A Biography of a Book: The Life Is in the Readers

Richard J. Smith’s contribution to Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series takes the genre’s conceit seriously: this is not an exegesis of the Yijing but the life story of a text that has been alive for three thousand years because its readers kept it so. His organizing observation is the classic’s radical open-endedness — the negative capability, he says, borrowing Keats, that lets it absorb any interpretive system brought to it. He relates the Four Treasuries editors’ remark that interpreting the Changes was like playing chess — no two games alike. A manual of sixty-four hexagrams built from broken and unbroken lines, of judgment texts and image texts, became cosmology, ethics, mathematics, and psychology by turns, and Smith’s biography is the record of what each age needed it to be. For a shelf holding the Wilhelm/Baynes translation and its commentarial descendants, this is the librarian’s book: the one that tells you where everything else came from.

Canonization by Commentary: What the Ten Wings Did

Part One traces the domestic career of the Changes from its genesis — the Fuxi legend, the oracle-bone background, the divination records of the Zuo Commentary — to the moment of canonization under Han Emperor Wu in 136 BCE. Smith’s decisive point is that the classic was made, not born: the appended Ten Wings, traditionally and questionably ascribed to Confucius, “transformed a relatively simple divination manual into a sophisticated philosophical tract.” The Mawangdui manuscript, with its variant hexagram sequence and names, shows how little consensus existed mere decades before the imperial canon froze the text. From there Smith walks the great commentarial schools — Jing Fang’s correlative numerology, Shao Yong’s diagrams, the Cheng–Zhu orthodoxy that governed the civil-service mind for centuries, the Kangxi emperor’s court lectures — each school finding its own philosophy already waiting in the lines. Authority, in this biography, is a deposit left by generations of interpretation: a lesson that generalizes well beyond China.

Domestication: Every Culture Remakes the Changes in Its Own Image

Part Two follows the text abroad, and Smith’s master concept — domestication — does its best work. Tokugawa Japan bent the Changes toward bushidō loyalty and rice-market forecasting; Korean Neo-Confucians made it the battleground of their metaphysical debates; Tibet absorbed it into a different divinatory ecology. The Western chapter repeats the pattern with a twist: requiring translation, the classic was serially assimilated to whatever system the translator carried. The Jesuit Bouvet found in its diagrams confirmation of Leibniz’s binary arithmetic; the missionary McClatchie found pagan phallic worship; Legge rendered what it says, Wilhelm what it means. Smith’s shrewdest line of argument is that each reading reveals the reader — the Changes functioning across cultures the way a projective instrument functions in the consulting room, returning to every interpreter a portrait of their own categories.

The Wilhelm–Jung Mutation: From State Classic to Instrument of Self-Scrutiny

For this library the decisive chapter is the modern one. Wilhelm’s German translation reached English in 1950 through Cary Baynes, one of Jung’s students, under the Bollingen imprint — and, as Smith notes, Wilhelm’s rendering seemed to confirm Jung’s theories of archetypes and synchronicity, exactly as Bouvet’s had confirmed Leibniz. Jung’s famous foreword, built around a demonstration divination, recast the book — in the phrase Smith quotes — as one long admonition to careful scrutiny of one’s own character. From that graft grew a branch of Jungian practice using the Yijing as a therapeutic device: Smith instances Jolande Jacobi’s patient in Man and His Symbols, whose chosen hexagram, Meng — Youthful Folly — met his dream imagery so precisely that the case broke open. The same transmission carried the classic into the postwar counterculture: Dylan, Cage, Philip K. Dick. Smith neither debunks nor endorses; he documents the mutation and lets the pattern — domestication again — speak.

The I Ching: A Biography earns its place as the reception-historical spine of the I Ching shelf: the scholarly context that keeps the Wilhelm translation, the Taoist commentaries, and the modern psychological use of the oracle in one intelligible story. It equips a reader — or a librarian fielding a hexagram question — to say not only what the Changes says, but whose Changes is speaking.