The Forest of Changes was written in the Han Dynasty, 2,000 years ago. The book is an expansion of the Yi Jing, the book that is at the core of Chinese religion and philosophy. This first volume in a series of three serves two purposes. It separates out much of the traveling merchant layer of verses in the Forest. It also is the first attempt in over 1,000 years to repair the Forest of Changes. At some point between its writing and the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 CE), the book was damaged badly, losing many of its original 4096 verses. A later hand or hands duplicated some verses, perhaps adding some other work of their own, leaving us with the current hodgepodge of a text. The trouble with that reconstructed Forest is that it is very negative, and the images are not lined up with the Yi Jing. Although it isn't possible to perfectly align the two works, I have made a first go at it, associating Forest verse to Yi Jing text based on favorability and image to create a working oracle. I have also added an element. The Merchant's and Traveler's Forest of Changes has All Lines Change texts for all the hexagrams rather than just the first two as in the original Yi Jing. This brings the number of texts to 512 and adds an element to use interpreting results. Helpful for making decisions, particularly regarding business and travel obviously, and also an excellent work to use in concert with the Yi Jing from which it developed.Many of the footnotes and glossary from the main edition of the Forest appear here to aid the user in orienting themselves in Han China as seen by a traveling merchant, a place that is distant in both time and culture from today's world.

The Forest of Changes (Jiao Shi Yi Lin) is a Han Dynasty book of divination based on the Yi Jing. It expands the 64 hexagrams of the Yi Jing into 4096 verses, with one verse for each possible combination of two hexagrams. The work was created in the latter part of the Western Han or during the reign of Wang Mang. Much more than a diviners' tool, it contains numerous important insights into early Chinese culture, religion, history, myth and philosophy. This is the first translation of the entire work into a western language.Note! Now available: The Merchant's and Traveler's Forest of Changes. This is the first of three volumes in the Forest of Changes Oracle series, a resyncing of the Forest to the Yi Jing to create a working oracle. See my author's page for details.

A tale of blood and elder magic, where the air flays the mind of its memories, and the trees bleed psychotropic venom. A wanderer scours a sentient forest of flesh and delirium for the only thing that he can still remember: his daughter, exiled from time when a devastating cataclysm doomed the world to an eternity of suffering. The Astral Wanderer and the Forest of Tears is the first book in a series of three, fusing the genres of cosmic horror, dark fantasy, and apocalyptic science fiction with the surreal dread of a twisted fever dream. This book contains scenes of violence that may be unsuitable for some readers.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

This volume examines the rise of the many different trading empires from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.