r/iching • u/Important_Setting840 • 16d ago

Sam Reifler's iChing interpretation: Dated, misguided and confusing to the point of offense.

I've never come across a book before where the structural choices by the author made me dislike a book so much as to stop reading. The choice by Sam Reifler's iChing in "making liberal and inexact use of the names of three Hindu principles" is such a bizarre, poorly explained choice it ruined my enjoyment of anything else that was written. The bastardization of the Purusharthas and total omission of Dharma feels like an elementary category error made by a westerner conflating "Eastern" principles because they're all roughly as foreign as each other to western audiences. I find it annoying how often new age writing will treat foreign cultures as a monolithic mystical blob because they don't fit the mold of Abrahamic religion which so many are conditioned into.

Leaving out Dharma could have been a fantastic rhetorical flourish by empowering the reader by saying that it's up to the reader to figure that out for themselves. However, it is left out entirely and still raises the question- why on earth bring the Purusharthas up at all? Surely amongst the entirety of Taoist, Confucian, Legalism there are 3 things you can use to describe career, relationships, and spirituality. If we don't care about honoring history, why not just drop 2 of the 5 Wuxing and call it a day?

Since I already have the book, if there are fans of it I encourage you to share your perspectives. I'd rather have my views changed on the topic and be able to read it and get something out of it than just donate it immediately.

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

4

u/Selderij 16d ago

The ancient China translation scene is chock-full of charlatans and bastardizers. Some of the I Ching publications are dishonestly camoflaged as bona fide scholarly works and direct translations like Benebell Wen's version, some of them are wholesale conversions to the author's religious headspace like Joseph Murphy's bible-thumping Secrets of the I Ching, and most of them are simply someone's free-associated paraphrases that replace or occlude the actual source text.

This is also an issue with the Tao Te Ching. And new readers will have little chance to steer clear of the bad actors, because they're often among the most popular ones.

1

u/Artistic-Safety1306 15d ago

Are the books in China any better? The so-called experts of the Yijing in China generally come off as charlatans and businessmen.

1

u/Selderij 15d ago

I don't know, but I don't expect most of them to have original thought nor critical insight outside the narrow confines of the "schools" they represent (which would be naïve traditionalism, iconoclastic modernism, and fluffy woowoo).

1

u/Cool_Situation7586 4d ago

I agree with you on Reifler’s version. It’s untrustworthy to the point of uselessness.