Publisher's Synopsis
The Forest of Changes was written in the Han Dynasty, 2,000 years ago. The book is an expansion of the Yi Jing, the book that is at the core of Chinese religion and philosophy. This first volume in a series of three serves two purposes. It separates out much of the traveling merchant layer of verses in the Forest. It also is the first attempt in over 1,000 years to repair the Forest of Changes. At some point between its writing and the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 CE), the book was damaged badly, losing many of its original 4096 verses. A later hand or hands duplicated some verses, perhaps adding some other work of their own, leaving us with the current hodgepodge of a text. The trouble with that reconstructed Forest is that it is very negative, and the images are not lined up with the Yi Jing. Although it isn't possible to perfectly align the two works, I have made a first go at it, associating Forest verse to Yi Jing text based on favorability and image to create a working oracle. I have also added an element. The Merchant's and Traveler's Forest of Changes has All Lines Change texts for all the hexagrams rather than just the first two as in the original Yi Jing. This brings the number of texts to 512 and adds an element to use interpreting results. Helpful for making decisions, particularly regarding business and travel obviously, and also an excellent work to use in concert with the Yi Jing from which it developed.Many of the footnotes and glossary from the main edition of the Forest appear here to aid the user in orienting themselves in Han China as seen by a traveling merchant, a place that is distant in both time and culture from today's world.
