Throughout China’s long and provocative history, The Book of Changes (Yi Jing) has occupied pride of place. It is named first among the five Classics - the volumes of Changes, Histories, Poems and Songs, Rites, and Spring and Autumn Annals, which survived the literary desolation surrounding the burning of the books in 220 BC.
The Book of Changes has always been a foundation text for Daoist and Confucian alike and assumed canonical importance during the Song (960-1279 AD) - with its philosophies of Yin and Yang and the Great Unity being a corner-stone for the amalgam of Neo-confucianism which sustained China thereafter. This was the official imperial ‘line’ right up until the dissolution of the Empire a hundred years ago.

This new translation and commentary, aims to show the intimate structure and philosophy of the Chinese mind. A book which transforms your thinking into yin-yang ways of thought, resonance, stimulus, association and blind alley-ways, as you ponder the line-texts and commentaries.

About the author

Richard Bertschinger is a translator from the classical Chinese of the The Golden Needle, (Churchill Livingstone 1991) also The Secret of Everlasting Life, (Element 1994), early alchemical and medical texts. He taught ten years at Yeovil College - Tai-chi, massage and relaxation. He has been in acupuncture practice twenty-five years with Jane Robinson and Lesley Jenkins in Yeovil. He studied Tai-chi, meditation and translation with Mr Gia-fu Feng, American-Chinese Taoist teacher until his death in 1986, also learning his acupuncture from Jack Worsley at Leamington Spa, and working as a primary school teacher in the UK and in Gestalt Therapy in the USA. A first degree in philosophy, he also worked ten years at Musgrove Park Hospital Taunton, in the NHS Pain Clinic promoting Traditional Acupuncture.