Yijing (I Ching) Chinese/English Dictionary with Concordance and Translation

by Daniel Claudio Bernardo

This Chinese/English YiJing dictionary includes all Chinese characters found in the YiJing as well as a translation and a concordance. Both the traditional explanations for the character's meanings and the findings of the modern research on oracle bones characters are covered. 993 Chinese characters are explained in detail and in many cases not only the traditional but also archaic representations are shown to clarify the character's original significance. Multi-character words are covered as well, to help understand some YiJing expressions. Includes all characters found in The Judgment, The Lines and The Image.

316 pages, Hardcover

First published August 8, 2012

Reviews

[Daniel Bernardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book includes a YiJing translation, but is a bare bones one.
The purpose of the translation is to act like an index to the dictionary.

For example, the hexagram 1:

Judgment
qian2
3233
乾
yuan2
7707
元
heng1
2099
亨
li4
3867
利
zhen1
0346
貞
The Creative. Outstanding success. The determination is favorable

As you can see the translation is terse and succinct, without comments.
Above the translation you can see (I could not reproduce the exact layout here) the Chinese ideograms, its PinYin spelling, and its numbers. The number of the characters allow locating them in the dictionary easily. Each character is thoroughly explained.
For example, qian2, number 3233:

This character has different meanings, depending on its pronunciation:
quian2: spirit power, creative, force, dynamic, strong, vigor, constant, heaven, heavenly generative principle (male), father, sovereign, power above the human, yang power, active, vigorous appearance (1.0, 1.3).
It is the character of the trigram: The Creative.
See 9000: The Eight Trigrams.
Its duplication in 1.3 is usually interpreted as “diligent, vigorous”, although some say it means “sad and fearful”.
gan1: dry, dried, sun dried, to make extremely dry, all gone, exhausted (21.4, 21.5).
Notice that both meanings are related, the Sun is the ultimate yang; it is both powerful and dynamic.

This dictionary is very useful for hardcore YiJing buffs. Indeed, you could use it to make your own YiJing translation.
It is not useful for divination.
It has a very good Concordance at the end, that shows all places where every character appears in the YiJing.
It only covers the Judgment, Image and the Lines.