“Production and reproduction is what is called change”
I Ching“Production and reproduction is what is called change” is the Great Treatise’s compact definition of change as continuing generation and succession. The translator applies it both to the Yî as a classic and to the changing lines used in divination, while cautioning against turning its account of nature and experience into a later theory of cosmic origins.
The phrase and its two applications
The translator notes that the character Yî, which gives the classic its name, does not appear in the Text or the first two Appendixes, but occurs nearly fifty times in the Great Treatise. It commonly designates the classic itself, as in Yî King or Yî Shû, but it also refers to changes in the lines of the figures produced through divinatory manipulation, apart from any oracle spoken by King Wen or his son. The phrase therefore speaks to both a book and a system: the received text and the operations through which its figures change.
The definition, “Production and reproduction is what is called (the process of) change,” makes succession the point. The translator illustrates it through replacement: in nature, what displaces something else takes its place; in the figures, strong and weak lines push one another out. The line-patterns and external phenomena are thus presented by the Great Treatise as changing in correspondence, not as isolated symbols with fixed meanings.
Figures, interpretation, and divination
The classic’s Text consists, in the translator’s account, of sixty-four brief, enigmatic essays on chiefly moral, social, and political themes, each based on a six-line figure. King Wen interprets each hexagram as a whole, indicating its significance and sometimes whether action in the circumstances it symbolizes will be fortunate or unlucky. The Duke of Zhou then interprets its lines in sequence from the bottom upward, using emblematic illustrations and similar indications of fortune. The interpretation of the whole is meant to accord with the combined significance of the six lines.
Those meanings are not interchangeable across every figure. The translator stresses that interpretation depends on the hexagram’s name and the condition it represents, as well as the positions and qualities of its lines. The second and fifth positions, the middle lines of the two trigrams, carry particular force: when their line qualities complement one another, the fifth may represent a sovereign or commander and the second an able minister or officer, whose mutual action can bring a beneficial result. The phrase about change belongs to this layered system of figure, position, and interpretation, rather than serving as a free-standing formula for predicting events.
Divination, as the translator describes it, was intended to assess whether a contemplated scheme or set of circumstances would turn out fortunately or unfavorably, not to disclose future events absolutely. The Great Treatise’s procedure uses forty-nine stalks, manipulated three times for each line; eighteen manipulations produce a hexagram. Odd and even numbers determine strong or weak lines, with the emblematic numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 involved in forming the figures. Once formed, the hexagram is interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line sentences. Numbers assist the construction of the figure; in the translator’s reading, they are not an independent substance or the material cause of all things.
The translator’s boundary against later cosmology
The Great Treatise associates changes in the figures with changes in the external world, claiming that the Yî accords with Heaven and Earth and displays their course without confusion. The translator presents this as the treatise’s striking assertion of correspondence. He nevertheless resists reading it as a developed cosmology: in his view, the author’s subject is the changing phenomena of nature and human experience, not creation or a primordial substance that alternately expands and contracts as yang and yin.
He argues that the doctrine of primary matter was not fully developed in the Confucian school until the Song period, more than a thousand years after the Yî had been completed. To find that later doctrine already in the Great Treatise, he warns, is to put the last first. The phrase about production and reproduction can therefore be read as an account of ongoing change without making it a claim that the text contains a fully formed theory of cosmic origins.
Translation as participation in thought
The same concern with change and relation informs the translator’s method. His first translation, made in 1854, tried to reproduce the Chinese concision too closely and became difficult to understand, much as he considered the earlier Latin version by P. Regis and his coadjutors nearly unintelligible. He concluded that a literal rendering was futile because Chinese written characters, in his account, symbolize ideas rather than represent words, and their composition presents what the writer thinks rather than simply reproducing what the writer would say.
He therefore describes translation as bringing the translator’s mind into relation with the author’s and then expressing the perceived ideas in the clearest language available. This freedom is bounded: the aim remains to convey the original meaning as exactly and concisely as possible, adding occasional words where English needs what the original leaves implicit. He generally marks such additions with parentheses. The method echoes the Great Treatise’s emphasis on relation and correspondence, but it does not license arbitrary interpretation; where readers find the hexagram explanations unconvincing, he assigns responsibility to the original rather than claiming that translation can remove every difficulty.
