Yilin glosses · in progress · 26 August 2026
One gloss in four was wrong
We are re-reading every English gloss in the Forest of Changes against the manuscript, one hexagram at a time, before paying to paint any of them. Nineteen of sixty-four are done. The correction rate is about one in four, and it is not falling.
This is a field report from work still underway. Nineteen hexagrams of sixty-four had been re-read when this was written. Counts here are dated; the rate is the finding. The corrections are our own reading, unreviewed by a classicist — a strong draft, not settled scholarship.
The Yilin is 4,096 short oracle poems, one for every pairing of the I-Ching's sixty-four hexagrams. Each carries an English gloss. Each gloss produces an image prompt, and each prompt produces a painting that costs money to make:
verse → gloss → prompt → image
Only the last arrow costs anything. Everything upstream of it is text, and text can be fixed for free — which is the entire argument for doing this now. Seven hundred and seventy-six paintings are sitting unrendered while the English gets settled, because a painting made from a mistranslated line is a mistake you have bought.
There were two ways for a gloss to be wrong, and only one of them was visible. When we replaced the digital text with an eighteenth-century manuscript, thousands of readings changed underneath their translations. That class is easy: each gloss is stamped with a hash of the verse it was written against, so when the verse moves the stamp stops matching and a script can list every casualty.
The other class has no signature at all. A gloss that was wrong the day it was written is fluent English, correctly stamped, and passes every automated check in the repository. Nothing finds it but a reader. Nineteen hexagrams in, that reader has changed 354 of 1,216 glosses.
What “wrong” turned out to mean
Not clumsiness. Almost none of the corrections were about style. They fall into a small number of classes, and each one is a different way of producing confident, readable, wrong English.
1 · The error that copied itself
The Yilin repeats. A verse can appear in six places, and a misunderstanding at one occurrence is usually a misunderstanding at all six — which makes this the most valuable class to catch and the most expensive to miss.
烏升鵲舉，照臨東海。尨降庭堅，為陶叔後。封於蓼丘，履祿綏厚。
Pang descended and Tingjian arose, becoming the ancestor of the Tao clan; enfeoffed at Liao and Lu…
Pangjiang and Tingjian became the heirs of Uncle Tao; enfeoffed at Liaoqiu…
尨降 and 庭堅 are two of the 八愷, the eight harmonious ones of the Zuo Commentary; 庭堅 is the courtesy name of 皋陶, the legendary judge. They are never separated in this corpus, and they are always followed by 為陶叔後 — became the heirs of Uncle Tao — which only parses if they are people who can have descendants. One place-name, 蓼丘, was also being split into two invented ones.
The pair appears six times. Four of the six had turned 尨降 into an animal — a shaggy hound descends, a shaggy beast comes down. One had it right all along, which is what made the other five findable:
入村既登，以成嘉功。尨降庭堅，國無災凶。
Mang Jiang and Ting Jian — the state has no calamity, no ruin.
Mang Jiang and Ting Jian — the state has no calamity, no ruin.
Unchanged, because it was already correct. Comparing a line against its own repetitions elsewhere is the single most productive move available, and it costs nothing: the corpus is its own control group.
烏飛鵲舉，照臨東海。尨降庭堅，為陶叔後。圭析英雄，履福綏厚。
A shaggy hound descends at Tingjian, to become the ancestor of Lord Taoshu.
— still carried on the worklist, not yet rewritten.
Live, in the app, as this is published. It is on the ledger and it will be fixed in its own batch. Showing it uncorrected is more honest than showing only the ones already cleaned up, and it is a fair picture of what an in-progress corpus looks like.
2 · A gloss reading its neighbour's page
The same repetition that makes errors findable is also the way new ones get in. Two verses can be nearly identical and differ in one character, and after reading four siblings it is very easy to translate what they say instead of what this page says.
白龍黑虎，起伏俱怒。期戰盤空，蚩尤敗走，死於魚首。
Chi You flees in defeat, slain at Lu Shou.
Chi You is beaten and flees, and dies at Fish Head.
Its sibling 13-8 ends 死於魯首, Lushou. This page ends 死於魚首 — Fish Head. The gloss had quietly adopted the neighbour's place-name, and nothing downstream could have told the difference.
桃鵲竊脂，來於小枝。搖動不安，為風所吹。
A sparrow pilfers grease, nesting on a slender branch.
The peach-sparrow, the grease-thief, comes to a slender branch.
Four siblings read 巢於小枝, nesting on. This one reads 來於小枝, comes to. The bird was given a nest it does not have, by the same mechanism, in the opposite direction.
Which produced the one operating rule that came out of this work and is now written into the procedure: the row's own page is read last, always. Siblings settle how to read a character. Only the page itself says which characters are there.
3 · The right cast, the wrong direction
The hardest class to see, because the output names real people and real events and reads perfectly. Only the arrow between them is reversed.
孤竹之墟，失婦無夫。傷於蒺藜，不見其妻。東郭棠姜，武子以亡。
Dongguo Tang Jiang; by Wuzi he was undone.
Dongguo's Tang Jiang; by her Cui Wuzi perished.
Cui Wuzi married the widow Tang Jiang against every warning he was given, and the marriage destroyed him. The gloss had him destroying her. Two other occurrences of the same story elsewhere in the corpus had the direction right.
郤大墻壞，蠹衆木折。狼虎為政，天降罪罰。高弑望夷，胡亥以斃。
Gao murdered at Wangyi; Huhai perished.
Zhao Gao struck down his sovereign at Wangyi; by it Huhai perished.
弑 is not a neutral word for killing — it specifically means a subordinate killing his ruler, and it is doing the whole work of the line. Zhao Gao is the subject. Huhai, the Second Emperor, is the one who died. The gloss had killed the wrong man.
4 · One person made from two, two from one
舞陽漸離，擊筑善歌。慕丹之義，為燕荊軻。陰謀不遂，霍目死亡，功名何施。
Gao Jianli of Wuyang; skilled at striking the zhu and singing… The secret plot failed; dying alone.
Wuyang and Jianli, who was a fine singer to his own zhu… The secret plot came to nothing; blinded, he died.
舞陽漸離 is two men. 秦舞陽 walked into the Qin court beside Jing Ke and lost his nerve; 高漸離 was the zhu-player who made his own attempt later, after being blinded — which is exactly what 矐目 says, where the gloss had “dying alone.”
三蟲為蠱，剗迹無與。勝母盜泉，君子弗處。
The spring of Robber's Mother, the well of Theft — the noble man will not dwell there.
Shengmu village, Daoquan spring — the noble man will not dwell there.
勝母 and 盜泉 are two places, not one compound. Zengzi would not enter a village called Conquer Mother; Confucius would not drink from a spring called Robber's Fountain. Both refusals are on the record, and the refusal is the entire line.
5 · The allusion nobody recognised
The largest class by count. These verses quote the Book of Songs and the Zuo Commentary constantly, and an unrecognised quotation does not produce an obvious error — it produces fluent nonsense.
繭栗犧牲，敬享鬼神。神嗜飲食，受福多孫。
Silken calves as offerings, reverently presented to the spirits.
A calf with horns still small as cocoon and chestnut, offered up in reverence.
繭栗 has nothing to do with silk. It is a fixed term for a calf whose horns are still the size of a cocoon and a chestnut — the animal's age, which is the whole point: only a beast that young is fit for this sacrifice.
巳動死，連商子。揚砂石，胡狢擾。軍鼓振，吏士苦。
stones flow, foxes and badgers scatter.
Sand and stones are flung up; the Hu and the Mo are in tumult.
胡狢 are the Hu and the Mo, the northern peoples — which is what the war drums in the next clause are being beaten against. Read as foxes and badgers, the middle of the verse connected to nothing on either side of it.
鴟鴞破斧，邦人危殆。賴旦忠德，轉禍為福，傾危復立。
The owl breaks the axe; the people are in peril. By virtue of loyal integrity…
The Owl and the Broken Axe; the people of the realm in peril. Relying on Dan's loyal virtue…
鴟鴞 and 破斧 are the titles of two poems in the Odes of Bin, both about the Duke of Zhou — which is precisely why 旦, his given name, stands in the next clause. Read as an event, the owl broke an axe and the Duke vanished from his own sentence. He had been dropped from two other verses the same way.
沐猴冠帶，盜在非位。衆犬共吠，倉狂蹶足。
A bathed monkey in cap and sash.
A macaque in cap and sash.
沐猴 is a macaque. The phrase 沐猴而冠 — a macaque in a hat — was said of Xiang Yu, and it is an insult about someone unfit for the office he is wearing, which is what the next clause then says outright. Bathing the monkey removes the idiom and leaves a wet animal.
6 · Invented material
The rarest class and the worst, because nothing on the page constrains it and nothing downstream can catch it.
求金東山，利在茂鄉。賈市有息，子載母行。
profit lies in the land of Dai. Trading brings increase; the child carries on while the mother goes forth.
profit lies in the flourishing quarter. Trade yields interest; the interest rides upon the principal.
Dai is 代, and the verse says 茂鄉. Then 子 and 母 are not a child and a mother: in commercial language 母 is the principal and 子 the interest it bears. The line is about money, and it had become a family.
平國不君，夏氏作亂。烏號竊發，靈公殞命。
Candle shadows sway red as the axe-sound chills; behind the screen a bowstring is drawn in darkness. The bright lord gone, the dragon throne grows cold.
— still carried on the worklist, not yet rewritten.
Four clauses, and the English answers to none of them. There is no candle, no screen, no axe. 平國 is the ruler's name and 夏氏 the clan that revolted; neither appears at all. This one was found late, inside a hexagram that had already been marked finished — a whole failure mode we had not accounted for, and the reason the procedure now warns about it.
The rate does not fall
Percentage of the sixty-four glosses in each hexagram that changed, in the order the batches ran. Bottom row is the hexagram number. Hexagram 36, dashed, is not a corpus finding — it is the batch where the reader drifted, and it is discussed below.
Excluding hexagram 36, the mean is 27%, over a range of 20 to 33, with no downward trend across nineteen hexagrams and roughly three hours of continuous work. That flatness is the actual finding.
It means there is no dirty corner of this corpus to clean out and then be finished. It means the remaining forty-five hexagrams should be expected to yield something like another seven hundred and fifty corrections. And it means the glosses were not produced by a process that failed on hard verses — they were produced by a process with a stable one-in-four defect rate, which is a different problem and has a different fix.
The dashed bar is hexagram 36, at 67%. That number is not about the corpus. Two-thirds of a hexagram changing was so far outside the established band that it read as an instrument fault, and it was: the reader had drifted from correcting errors into polishing prose. The rule that came out of it — if the reading did not change, the English does not change — is now enforced by measuring the correction rate itself and flagging any batch that leaves the band in either direction. Too low means skimming; too high means rewriting.
What this cost, and what it is worth
Nineteen hexagrams, 1,216 glosses read line by line against the manuscript, 354 rewritten. No automated check in the repository found any of them, and none could have: every one of those glosses was well-formed English, correctly stamped, and internally consistent. The hash that catches a moved verse cannot see a wrong one.
Seven hundred and seventy-six paintings remain unrendered until the English underneath them is settled. On a one-in-four rate that is roughly a hundred and ninety pictures of the wrong thing, bought and published, and the reason to spend three hours reading before spending anything else.
Verses are the 文淵閣 Siku Quanshu manuscript readings, which carry no punctuation; the punctuation above is editorial and travels with the text as a separate layer. Corrected glosses are our own reading against that manuscript, its variant apparatus, and the parallel occurrences within the corpus itself; they are attributed as unreviewed by a classicist in the data files that carry them. Counts are as of 26 August 2026, at nineteen hexagrams of sixty-four; the two verses marked still uncorrected were live in the app on that date.