Personifying the i ching

The gesture is almost embarrassingly direct. In 1949, preparing his foreword to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation, Jung did not write about the I Ching — he consulted it about itself, asking the oracle what it thought of his intention to introduce it to the English-speaking world. He received hexagram 50, Ting, the Cauldron: a ritual vessel containing cooked food, the food understood as spiritual nourishment. Jung's commentary on this is worth sitting with:

The handle of the ting is altered. One is impeded in his way of life. The fat of the pheasant is not eaten. Once rain falls, remorse is spent. Good fortune comes in the end.

The handle, Wilhelm notes, is the Begriff — the concept, the way one grasps (begreift) the thing. The I Ching is here testifying that its handle has been altered, that we can no longer grasp it as the ancients did. Jung takes this as the book speaking about its own situation in the modern West — impeded, its richest nourishment uneaten, yet ultimately fortunate. He then submitted a second question about his own role in writing the foreword and received hexagram 48, the Well: an old, ruined well buried in mud, capable of being restored. The I Ching, he concluded, had described itself as a spring of living water — and described him as someone who had fallen into a dangerous pit that turned out to be that same well.

What makes this more than a parlor trick is the theoretical scaffolding Jung builds beneath it. The hexagram, he argues, is not a prediction but an exponent of the moment — it captures the qualitative character of the instant in which it is cast, the way a wine connoisseur reads a vintage from taste alone, or an antiquarian dates a piece of furniture from its physiognomy. This is the principle he called synchronicity:

Whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast — even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be — inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing at the moment of its origin.

The sixty-four hexagrams are, on this reading, "the instrument by which the meaning of sixty-four different yet typical situations can be determined" (Psychology and Religion, ¶974) — a grammar of archetypal situations, not a fortune-telling device. Personifying the book is not superstition; it is a methodologically consistent act within the synchronistic frame. If the oracle captures the quality of a moment, and if the moment includes the questioner's psychic state as an indispensable ingredient, then asking the book about itself is simply asking what the moment of that asking contains. The book answers as a subject because the method treats it as one.

Von Franz adds a biographical footnote that sharpens the picture: Jung used the I Ching for decades to illuminate doubtful situations, but eventually gave it up because he found he always knew in advance what the answer would be. He had become so open to the meaning constellated in the unconscious that he no longer needed the oracle as a roundabout route via an outer technique. The personification had served its purpose — it had trained a mode of attention that eventually became direct.

Ritsema and Karcher, working from the Eranos Foundation's long engagement with the text, describe the oracle's animating logic in terms that complement Jung's: the book is "a sort of animated being" whose "living soul" consists in spiritual agencies that make the yarrow stalks give meaningful answers. The chün tzu — the ideal user — "turns and rolls" the words in the heart, and through this action becomes hsiang, symbolizing, linking the divinatory tools directly to the ruling power of the personality. The personification is not imposed on the text from outside; it is the text's own self-description.

What Jung did in 1949 was take that self-description seriously enough to act on it — and to report the results with the same clinical precision he brought to a patient's dream.

Sources Cited

  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Wilhelm, Richard, and Baynes, Cary F., 1950, The I Ching or Book of Changes
  • Ritsema, Rudolf, and Karcher, Stephen, 1994, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time