Transcultural and Interreligious Encounter: James Legge’s Translation of the Yijing (Book of Changes, 1882)

James Legge (1815–97), arguably the most prominent missionary-sinologist in the 19th century and the founding Professor of Chinese in Oxford in 1876, produced an English translation of the Yijing (Book of Changes), the highly venerated and influential Chinese classic, in 1882. Perceiving the Yijing as a Confucian classic with profound moralistic connotations, Legge even revered it as a “sacred book” containing some divine revelation. He claimed that the Chinese term Shangdi (Supreme Lord) meant “God–our God–the true God”; and that the operations of nature in the various seasons, as denoted by the trigrams, are the operations of Shangdi. This talk examines Legge’s pioneering attempt of introducing and translating the Chinese classic to the West, which engendered profound inter-religious encounters and dialogues between Confucianism and Christianity.

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About the speaker

Prof. John Lai received his DPhil. (Oriental Studies) from Oxford (2005), and is currently Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Fellow of Gale Asia Pacific Digital Humanities at Oxford. His research interests focus on Chinese religion and literature, and Global Yijing (Book of Changes) studies. He has published more than ten books, including Literary Representations of Christianity in Late Qing and Republican China (2019); An Annotated Anthology of the Yijing Commentaries by the Early Qing Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (2020); Global Yijing: Intercultural Encounters with World Religions and Thoughts (2025).