Needham put the edition in the "Department of Utter Confusion" and remarked that Wilhelm "seems to be the only person…who knew what it was all about." If only one person knows, the knowledge is his, not the book's.

Carl Jung supplied the introduction. Wilhelm thought him "in touch with the findings of the East [and] in accordance with the views of the oldest Chinese wisdom," in part because the *animus* and the *anima* could be paired with *yin* and *yang*. One claim of Jung's is now an embarrassment, and it should stay visible: "It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese have never developed what we call science." What was unexpected, at the time, was his stress on chance — or synchronicity, the Jungian, metaphysical version of chance — as the ruling principle of a sacred book. True believers reject the stress. They insist the *I Ching* does not operate on chance at all. Translation cannot settle that. It can show that the fight is about the rite, not about the word Gen. Chance or spirit, you still must choose between cleave and Keeping Still.

Through the 1950s and 1960s the Wilhelm/Baynes Bollingen volume was a sensation. Poems drew on its wording from Octavio Paz, Allen Ginsberg, Jorge Luis Borges, and Charles Olson, among others. Fritjof Capra carried the book into *The Tao of Physics* while talking about quantum mechanics. Terence McKenna heard its geometry echoing the "chemical waves" hallucinogens make. Some readers treated the broken and solid lines as an early sketch of the computer. Novels by Philip K. Dick and by Raymond Queneau used the sixty-four as a scaffold. Jackson Mac Low and John Cage built elaborate procedures so the figures would generate poems or music. Cage's machines are a kind of candor: he did not pretend one sentence was waiting to be recovered.

Avant-gardists who preferred process to a finished object, and readers who disliked authority, both found it thrilling. It came from an East many in the West had already cast as the opposite of their own soulless civilization, and it carried what Wilhelm called "the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years." No author, no first or last page, no exotic gods, no priests, no professional diviner. A self-help book for people who would never be caught reading one, plus a glimpse of a private future. Bob Dylan called it "the only thing that is amazingly true." Set beside Giles's "apparent gibberish," that is the Western reception in two breaths.

Minford's Library and Hinton's Two Pages, Already Arguing Inside Gen

The two latest translations could hardly be less alike, and together they form a *yin* and a *yang*. Both have already appeared inside Gen. The books around those choices are the rest of the split.

John Minford's best-known labor is the magnificent five-volume English of *The Story of the Stone*, or *The Dream of the Red Chamber*, widely taken as the greatest Chinese novel, a project the late David Hawkes began. Minford's *I Ching* is obviously many years of study. It runs over 800 pages, much of the type small, and it is encyclopedic on purpose. He prints two complete translations. The Bronze Age Oracle rebuilds the Zhou text from before the Confucian commentaries. The Book of Wisdom gives the text as later centuries explained it. Each portion of each hexagram comes with an exegesis digesting historical commentaries and earlier translators, plus Minford's own links to Chinese poetry, art, ritual, history, philosophy, and mythology. The learning is almost a microcosm of Chinese civilization, which is how the *I Ching* itself used to be described. Mountain in one half and Tending in the other are not a slip. The double book is the point.

David Hinton belongs with Arthur Waley and Burton Watson in a thin company: classical scholars who also live inside contemporary writing in English. Watson is older by a generation. Over the past fifty years the two Americans are surely the main translators of classical Chinese poetry and philosophy. Both have published heavily, and both changed how those poems can sound in English. Hinton's *I Ching* invents just as freely, and it stays short. Two pages per hexagram. A few cuts from the original Ten Wings. Past a brief introduction, no commentary of his own. Read it straight through, as if it were recent poetry, but it is still a translation, not an "imitation" and not a postmodern elaboration. Open it anywhere, too, the way one opens E. M. Cioran or Elias Canetti. Two pages leave no space for spinal nerves or for a warning to Beware. Brevity is the claim.

He follows a Taoist or Ch'an (Zen) reading and ignores the Confucian ethical and political uses. The reader is placed inside the Tao of nature. The cryptic Judgments become "strategies…to tease the mind outside workaday assumptions and linguistic structures, outside the limitations of identity." That is the reverse of Wilhelm's Jungian self-realization: a realization of selflessness. It also rests on a belief that archaic Chinese life, closer to the land and to land that still held a great deal of wilderness, was less estranged from nature's Tao. "Expect nothing from your life" is that belief turned into a command, not Wang Bi's picture of two people, backs turned, each practicing self-restraint.

Sometimes he translates the oldest characters as pictures, a technique Ezra Pound used first in his idiosyncratic version of the earliest poetry anthology, the *Book of Songs*, which he titled *The Confucian Odes*. Hinton does not do it often. Hexagram 32, usually Endurance, Duration, or Perseverance, becomes "Moondrift Constancy," because he reads a half-moon fixed between a line above and a line below. The character for Observation becomes "Heron's-Eye Gaze," a heron plus an eye, on the ground that nothing watches more closely than a waterbird. Sinologists will be scandalized. The scandal is Gen's scandal in a smaller coat: the inherited concept, or the picture still visible in the graph. Mountain versus Stillness is the mild form. Moondrift Constancy versus Perseverance is the same dilemma with the mildness removed.

A Bronze Mirror That Keeps Its Patina

It is tempting to call the *I Ching* a mirror of whatever the reader brought in. The image is nearly right, and the object corrects it. Shang bronze mirrors do not behave like glass. Under a dark blue-green patina they reflect nothing.

Quiet brings Hinton's courtyard. A stronger master brings Wilhelm's unrescued leader. Illness brings thin calves. Sacrifice brings cleave or gnawing. The patina returns the cloth, not the face. Minford's last talk with David Hawkes caught the dying scholar saying: "Be sure to let your readers know that every sentence can be read in an almost infinite number of ways! That is the secret of the book. No one will ever know what it really means!" Seven Englishes for Gen are not infinity. They are already too many for a book asked to underwrite reality. The Ten Wings, Wang Bi, the Song commentators, and the choice to stop at two pages per hexagram are all changes. None is the last.

Casting It Yourself, After You Have Watched the Translators Disagree

The row of versions teaches one thing: the *I Ching* has no single settled meaning. A reader brings a question, and the answer follows the angle that question and that translation have already opened. Keeping Still sounds like timing and a quieted ego. Gnawing sounds like an offering and an absent host. Minford may hand you both. The coins will not choose.

The old rite makes the limit concrete. Ask something open. Toss three coins across six tosses. Build from the bottom line upward. Changing lines carry the sharpest counsel and flip into a relating hexagram that shows where the situation is headed. The arithmetic can yield Gen or another of the sixty-four. It cannot yield an English title. The title arrives when a particular book is opened.

Real coins and a notebook will do, if you then read more than one English of the figure that appears. Or let a page count. A free online I Ching reading with three coins works the sums, finds the wording, and lays out the primary hexagram, every changing line, and the relating figure. No account is required, and the reading stays in the browser. Handing off the arithmetic is a small shift in labor, like the older shift from a tortoise shell, which needed an expert, to three coins, which did not. Fifty yarrow stalks remain for anyone who wants the slow count. Neither page nor coins will prefer Keeping Still to cleave, Tending to gnawing, or Mountain to Stillness and Restraint.

If the figure is Hexagram 52, the comparison has returned to its start. Two mountains, a back, a courtyard where someone is not seen. After that, the English you trust decides whether you keep still, restrain yourself, tend weak flesh, spare the marrow, or read teeth as news from the dead. How those Englishes piled up is mapped in Eliot Weinberger's essay for The New York Review of Books, dated 2016-02-25. The map gives Gen no final name. Hawkes, dying, told Minford that no one ever would. The patina stays. Under it the lines are still six lines, and they can still be cast.