Library

No. 131

Kinh Dịch: Cấu Hình Tư Tưởng Trung Quốc

Dương Ngọc Dũng & Lê Anh Minh

Philosophy & PsychologyVietnamese~420 min original read

This is a scholarly study of the *Kinh Dịch* (I Ching / Classic of Changes) written for a Vietnamese academic readership by two Vietnamese scholars of Chinese thought. Rather than functioning as a how-to divination manual, the book treats the Kinh Dịch as a philosophical and civilizational document: it asks how a text built from sixty-four hexagrams, broken and unbroken lines, and layered commentary came to shape the deep grammar of Chinese thought — its view of change, cosmology, ethics, and statecraft — across more than two thousand years.

The authors trace the book's layered authorship: the archaic divinatory core attributed to legendary or semi-legendary figures, the addition of the line and hexagram judgments, and the later "Ten Wings" commentarial layer associated with the Confucian tradition, which reframed a divination manual as a philosophical cosmology. A central concern of the book is showing how the core intuition of the Kinh Dịch — that reality is constituted by continuous change (dịch) organized around the interplay of yin and yang — became a template underlying not just Confucian and Taoist philosophy but also Chinese medicine, political theory, and aesthetics.

The book also situates the Kinh Dịch comparatively, discussing how Chinese cosmological thinking organized around correlative pairs and cyclical transformation differs from more linear or substance-based frameworks in Western philosophy, and what this means for reading Chinese intellectual history on its own terms rather than through borrowed Western categories.

**A note on the depth of this entry:** this is a dense, specialist academic text, and I do not have reliable detailed knowledge of its exact chapter-by-chapter argument, its specific case studies, or its named analytical frameworks (if it has any beyond standard I Ching terminology like yin/yang, the trigrams, and the Ten Wings). I have kept the sections and other content below to what I can respectfully generalize about the book's known subject and approach, and have not invented a chapter list, named frameworks, or quotes I cannot verify. This entry is thinner than the ones for better-known titles in this batch — that is a deliberate choice over inventing plausible-sounding detail.

Who This Is For

Readers with a genuine interest in Chinese philosophy or intellectual history who want a scholarly grounding in the Kinh Dịch, not a quick divination guide.

When To Read This

Best approached slowly, alongside primary Kinh Dịch translations, rather than as a single fast read.