Tracing the reception of the Yijing in Spain through paratexts: the dominant divination practices and a dynamic evolution from the 1970s to the present

While extensive research has focused on the dissemination of the Yijing in the German and English-speaking worlds, its translation and reception in Spain remains underexplored. This study examines the textual and non-textual paratexts of 21 Spanish translations of the Yijing published between 1971 and 2023 to investigate their reception in Spain. The findings indicate that the Yijing has been predominantly accepted through divinatory practices framed within popular cultural paradigms, while its multidimensional scholarly and theoretical value as a Chinese classical text remained relatively neglected. Furthermore, the study has observed a dynamic evolution during its reception history. Since the twenty-first century, the Orientalist perspective once presented has increasingly been complemented by interpretations that respect the intellectual, cultural, historical, and philosophical dimensions of the original text. This paper not only demonstrates how these characteristics are intrinsically linked to the prevailing indirectness in Yijing translations in Spain, but also sheds light on the socio-historical rationale behind this indirectness. More importantly, from a Spanish perspective on the global dissemination of the Yijing, this study illustrates how indirect translation practices, paratextual strategies, and socio-historical contexts shape its cross-cultural circulation and interpretative framing of Chinese classical texts.