Wang Bi

Wang Bi is the short-lived genius of the Wei dynasty whose commentary on the Yijing — the Classic of Changes — established the reading that shaped the Chinese interpretive tradition for the next thousand years and that, in its German translation by Richard Wilhelm and its English rendering by Cary Baynes, entered the depth-psychological lineage through Jung‘s foreword to the Wilhelm-Baynes I Ching.

Dead at twenty-three, Wang Bi left behind commentaries on the Laozi and the Zhouyi that reoriented Chinese philosophy toward what is called xuanxue — the learning of the mysterious, the learning of the empty. His central hermeneutic move on the Yijing was to subordinate the complex symbolism of the lines to the unifying meaning of each hexagram as a whole — the meaning discoverable only by passing through the images into the non-image ground they indicate. The reading is structurally kin to what Jung later called amplification: the image is to be read toward the archetypal ground it manifests. See classic-of-changes-wang-bi.

Relationships

• classic-of-changes-wang-bi
• hexagram
• amplification