What public domain translations and commentaries are available?

The translation from Chinese into English by James Legge (1815 – 1897), The Yî King (1882) as published in Sacred Books of the East, vol. XVI. (2nd edition 1899) is in the public domain and available via archive.org. It appears to be the only significant English translation that is currently in the public domain. There is a parallel Chinese/English edition 《易經 - Yi Jing》 hosted at the Chinese Text Project using the Legge translation.

The German translation and commentary by Richard Wilhelm (1873 – 1930), I Ging Das Buch der Wandlungen (1924) is in the public domain and available via Projekt Gutenberg. Wilhelm’s translation from Chinese into German was translated into English as The I Ching or Book of Changes (1950) by Cary Baynes (1883 – 1977) and should enter the public domain in 2045 (95 years after publication or possibly earlier?)

Wilhelm’s translation has provided the basis for translation into several other European languages. Which, if any, of these are in the public domain?

There are other significant methods which have not (yet) been implemented, in particular the “Ancient“ (Neo-Confucian reconstruction) and “Modified” methods of casting yarrow stalks described by Huang and some of the more idiosyncratic variants that have appeared during the 20th Century CE.

For inclusion into MELPA we need to agree on a name (thread). Naming things is hard. The obvious name for this package would be "I Ching" but there is another version in the emacswiki and emacsattic (for “Obsolete Emacs packages”) with the same name and prefix (see previous discussion about moving, removing and namespaces)

The preferred method can be set or customized via the variable i-ching-divination-method

Reading this from the README, I understand it to mean that I can set i-ching-divination-method and it should be automatically used when calling i-ching-query or i-ching-cast or similar functions, if I do not specify a method. Instead, i-ching-divination-method is ignored and i-ching-cast uses i-ching--random-number instead (which never returns changing lines, which is what led me to figuring this out).

Requested: if no optional method param is passed, use method specified by i-ching-divination-method as default.

Check randomness sources & result ranges (discussion at #9) and simplify i-ching-random

In order to consult other translations, interpretations and commentaries, it could be useful to separate the descriptions from the logic. Given the structure of the I Ching and the Ten Wings, a machine readable document or collection of documents could follow...

some online sources

• https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/autoren/namen/wilhelm.html
• https://archive.org/details/sacredbooksofchi16conf
• http://jamesdekorne.com/GBCh/GBCh.htm
• https://ctext.org/book-of-changes/yi-jing
• https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/I_Ching