A Note on This Book
This online book,Taixuanjing for Today, is a draft (v0.9) of the book of the same title by Joe Perez. The print edition, forthcoming, will offer the final text, expanded commentary, essays, and full instructions for casting the oracle yourself.
These are original poetic renderings made from the Chinese of the Taixuanjing 太玄經, composed by Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE – 18 CE) as a deliberate counterpart to the Yijing. They are not a scholarly translation, and readers who want one should go to Michael Nylan’s complete rendering, The Canon of Supreme Mystery (SUNY Press, 1993). Derek Walters’s The T’ai Hsüan Ching: The Hidden Classic (Aquarian Press, 1983) is also available, and may be useful as a companion when you are actually casting rather than reading.
The Taixuanjing replaces the Yijing’s binary line with a ternary one. Each figure has four positions, and each position takes one of three line types — unbroken, once-broken, twice-broken — giving eighty-one figures rather than sixty-four. Each figure carries a head text and nine appraisals, seven hundred and twenty-nine in all, which together with two supernumerary appraisals map onto the days and nights of the solar year.
Every appraisal falls on either day or night. The polarity alternates by figure: in the odd-numbered figures the odd appraisals are day, and in the even-numbered figures they are night. A day position is not reliably favorable and a night position is not reliably ill — the first figure ends on a day position that topples — but the alternation is regular, and learning to feel it is part of learning to read the book.
The nine appraisals also run an arc. Positions one to three are the phase of thought, four to six of fortune, seven to nine of reckoning; and within each triad, first, middle and last. Five is the center of the whole. Everything from five downward is waxing and everything above it waning.
The commentary on each part interprets the glyph and its appraisal as an oracular proclamation suitable for a contemporary audience. It is intended to introduce the Taixuanjing to readers who are more concerned with practical uses rather than fidelity to historically nuanced interpretations. I hope you will use this text for useful readings suitable for divination and contemplation.
Note: AI tools were used to assist in the translation and creation of this book.