The Yi jing
Reading assignment: The Yi jing
The goal of today's class will be to look directly at one angle of Confucian classicism by examining the Yi jing, or Book of Changes, a concatenation of commentary material surrounding a very old and arcane divination manual. We will discover in the text a highly schematic illustration of the Confucian doctrine of "timeliness," constructed as an analogy with a vision of Nature or the non-human cosmos.