ABSTRACT
A thinker at the time of the Three Kingdoms, Wang Bi was born in Shangyan in the Kingdom of Wei, in present-day Henan Province. Together with thinkers such as He Yan and Xiahou Xuan, Wang Bi started the trend of 'pure conversation'. The art of 'pure conversation' consisted in expressing the best thought-usually Taoist thoughts-in refined language and terse phraseology. In the essay, Wang Bi reacts against most of the earlier methods, the Ruist method included, of deciphering the meaning of the Zhou Changes. The essay is on the proper way of reading the Zhou Changes. Wang Bi considered those earlier methods intricate and clever, but inadequate. He criticized them for dwelling too much on the images or the words. It should be noted that by the time of Wang Bi, the Zhou Changes was often called the Book of Changes.
