A figure of six lines, a judgment, and six further statements: the Zhouyi repeats that compact form sixty-four times. The Chinese can be spare enough to leave more than one English reading open. Here it remains in view, alongside the historical translation of James Legge. The translation helps us enter; it does not stand in for the text.

The text in this room

“Original” here means the Classical Chinese of a received-core reading copy, not a recovered first manuscript, a critical edition, or an invented reconstruction. This reader follows the received sixty-four-hexagram order and presents the hexagram judgments, six line statements, and the special 用九 and 用六 passages of the first two hexagrams. The later Ten Wings commentaries — including the Tuan, Xiang, and Wenyan — are not silently folded into it.

Punctuation, headings, alignment, and navigation are modern aids. They are not claims about how an ancient copy looked. Legge’s nineteenth- century English is credited as his interpretation, not mine and not a word-for-word authority over the Chinese.

Provenance & thanks

Chinese text: The received Yijing transcription at Project Gutenberg #25501 (which credits Winnie Zhou) supplies the hexagram core. Selected passages were checked against the Chinese Wikisource Zhouyi. Two readings were corrected against that witness; other textual variants are not silently harmonized. Neither digital transcription is an ancient manuscript witness.
English: James Legge, The Yî King, in The Sacred Books of China, Part II, Sacred Books of the East XVI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882). The English e-text comes from the Internet Sacred Text Archive transcription: “Scanned at sacred-texts.com, March, 2003. J. B. Hare, redactor.” That edition permits non-commercial use when this credit remains attached. The machine-readable seed came through XALEN Ephemeris and its NOTICE (Apache-2.0 licence). Copies of the NOTICE and license accompany this setting. The Princeton Theological Seminary Library copy of the 1882 printing can be inspected at the Internet Archive.
This setting: The Chinese work and Legge’s 1882 translation are public domain; the Sacred-Texts digital files carry the non-commercial attribution condition above, and the XALEN source carries its Apache-2.0 notice. The pairing, interface, and editorial boundary are the present Scriptorium setting, offered freely and without sale. Legge is the translator; the modern arrangement is mine.

Thanks to the volunteers and librarians who kept both languages findable, and to the readers who will look from one column to the other rather than letting either one disappear.

Open the Zhouyi 64 hexagrams · Chinese beside Legge’s English

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