The I Ching or Book of Changes (3 page)

When this new edition was being prepared, the editors gave much thought to the question whether a rearrangement of the contents of the Book might facilitate its use for the non-Chinese reader. The final decision was to leave unchanged the arrangement which my father had chosen. This decision was based not only on the conviction that books, too, are organisms which should undergo incisive operations only in dire emergencies; the more important consideration was that the present arrangement is the most meaningful and the easiest to handle. In the traditional Chinese editions the presentation of the text is not uniform. The problem of arrangement pertains particularly to the text of certain of the Ten Wings which might either be divided up among the hexagrams or be read as a continuous text. The second alternative has points in its favor. One of the Wings, the book
Tsa Kua
(Miscellaneous Notes on the Hexagrams), which discusses the hexagrams one by one (or rather in pairs), does not coincide in sequence with the hexagrams in the main text. The particular curve of development thus gets lost when this book is divided up among the hexagrams. Nor is this all. The
Tsa Kua
, when read in its own sequence, is an accomplished poem with a firm prosodic structure and a consistent rhyme system. The same is true
of the Small Images, the commentaries on the line texts, found in the third book of this translation. Thus here we have early examples of didactic Chinese poetry the features of which are lost when these texts are divided up among the hexagrams.

These considerations notwithstanding, my father chose, after much hesitation, to employ a modified form of the first alternative for the arrangement of his translation. (See the chart following: “
The Major Divisions of the Material
.”) He furthermore chose to distinguish systematically (again, with one modification) between the older layers of the texts and the material of the Ten Wings. In this way he arrived at a division into three “books”: the (old) Text, the Material, and the Commentaries (contained in the Ten Wings). Book I gives the older layers of the text, the Judgments pertaining to the hexagrams as a whole, and the line texts. To these he added the so-called Great Images, which appear for each hexagram under the caption “The Image.” These do, of course, belong to the Wings. Their inclusion here reflects my father’s special approach to the Book. Of a later date, these texts reflect a more advanced interpretation and understanding of the situation represented in the individual hexagrams. In frequently surprising statements they formulate succinctly the reaction of the “superior man” to the specific configuration of imagery offered by the system of the line structure. They are thus not to be considered commentaries on specific passages of the older texts (as the so-called Small Images and the
Wên Yen
are); they constitute a third and independent approach, in addition to the judgments and the line texts, to the situations entailed by the hexagrams.

To the translation of these three types of classical texts, my father added his own elucidative remarks (in this as in other editions, printed in smaller type). These remarks are based on a careful reading of the later (postclassical) commentatory literature, on his discussions with Lao and other friends and experts, on the modern scholarly literature then available, and on his own understanding and interpretation of the passages and situations involved.

Book II contains the translations of the more systematic among the Ten Wings, specifically, the
Shuo Kua
(Discussion of the Trigrams) and the
Ta Chuan
(The Great Treatise), the
translated passages again being elucidated by my father’s own remarks. To these translations is appended an essay from my father’s own hand, “The Structure of the Hexagrams.” (Another, “On Consulting the Oracle,” has been transposed to the end of the volume for this edition.)

Book III, finally, is again arranged in the sequence of the hexagrams. It repeats the basic translations found in Book I and arranges under them those books and passages from the Ten Wings that are considered commentatory to the texts. These include passages found in the Great Treatise, which are repeated here under the caption “Appended Judgments,” a term which is the rendering of an alternate name of this treatise,
Hsi Tz’u
. Here again, my father’s own remarks (in smaller type) are added to the translations, dealing in this case not so much with general considerations as with technical and systematic aspects, the principles and concepts of which are discussed in the above-mentioned essay on “The Structure of the Hexagrams.”

HELLMUT WILHELM

Seattle, December I966

I am grateful to Wallace K. Snider for discovering several typographical errors and an interesting textual error
here
: in the first line of the Note, hexagram I (
27
) should be cited rather than I (
42
).

H. W.

Seattle, April I968

The Major Divisions of the Material

Foreword

BY
C
.
G
.
J
UNG

Since I am not a sinologue, a foreword to the Book of Changes from my hand must be a testimonial of my individual experience with this great and singular book. It also affords me a welcome opportunity to pay tribute again to the memory of my late friend, Richard Wilhelm. He himself was profoundly aware of the cultural significance of his translation of the
I Ching
, a version unrivaled in the West.

If the meaning of the Book of Changes were easy to grasp, the work would need no foreword. But this is far from being the case, for there is so much that is obscure about it that Western scholars have tended to dispose of it as a collection of “magic spells,” either too abstruse to be intelligible, or of no value whatsoever. Legge’s translation of the
I Ching
, up to now the only version available in English, has done little to make the work accessible to Western minds.
¹
Wilhelm, however, has made every effort to open the way to an understanding of the symbolism of the text. He was in a position to do this because he himself was taught the philosophy and the use of the
I Ching
by the venerable sage Lao Nai-hsüan; moreover, he had over a period of many years put the peculiar technique of the oracle into practice. His grasp of the living meaning of the text gives his version of the
I Ching
a depth of perspective that an exclusively academic knowledge of Chinese philosophy could never provide.

I am greatly indebted to Wilhelm for the light he has thrown upon the complicated problem of the
I Ching
, and for insight as regards its practical application as well. For more than thirty years I have interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the unconscious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance. I was already fairly familiar with the
I Ching
when I first met Wilhelm in the early nineteen twenties; he confirmed for me then what I already knew, and taught me many things more.

I do not know Chinese and have never been in China. 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. In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind. It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese has never developed what we call science. Our science, however, is based upon the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth. But a great change in our standpoint is setting in. What Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics. The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.

The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the
I Ching
, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with.

The manner in which the
I Ching
tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.

Thus it happens that when one throws the three coins, or counts through the forty-nine yarrow stalks, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it—a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the Chinese mind. With us it would be a banal and almost meaningless statement (at least on the face of it) to say that whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment. This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one. There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from the appearance, taste, and behavior of a wine the site of its vineyard and the year of its origin. There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an
objet d’art
or piece of furniture on merely looking at it. And there are even astrologers who can tell you, without any previous knowledge of your nativity, what the position of sun and moon was and what zodiacal sign rose above the horizon in the moment of your birth. In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long-lasting traces.

In other words, whoever invented the
I Ching
was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast—even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be—inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin.

This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity,
²
a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.

The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure. The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the
I Ching
comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation. Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of events. The causal point of view tells us a dramatic story about how
D
came into existence: it took its origin from
C
, which existed before
D
, and
C
in its turn had a father,
B
, etc. The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence. How does it happen that
A
′,
B
′,
C
′,
D
′, etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events
A
′ and
B
′ are of the same quality as the psychic events
C
′ and
D
′, and further because all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture.