Bent Nielsen Companion to Yi jing Numerology and Cosmology

Annotation

Translations of the Yi jing into western languages have been biased towards the yili ('meaning and pattern') tradition, whereas studies of the xiangshu ('image and number') tradition - which takes as its point of departure the imagery and numerology associated with divination and its hexagrams, trigrams, lines, and related charts and diagrams - has remained relatively unexplored. This major new reference work is organised as a Chinese-English encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically according to the pinyin romanisation, with Chinese characters appended. A character index as well as an English index is included. The entries are of two kinds: technical terms and various other concepts related to the 'image and number' tradition, and bio-bibliographical information on Chinese Yi jing scholars. Each entry in the former category has a brief explanation that includes references to the origins of the term, cross-references, and a reference to an entry giving a more comprehensive treatment of the subject.