I Ching: The Book of Changes by Anonymous (Chinese Classical)
Published -800 · 95,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Classic Literature, Religion
How hard is I Ching: The Book of Changes to read?
I Ching: The Book of Changes scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 86 out of 100
- Archaic oracle language whose terms — the great man, the great water, no blame, the superior man — are technical, disputed, and untranslatable with confidence.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Fragmentary formulaic statements with no connectives, layered under commentary written a thousand years later in a different idiom.
- Abstraction: 90 out of 100
- A general system of situation, correlation and change that never anchors itself to a single concrete case.
- Information density: 84 out of 100
- Sixty-four figures, three hundred and eighty-four line statements, and a commentary apparatus that cross-references all of it.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- There is no narrator and no argument, only pronouncements whose application the reader must supply, which is the point of the book.
- Symbolic density: 94 out of 100
- Every element is symbolic by construction — trigrams stand for thunder, wind, mountain, lake, and their combinations are the entire semantic content.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- The text does not hold a position to be ironic about; the gap is between the reader's question and the answer received.
- Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100
- Judgements are conditional and reversible by design, and the most favourable hexagrams carry warnings inside them.
- Structural complexity: 92 out of 100
- A non-linear reference work of layered texts from different centuries, meant to be consulted by generated coordinates rather than read from front to back.
How I Ching: The Book of Changes is regarded
I Ching: The Book of Changes holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.