Every I Ching related publishing project has an angle. TCB I suppose is no exception, except that there are several angles, and they're not easily summarized.
I think what emerges is sensational, but it's not because I have one particular theory I'm putting forward, but because of the interaction of several things results in a
very different view of the I Ching, or I should clarify: the primitive I Ching, the Zhouyi.
When I began looking hard at the original text and comparing the usages of the same word in several different places many things became clearer. At some point the notes I started taking sort of developed critical mass, and detonated into a book project.
There is the translation, which is I think, pretty uncontroversial. Basically everything that I do that is controversial or against the grain, either grammatically reparsing a line, or making a homophone substitution is footnoted and explained.
I tried to lard in as much historical material that was useful, uncontroversial and relevant, because I felt that if my guesses were worthless, then the translation and all the correlations with historical material would continue to be interesting and of lasting worth.
There seemed to me a lot of correlations that were rather simple that could be made that nobody ever did. Such as saying what kind of herbs the herbal references were, and why they might be relevant. Things like what a plow looks like, and why that was relevant to the Great Yü.
A lot of simple and sometimes
lovely fragments of fact and data.
Out there in dissertations, papers and history books. Nobody ever organized into an annotated Zhouyi. Why? Well, because there wasn't an obvious way to market it.
Roughly speaking: what you would have might be too geeky and technical for the mass market (in the eyes of a conventional publisher), and yet too spooky and weird and too much a piece of creative writing to go through the channels as an academic paper.
The only way a book like this would get written and published is if an outsider with a completely bizarre combination of skills as a reader, puzzle solver, literary detective, critic, creative writer and typesetter fell in love with the damn book.
That would be me.
Freeman Crouch, literary detective, at your service.
So what emerges in this reading? What's distinctive about TCB?
I'll try to address that next time.