As I see it | What the I Ching is really about
Carl Jung was a big fan of the I Ching, also known as the Book of Changes. He was also a close friend of Richard Wilhelm, whose German translation was probably the most influential Western version of the ancient Chinese text in the last century. But over the years, I have become convinced that the g
By Alex Lo
Carl Jung was a big fan of the I Ching, also known as the Book of Changes. He was also a close friend of Richard Wilhelm, whose German translation was probably the most influential Western version of the ancient Chinese text in the last century.
But over the years, I have become convinced that the great Jung didn’t really get it. A red flag is that he thinks it is very difficult for the Western mind to grasp what I will call the Chinese spirit of the I Ching, which he claims is completely foreign.
“I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of thinking,” he wrote in the foreword to an English translation of the Wilhelm text.
Actually, I think it is quite accessible and easy for anyone to consult the I Ching and believe in it. It’s precisely its enigmatic allure that appeals to foreign minds like Jung.
People as different as poet Allen Ginsberg, musician Joni Mitchell, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham have all “lauded the Yi Jing for both its wisdom and its poetic suggestiveness”. That’s according to Brian Bruya, who recently translated the classic – and highly amusing – Illustrated Book of Changes by C.C. Tsai, the cartoonist and Shaolin monk who also illustrated volumes about Chinese philosophers such as Confucius, Sun Tzu and Chuang Tzu.
Yi Jing is the contemporary standard transcription of I Ching. I will stick with the latter, which most readers are probably more familiar with. Bruya’s translation is now published in a handsome edition by Princeton University Press.
On YouTube, you can find countless non-Chinese teaching or consulting the I Ching. They might use sticks, flip coins or run online randomisers to draw one of the 64 hexagrams, with their intricate combinations of solid and divided lines, and tell you what your future holds. Or you can learn to do it yourself.
What Jung seemed to assume is that the I Ching is esoteric when it is actually, and has always been, popular insofar as fortune-telling has always appealed to the masses, in China and everywhere else. Think Western astrology or ancient Roman entrail reading.
However, Jung was probably right that for a certain type of Westerner – and I would argue the same for a certain type of people generally, including Chinese – it would be difficult to get into that spirit of superstition or non-scientific explanation. Overly rationalistic people, whom Jung criticises in the foreword, simply don’t believe it.
But the real problem is that Jung read too much of his own discovery of synchronicity – the notion that events, separated by space and time, can be meaningfully related and yet have no discernible causal connection – into the I Ching.
In the foreword, Jung even attacks the very idea of causality as the foundation of science: “Our science, however, is based upon the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth.”
To be fair, Jung is only attacking classical Newtonian physics. He praises the then young science of quantum mechanics, which is based on statistics and chance, not cause and effect. Wolfgang Pauli, an important contributor to quantum physics, was a friend and patient of Jung’s.
Accurate or not, there are many ways to predict the future. These include making statistical projections, repeating experiences and experiments (what philosophers call empirical induction), looking at past stock movements to predict future prices and following the planets in astrology. Then there is Nostradamus and his prophecies, vague enough to be credited by some people online with foretelling the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
The I Ching is none of that. The book “is not telling you what will happen out of the blue”, Bruya wrote. “Rather, it is purported to tell you how circumstances are developing, and given that, what may or may not be the best thing to do.”
Psychologically, the I Ching is about awareness, and the possibility of taking a different course of action or doing nothing at all. The future is not fixed. You can reverse a trend and bring about a different outcome, which may or may not be to your liking. But if you use the I Ching long enough, you will also learn that who you are and what you want are always changing too.