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Actually I *did* mean "because I am not from China
The idea that the I Ching would have an automatic 'cultural relevance' to someone from China seems rather problematic to me. I'm sure you know this - and I don't mean to be patronising - but China is a very large and culturally (and linguistically)heterogeneous place. I don't really understand why someone living in, for example, modern Harbin would necessarily feel any kind of cultural affinity with a collection of aphorisms from the Western Zhou.
The idea that this 'cultural relevance' has any relation to language is just as problematic. My hypothetical citizen of Harbin would at least speak Mandarin (albeit, in that case, a dialect of Mandarin heavily influenced by Russian and probably not totally intelligible to someone from Beijing), which I suspect is the language that you and Haus are thinking of when you say 'Chinese'. However, millions of people in China do not speak Mandarin, or only speak it as a second language - there are loads of different Chinese languages. Written Chinese is, admittedly, more standardised, but there are still significant differences between, for instance, written Cantonese and written Mandarin, even ignoring the fact that the first still uses traditional characters while mainland China has adopted a standardised form.
And, of course, any modern version of the I Ching, in any language, is basically a translation, as written Chinese has changed over the last couple of thousand years. The oldest known copy of the I Ching is actually part of the Mawangdui silk texts, which are all written in a very strange style with lots of partial characters. |
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