P. Regis

P. Regis emerges in this commentary as a formidable but imperfect interpreter of the I Ching: his work brought considerable learning and an important historical insight to its Western readership, yet its literal method could leave the text opaque or invite explanations beyond what its words warrant. Across discussions of translation, line symbolism, rank, marriage, and political advancement, the translator treats Regis neither as a reliable authority in every detail nor as a foil to be dismissed, but as a recurring interlocutor whose strengths and overreach expose the difficulties of reading the classic.

A learned predecessor and a literal method

When the translator began his own version in 1854, the only Western translation he knew was that of P. Regis and his collaborators. He regarded them as highly accomplished sinologists and judged their account of the Text as relating to events between the founders of the Zhou dynasty and the last ruler of Shang to be too narrow, but still an approximation of the truth. Their historical framing was therefore valuable even where it did not adequately distinguish the core Text from its Appendixes.

The translator also saw Regis’s Latin version as a warning about excessive literalness. In his first attempt, he had tried to reproduce the Chinese compactly, following Regis’s example, and produced English that was scarcely more intelligible than the Latin. He later argued that Chinese written characters function as symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words, so a translator must convey the author’s thought rather than mechanically reproduce the visible units. That principle does not authorize free invention: the aim remains exact, concise expression, with occasional added words to make implicit connections legible. Regis’s version is important in this account because it embodies the difficulty the translator had to overcome, not because its learning was negligible.

Reading lines through their relations

Regis appears as a participant in debates about how a line’s meaning depends on its position and relation to the rest of a hexagram. The commentary lays out a system in which the fifth and second lines may represent a ruler and an able minister, and their interaction can be auspicious when the lines’ qualities correspond appropriately. This relational method explains why a single line cannot be assigned one fixed human identity across the book: its application changes with the hexagram’s name, subject, and surrounding lines.

In a discussion of the figure’s mother-and-son designations, Regis’s note cautions against searching for a hidden mystery in every label. The translator cites his argument that line names can be assigned to suit the wording and sense of a particular statement, just as the wording is interpreted in light of that sense. The observation supports the translator’s larger account of symbolic reading: the figures provide a structure for interpretation, but their human roles are not a rigid code that always yields the same answer. At the same time, the translator admits that the particular mother-and-son pattern under discussion remains unexplained.

Historical claims and the limits of inference

Regis’s interpretive confidence becomes more problematic when he gives specific historical identities to figures in the Text. In his reading of a passage about a ruler’s sister, he assumes that the sister was given in marriage to the lord of Zhou, later known as King Wen, and identifies her with the celebrated Tai-sze. The translator rejects the identification as contrary to the evidence he can find. He presents an alternative account associated with Khăng-ȝze: the passage may reflect a rule concerning the status of royal daughters when they married the rulers of the states. The dispute shows the difference between using historical context to illuminate the text and treating a suggestive symbol as proof of a particular biography.

Regis’s treatment of a line in Progress likewise illustrates both the usefulness and the risk of historical glossing. The line says that its subject receives a great blessing from the king’s mother. Regis renders the phrase as “the king’s mother” and tries to connect it with prominent women in the history of King Wen’s family. The commentary instead explains that “king’s father” and “king’s mother” were familiar expressions for grandfather and grandmother, and reports that later authorities connect the mother figure with the sovereign occupying the fifth line. On that interpretation, the blessing is the ruler’s eventual recognition of a feudal lord’s worth. Regis’s attempted identifications are evidence of his effort to anchor the symbolism in history, but the translator prefers an explanation grounded in usage and the structure of the hexagram.

Translation choices and interpretive excess

Regis also serves as a foil in the translation of “advancing to the south” in the hexagram Ascending. Some critics, including Zhu Xi, take the phrase simply to mean advancing forward; Regis explains it as a direct route toward auspicious southern regions. The translator records the alternative without treating the geographical reading as necessary, making visible how a compact symbolic phrase can attract both straightforward and elaborated explanations.

A sharper criticism follows Regis’s rendering of the king’s mother in Progress as “Imperial Mother.” His accompanying note imagines a divine consort occupying the fifth line and becoming the great ancestress of humanity. The translator challenges the additions directly, asking why so much should be attached to the written words. The disagreement clarifies the standard by which the commentary judges interpretation: explanatory freedom may make implicit thought intelligible, but it should not turn a line’s symbolic role into an elaborate claim for which the text supplies no support.

The translator’s continuing interlocutor

Regis’s work is not reduced to these disputed cases. In explaining gradual advancement, the translator reproduces a substantial interpretation attributed to Regis: worthy men should be formed through firm virtue and sound instruction, and promoted to public responsibility only after passing gradually through lesser ranks. Regis reinforces the point with an analogy to learning from past experience before judging what lies ahead. The translator then questions whether the lineal figure really yields this interpretation, and finds the explanations he has encountered unsatisfactory. Regis is thus both a source of a coherent political reading and part of a debate over how securely such readings arise from the symbols.

The commentary’s portrait remains deliberately mixed. Regis helps establish the historical approach as a serious, if incomplete, path into the I Ching; his sensitivity to line relationships and political metaphor can clarify the text. But literal translation, conjectural historical identification, and imaginative gloss can also obscure the distinction between what a line says and what a commentator supplies. By returning to Regis across separate hexagrams and interpretive problems, the translator turns a predecessor’s work into a practical test of his own method: enter the author’s thought through the symbolic writing, then express that thought clearly without confusing inference with evidence.