So, this excursion into traditional Chinese culture (and one of the most important books in Asia) has just gotten through its first quarter.

In a completely arbitrary way, I thought that make make this a good time to break out a whole new translation of the Yijing -- one that's not out on the web because it's not in the public domain. It was only published in 1998. This is the Alfred Huang Complete I Ching.

Where Mr. Wilhelm was a European who was more or less seduced by the wisdom of this foreign book, Master Huang grew up in China. During the Cultural Revolution, studying old classics like this was viewed as a throwback to feudal times. It was counterrevolutionary. It was dangerous. In 1966, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death.

He wound up spending 13 years behind bars -- and spent the whole time practicing his tai chi and meditating on the Yijing. In 1979, he was released, and left China for the States, where he devoted himself to bringing what he saw as the real Classic of Change to the English-speaking world, as a book filled with hope, dense with the open-ended interpretations that classical Chinese language offers, and filled with the wisdom of Confucius' commentaries (which are minimized or overlooked in most English translations). He currently lives in Maui, Hawaii, and I've been told can be quite chatty on the phone, although I've never dared call him.

As a book, I find the most useful thing about Huang's translation the way he starts off each chapter -- each discussion of a gua, a "change" or hexagram -- with a short explanation of the Chinese character for that gua's name. Also, he links each gua with the previous one, so that there's a clear sequence of events. You can see how each change follows from the previous one, and leads smoothly into the next.

So, in the case of Sui, or Following, he sees as a natural extension of the previous hexagram -- Wilhelm called it "enthusiasm," but Huang calls it "delight":

When one is humble and full of delight, surely people will come to follow. Thus, after Delight comes Following.

The character for sui, he explains, has three parts: a representation of footprints, indicating walking, a representation of a king's banners, and a representation of an armed guard -- in other words, a soldier walking behind the pennants. As Huang explains:

This is a picture of the procession of a commander-in-chief with guards accompanying and following.

But he immediately dives into what this picture means in terms of the two trigrams that make up this hexagram -- dui, the lake or marsh, and zhen, the rolling thunder.

The structure of the gua is Lake above, Thunder below. The attribute of Lake is joy and Thunder is movement. Thus, Following is moving forward with joy, or following. How can one influence people to follow?

...In both cases, the yang are underneath the yin elements. Moreover, Lake represents the youngest daughter, and Thunder represents the eldest son. Lake over Thunder symbolizes that the elder complies with the younger.

...Only by behaving humbly can one attract others to follow.

This essential meaning is the same in Huang and Wilhelm, although it *feels* different reading each explanation. Huang and Wilhelm come to their biggest difference in their interpretation of the Image verse.
The translation of the verse is basically the same. This is Wilhelm's:

Thunder in the middle of the lake:
The image of FOLLOWING.
Thus the superior man at nightfall
Goes indoors for rest and recuperation.

And this is Huang's:

Thunder in the midst of Lake.
An image of Following.
In correspondence with this,
The superior person withdraws for rest
When the sun goes down.

Wilhelm interprets the verse as referring to an old folk belief about autumn being the time when electricity goes to sleep inside the earth. I'm not making that up.

...thunder in its winter rest, not thunder in motion. The idea of following in the sense of adaptation to the demands of the time grows out of this image. Thunder in the middle of the lake indicates times of darkness and rest. Similarly, a superior man, after being tirelessly active all day, allows himself rest and recuperation at night. No situation can become favorable until one is able to adapt to it....

This is, of course, good wisdom. But listen! Huang says the same poetic image has to do with the Thunder and Lake trigrams symbolizing something else altogether -- they do pack a lot in those trigrams, don't they? He says Thunder represents the sun rising in the east, and Lake represents the sun setting in the west -- thus, this trigram has sunset following sunrise, time moving in the way it's supposed to move. Things are in order. Not just seasons, but days and nights. Sleep when it's time to sleep. Move when it's time to move. Align yourself with those cycles, and others will come to follow you.

On the whole, and in either translation, this hexagram has a very Ecclesiastes flavor: To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven. Which, despite the Byrds, is a very upright, Confucian kind of lesson indeed.

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_{For the most part, I'm still using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation from the comprehensive Wengu collection or the user-friendly Eclectic Energies site. Feel like going deeper? Check out Hong Kong's Taoist Culture & Information Centre's I Ching page, and the essays & reviews on Ma Xia's Yijing Page}