The Dilemma Facing Contemporary Research in the Yijing

Even someone who is not knowledgeable about the study of the Yijing (Classic of change) will probably not deny that the study of the Yijing has today once more become a prominent field of scholarship. Today, in many bookstores and bookselling stalls dotting the streets in all the cities throughout the country, we can easily find books relating to the study of the Yijing sitting side by side with books that deal with such subjects as sexual physiology and psychology, or even "literary" magazines and periodicals that are highly and explicitly sexual or "erotic" in their contents and descriptions. This is a fact that those of us who are used to discussing the Yijing as some lofty and high-brow philosophy may not wish to acknowledge, but it is also something we simply cannot deny or dismiss out of hand. Within the last decade, our country's publishers, large and small, have published and republished thirty to forty works on the study of the Yijing, and two to three hundred articles on the subject have been pu...