Beyond East Asia

The Western reception

A Jesuit in Beijing sent Leibniz a diagram of the sixty-four hexagrams and he recognised his own binary arithmetic. Two and a half centuries later the same book was a bestseller in San Francisco. Few texts have been so thoroughly transformed by the act of being translated.

12
currents
12
figures
300
years in the West

The currents

Each generation found a different book. A proof of Christian revelation, a curiosity of oriental logic, a psychological instrument, a countercultural oracle, and finally a Bronze Age document.

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Jesuit figurism

Beijing and Paris 17th to 18th century

A minority of Jesuit missionaries argued that the Chinese classics contained a corrupted memory of biblical revelation, and read the hexagrams for traces of the patriarchs. Rome disapproved; the enterprise nevertheless produced the first serious European engagement with the text.

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Binary arithmetic

Hanover 1701–1703

Joachim Bouvet sent Leibniz the Fu Xi arrangement of the sixty-four hexagrams; Leibniz saw that reading broken lines as zero and solid as one produces the numbers zero to sixty-three in order. He took it as ancient corroboration of his own system.

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The first translations

Britain and Europe 19th century

Thomas McClatchie's 1876 version and James Legge's 1882 rendering for the Sacred Books of the East brought the complete text into English. Legge found the work uncongenial and said so, which shows.

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The Wilhelm-Baynes edition

Germany and the United States 1924 and 1950

Richard Wilhelm's German translation, made with the scholar Lao Naixuan, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes with a foreword by Jung. It became the standard Western text and shaped what almost every English reader thinks the book is.

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Synchronicity

Zurich 1930s to 1950s

Jung's proposal of an acausal connecting principle, developed partly to account for what he observed in consulting the Changes. It gave Western readers a framework for taking the oracle seriously without accepting divination on its own terms.

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Chance operations in art

New York 1951 onward

John Cage used hexagram casts to determine pitch, duration and dynamics in Music of Changes and much later work, turning the book into a compositional instrument and influencing a generation of artists and choreographers.

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The literary I Ching

Europe and America 20th century

Philip K. Dick consulted it while writing The Man in the High Castle, in which characters consult it too. Hesse, Borges and many others absorbed it, and it became a recognisable furnishing of postwar fiction.

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The counterculture

United States and Europe 1960s and 1970s

The Wilhelm-Baynes edition sold in enormous numbers to readers with no interest in sinology, becoming a fixture alongside Zen, Vedanta and psychedelics. Most Western familiarity with the book dates from this moment.

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Western occultism

Britain and Europe 20th century

Aleister Crowley used the Changes as his principal oracle for decades and attempted to correlate the hexagrams with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, an assimilation that continues in parts of the Western esoteric scene.

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The genetic-code analogy

Europe and America 1970s onward

That there are sixty-four hexagrams and sixty-four DNA codons prompted a literature mapping one onto the other. It is numerology rather than biology, and it has been persistent enough to require saying so.

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The manuscript discoveries

China 1973 onward

The Mawangdui silk manuscripts and later finds at Guodian and elsewhere revealed earlier versions with different hexagram orders and variant readings, transforming what scholars can say about the text's formation.

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The historical turn

Britain and America 1980s onward

Richard Rutt, Edward Shaughnessy, Richard J. Smith and others read the Zhouyi as a Bronze Age divination record rather than a book of wisdom, producing translations that look startlingly unlike Wilhelm's.

The figures

Missionaries, mathematicians, translators, a psychologist, the artists who used it as a working method, and the sinologists who took it back to its origins.

Joachim Bouvet

1656–1730 France and Beijing

Jesuit missionary and mathematician at the Kangxi court, and the leading figurist. He corresponded with Leibniz for years and sent him the hexagram diagram that produced the binary insight.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1646–1716 Hanover

Had already developed binary arithmetic when Bouvet's diagram arrived in 1701. He read the Fu Xi ordering as independent ancient confirmation and published on it, giving the Changes its first foothold in European intellectual history.

Thomas McClatchie

1812–1885 Shanghai

Anglican missionary who produced the first complete English translation in 1876, reading the text through comparative mythology. Legge thought little of it, and it is now read mainly as a historical curiosity.

James Legge

1815–1897 Scotland, Hong Kong, Oxford

The pre-eminent Victorian translator of the Chinese classics, whose 1882 Yi King appeared in the Sacred Books of the East. He worked with real rigour on a book he found frustrating, and his version remains valuable for its literalness.

Lao Naixuan

1843–1921 Qingdao

The Chinese scholar who taught Richard Wilhelm the Changes over several years, working through the text with him line by line. The Wilhelm translation is as much a record of his teaching as of Wilhelm's scholarship.

Richard Wilhelm

1873–1930 Qingdao and Frankfurt

Missionary turned sinologist who spent over twenty years in China and translated the Changes into German in 1924. His version reads the text through the Confucian commentarial tradition and has shaped Western understanding more than any other.

Cary F. Baynes

1883–1977 United States

Translator and analyst who rendered Wilhelm's German into the English edition published in 1950. Her careful work is why the book reached the Anglophone world in a form people actually read.

C. G. Jung

1875–1961 Zurich

Consulted the Changes for decades and wrote the foreword to the Baynes edition, in which he casts a hexagram about the book itself. His concept of synchronicity was developed partly to account for the experience.

Hellmut Wilhelm

1905–1990 Germany and Seattle

Richard Wilhelm's son and a professional sinologist, whose lectures and essays gave the West its first serious scholarly account of how the Changes actually works structurally.

John Cage

1912–1992 New York

Used hexagram casts to make compositional decisions from Music of Changes in 1951 onward, and continued for forty years. He is the reason the book has a place in the history of twentieth-century music.

Philip K. Dick

1928–1982 California

Consulted the Changes while writing The Man in the High Castle, whose characters also consult it, and later said the oracle had effectively shaped the plot. The novel won the Hugo Award in 1963.

Edward L. Shaughnessy

born 1952 Chicago

Leading Western scholar of early Chinese manuscripts, who translated the Mawangdui Changes and has done much to establish what the text looked like before the received version settled.

A book that changes with its readers

The Western history of the Book of Changes is a case study in reception. At each stage European and American readers found the book they were prepared to find, and the sequence of those books is almost a summary of three centuries of Western intellectual fashion: evidence of biblical revelation, a curiosity of oriental logic, a psychological instrument, a countercultural oracle, and at last a Bronze Age document about sacrifice and warfare.

Leibniz and the binary diagram

The first serious European encounter came through the Jesuit mission in Beijing. A group of missionaries known as figurists held that the Chinese classics preserved a corrupted memory of biblical revelation, and searched the ancient texts for traces of it. Rome was unenthusiastic and the position never became mission policy, but it produced the first sustained European study of the Changes.

Joachim Bouvet, a mathematician at the Kangxi court, corresponded with Leibniz for years, and in 1701 sent him a diagram of the sixty-four hexagrams in the arrangement attributed to Fu Xi. Leibniz had already developed binary arithmetic. Reading broken lines as zero and solid lines as one, he saw that the arrangement generates the integers from zero to sixty-three in order.

His interpretation was of its period: he took the diagram as ancient corroboration, evidence that a very old civilisation had grasped the same truth. Modern scholarship is clear that Shao Yong's eleventh-century ordering was produced by repeated binary division for cosmological reasons, not as arithmetic. The formal correspondence is nevertheless exact, and it gave the Changes its first foothold in European thought.

Translation

Thomas McClatchie published the first complete English version in 1876, read through a comparative-mythology lens that has not aged well. James Legge's 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East was a far more serious piece of work. Legge found the book uncongenial, was frank about it, and produced a version whose literalness still makes it useful.

The decisive event was Richard Wilhelm's. A missionary who became a scholar, Wilhelm spent more than twenty years in China and studied the Changes with Lao Naixuan, a Qing scholar of the old education, working through the text with him over several years. His German translation appeared in 1924, Cary F. Baynes rendered it into English, and the Bollingen edition of 1950 carried a foreword by Jung.

That edition is why most English speakers think the Changes is a book of philosophical wisdom about the conduct of the superior person. Wilhelm was transmitting the Confucian commentarial tradition faithfully, and he was transmitting one reading among several. It is not what a Zhou diviner would have recognised.

Jung and synchronicity

Jung consulted the book for decades and thought hard about why it seemed to work. His foreword to the Baynes edition does something unusual: he casts a hexagram asking what the Changes has to say about being introduced to the English-speaking world, and reports the answer.

His concept of synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle relating psychic states to outer events, was developed partly to make sense of this. Whatever one thinks of it, it did specific historical work. It gave educated Western readers a way to take the oracle seriously without believing in divination, and it is a large part of why the book was received as a psychological instrument rather than as a superstition.

The book as method

From 1951 John Cage used hexagram casts to determine pitch, duration and dynamics, beginning with Music of Changes and continuing for forty years. The point was not prophecy but the removal of personal taste from composition, and through Cage the practice reached Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns and a wide circle of artists.

Philip K. Dick consulted it while writing The Man in the High Castle, in which characters consult it too, and said afterwards that the oracle had determined the plot. The novel won the Hugo Award in 1963.

Then the counterculture arrived, and the Wilhelm-Baynes edition sold in numbers no scholarly translation had any business achieving. For twenty years it sat alongside Zen, Vedanta and psychedelics as standard equipment, and that is when most Western familiarity with the book was formed.

The historical turn

Two things reversed the direction of travel. Archaeology produced older versions of the text: the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, excavated in 1973, have a different hexagram order and many variant readings, and later finds at Guodian and elsewhere added more.

And a generation of scholars set out to read the Zhouyi as what it appears to be, a Bronze Age divination record. Richard Rutt's subtitle called it exactly that. Edward Shaughnessy worked on the manuscripts. Richard J. Smith wrote the standard cultural history. Their translations look startlingly unlike Wilhelm's: less philosophy, more livestock, captives, sacrifices and military campaigns.

Two books, both real

Western readers now have access to two quite different Changes, and it is worth being clear that both are legitimate.

One is the received classic as East Asia read it for two thousand years, layered with the Ten Wings and the Confucian commentaries, a book about conduct and situation. That is Wilhelm's book, and it is what the tradition itself mostly meant by the Changes.

The other is the Zhou text as it stood before that interpretation was built, terse and often obscure, concerned with sacrifice, hunting and war. That is Rutt's and Shaughnessy's book, and it is closer to what was originally written.

Preferring the older layer is not more authentic in any simple sense. The Changes has been a philosophical classic for far longer than it was a Bronze Age manual, and the interpretive tradition is part of the object. But a reader should know which of the two is in their hands, and most editions do not say.

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