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Richard Wilhelm
Richard Wilhelm
German sinologist, missionary, and translator whose 1924 German rendering of the I Ching — I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen — remains the foundational Western translation. Wilhelm spent more than two decades in China, learned the classical language under the Qing scholar Lao Nai-hsuan, and produced his translation out of what his son later called “the living tradition of the book” rather than from philological reconstruction alone (H. Wilhelm, Change). His close relations with Chinese scholars of the late imperial and early republican periods gave him access to the commentarial tradition as a living inheritance.
Wilhelm’s translation was rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes under Jung’s supervision and published as The I Ching or Book of Changes by the Bollingen Foundation in 1950. Jung’s foreword — which interpreted the oracle through the principle of synchronicity — gave the Wilhelm/Baynes edition its place in the Western depth tradition.
Wilhelm also collaborated with Jung on The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929), the translation of a Taoist alchemical text to which Jung contributed a psychological commentary. Jung’s 1930 memorial address for Wilhelm was the first place the term synchronicity appeared in print. Wilhelm died in 1930, before the Baynes English rendering was complete. The bridge between Chinese classical learning and Jungian psychology is largely his work.