Stephen L. Field

In this exploration of the central Chinese concept of qi, a team of authors trace its role in early texts and contemporary neuroscience to show how it continues to be relevant beyond China. As life-long scholars of qi related practices, Adam Frank, Nancy Chen, and Stephen Field offer new insights into the significance of qi in the current Anthropocene. They connect Daoist studies, Chinese medicine, martial arts, popular culture, and historical phenomenology to examine the experience of qi as part of the natural world, as breathwork, as mind-body connections, and as an increasingly frequent referent in film, comic books, and medicinal products. This interdisciplinary conversation includes explorations of qi in the context of ancient texts, performing arts, medical anthropology, and consciousness studies. Their approach allows them to reveal the fundamental role qi plays in our shared experience of being human–in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the fractured identities with which many of us contend. Covering its earliest inception in the minds of Chinese proto-scientists to its function in our transglobal world, this co-authored work opens up novel ways of studying brains, minds and the spaces we now inhabit.

The Zhouyi, Bronze Age progenitor to the Yijing (I Ching), or Book of Changes, was a divination manual created and utilized by the early rulers of the Zhou dynasty (founded 1046 BCE). This new translation dispenses with 20th century attempts to discredit tradition and endeavors to recover the context of its early Zhou dynasty origins. As such, interpretation of its language is based strictly upon pre-Confucian sources to avoid the anachronistic readings that accrued to the text in its evolution from a book of divination to a book of philosophy. For the first time in the book's translation history, its judgment and line texts have been clearly labeled according to their content - either omen, counsel, or prognostication - in order to clarify their divinatory function. Furthermore, each hexagram is accompanied by a line-by-line commentary providing detailed background for the situations presented in the texts and explicating metaphorical language and technical syntax. The general public will appreciate the narrative cohesion of the commentaries, while the specialist will welcome the appended Chinese text. Finally, the book also provides the reader with explanations of the myth, legend, and history in the formative stages of the Zhouyi's creation and gives comprehensive information on how to cast the oracle and interpret the resulting reading.