Taoist cycles of change

The Yijing's understanding of change is not linear progression but a ceaseless alternation of complementary forces — yin and yang — whose interplay generates all the conditions of existence. The Dazhuan (Great Commentary) articulates this with characteristic economy: the Tao sets in motion and maintains the interplay of these forces, and because it is itself only a direction, "invisible and in no way material," it serves to regulate all movements without being a thing among things (Wilhelm and Baynes, 1950). Change, on this account, is not something that happens to the world from outside; it is the world's own self-movement, its intrinsic pulse.

Two kinds of change run through the system. Wilhelm distinguishes cyclic change — recurrent transformation in which the process returns to its starting point — from sequent change, in which there is no return. The sixty-four hexagrams map the full range of these transformations: six-line structures built from the binary grammar of yin and yang, each hexagram a qualitative moment in the cosmic drama. Von Franz, reading the Chinese understanding of time, notes that time in this framework "consists in certain time-ordered phases of transformation of the cosmic whole," and that the most basic rhythm is the alternating one of yang and yin (von Franz, 2014). This is not abstract: the Yijing was built on the premise that the cosmos and the human being obey the same law, that the psyche and the cosmos are to each other as inner world and outer world.

The operative principle within this cycling is enantiodromia — the tendency of any force, when it reaches its extreme, to tip over into its opposite. Von Franz traces this directly:

"Whenever a line of the I Ching oracle or a symbol reached its extreme state of fullness, it jumped over into its opposite. This idea has also been formulated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who called fate 'the world order [logos] stemming from enantiodromia, the creator of all things.'"

Jung borrowed the term from Heraclitus and made it a psychological law: all extreme states tend to reverse into their opposite — exaggerated spirituality into surrender to instinct, happiness into unhappiness (Samuels, 1985). The Yijing had already encoded this as the moving line: the old yang line (9) on the verge of becoming yin, the old yin line (6) on the verge of becoming yang — transformation caught at its threshold.

The Taoist inner-alchemical tradition reads these cycles not merely cosmologically but as a discipline of consciousness. The Secret of the Golden Flower — the eighth-century Quanzhen Daoist text that Richard Wilhelm translated and Jung commented upon — describes the "circulation of the light" as a meditative practice of turning awareness back upon its own source. Jung recognized in this the same pattern he had observed in his patients' spontaneous mandala productions:

"The circulation is not merely movement in a circle, but means, on the one hand, the marking off of the sacred precinct and, on the other, fixation and concentration. The sun-wheel begins to turn; the sun is activated and begins its course — in other words, the Tao begins to work and takes the lead. Action is reversed into non-action; everything peripheral is subordinated to the command of the centre."

This is the alchemical circulatio transposed into Taoist idiom: the repeated alternation of ascent and descent, volatilization and fixation, through which consciousness integrates with its own ground. The unity of life (ming) and consciousness (hsing) — yin-like extensity and yang-like intensity — is what the text names Tao, and the circulation is the practice of recovering that unity once it has been lost.

Liu I-ming, the eighteenth-century Quanzhen adept whose commentary Thomas Cleary translated, makes the stakes explicit: the Yijing is not a book of divination but "the study of investigation of principles, fulfillment of nature, and arrival at the meaning of life" (Liu I-ming, 1986). The cycles of change are not a cosmological curiosity but the anatomy of how a human being moves — or fails to move — through the conditions of existence. To harmonize with the celestial in human life means to deal with each "time," each configuration of yin and yang, in such a way as to achieve an appropriate balance. The sage appears and disappears deliberately, advancing and withdrawing as the quality of the moment requires.

What the Taoist framework refuses is the pneumatic preference for stasis — for a condition beyond change, beyond the alternation of light and dark. The Yijing's operative power, as Hellmut Wilhelm insists, is change: "If heaven and earth did not change, this power could penetrate nowhere." The cycles are not a problem to be solved by transcendence. They are the medium in which soul moves.

I Ching (Wilhelm-Baynes) — the Bollingen translation through which the Yijing entered Western depth psychology, with Jung's foreword
The Secret of the Golden Flower — the Quanzhen Daoist text on the circulation of the light, with Jung's commentary
Tao — the originating ground from which yin and yang emerge as the Tao's own self-differentiation
Yin and Yang — the paired generative principles whose alternation drives the sixty-four hexagrams

Sources Cited

Wilhelm, Richard, and Baynes, Cary F., 1950, The I Ching or Book of Changes
von Franz, Marie-Louise, 2014, Psyche and Matter
Jung, C.G., 1967, Alchemical Studies
Liu I-ming (trans. Thomas Cleary), 1986, The Taoist I Ching
Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians