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Hellmut Wilhelm

Hellmut Wilhelm

German-American sinologist, son of Richard Wilhelm, and principal interpreter of the I Ching to the generation that received his father’s translation. Trained in Chinese philology under his father and in the German sinological tradition, Hellmut Wilhelm spent the years of the Second World War in Beijing, where he delivered the lectures that became Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching (Bollingen 1960). He later held the chair of Chinese at the University of Washington.

Hellmut Wilhelm’s lectures provide the structural account of the book that his father’s translation presupposed but did not systematically expound: the three historical strata (archaic trigrams; core text of King Wen and the Duke of Zhou; the Ten Wings); the two fundamental principles yin and yang; the construction of the eight trigrams and the sixty-four hexagrams; the formal architecture of Qian and Kun as the “gateway” of the book; the role of the Ten Wings as the philosophical superstructure attached to the classic in the late Zhou and early Han periods (H. Wilhelm, Change, chs. 1-6). He also wrote the preface to the third Bollingen edition of his father’s translation.

Hellmut Wilhelm’s methodological care — reading the book as “a unique manifestation of the human mind” rather than as superstition or as Western-style prophecy — made the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching usable to its Western readers. His lectures remain the standard structural introduction within the Bollingen tradition.

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