The Primary Way

Philosophy of Yijing

de Chung-ying Cheng, Robert Cummings Neville

In *The Primary Way*, the distinguished scholar of Chinese philosophy Chung-ying Cheng synthesizes his lifetime of work on the *Yijing*, also known as the *I Ching* or *Book of Changes*. Cheng offers a systematic engagement with the classic Chinese text as a philosophy that is still valuable and relevant today. In contemporary philosophical terms, Cheng has developed the ontological hermeneutics of the *Yijing* as well as its philosophical methodology of symbolic reference in a holistic and onto-generative system of trigrams and hexagrams. The book is organized around eight themes that illuminate Cheng's interpretation of the *Yijing* as a philosophy for creative human action and transformation. He demonstrates how the philosophy of change in the *Yijing* embodies early Chinese ontology, cosmology, epistemology, and virtue ethics in the interpretation of divinatory judgments. Cheng's work shows how the philosophy of change contains a vision of humanity as creatively related to heaven and earth, and how it gives positive meaning to any change as part of a ceaseless creativity. With this understanding, it enables humanity to develop its potential as a partner of heaven and earth.