“The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching” by Steve Moore

"The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching" by Steve Moore

"Since the 1960s, interest in the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes, has risen to unprecedented levels in Europe and America. It has gained an enormous popular reputation as a work of divination, a reputation no doubt enhanced by the interest shown in it by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. As a result, translations, popularizations and works of interpretation have flooded onto the market in recent years. It may therefore seem superfluous to add yet another volume to an already expansive literature.

However, this is not another work on divination and is intended for the reader whose interest in the I Ching extends beyond its predictive use. Its subject matter is at once both smaller and larger than the Book of Changes. Smaller, in that it deals primarily with the eight trigrams and their various arrangements, correspondences and uses, rather than with the hexagrams and texts of the book itself. Larger, in that it examines the concepts related to the trigrams in a much broader context: as part of an all-encompassing cosmological and cosmographical system which developed, for the most part, from quite separate roots. It is a system which sought to explain the nature of the world and its processes in terms of the Five Elements, yang and yin, the directions, numbers, the trigrams and so forth, correlated together like interlocking rings."