The I Ching as Spiritual Alchemy

The Taoist reception of the I Ching, carried into English primarily through Thomas Cleary’s translation of Liu I-ming’s eighteenth-century commentary, reads the book as a grammar of inner transformation — a “path of the gold elixir, the spiritual alchemy, the science of reversing the ordinary course of things” (Cleary / Liu I-ming, Taoist I Ching). Liu’s central claim is provocative: “the I Ching is not a book of divination but rather is the study of investigation of principles, fulfillment of nature, and arrival at the meaning of life.”

For this lineage, the sixty-four hexagrams are stages in the recovery of the primordial or celestial — the “innate knowledge and innate capacity” Mencius distinguished from the “artificial knowledge and artificial capacity” of the conditioned personality (Cleary / Liu I-ming). The superior person’s work is the reversal that returns primordial reality to its place; the inferior person’s drift is the habit that obscures it. Read this way, the I Ching lies parallel to the Western alchemy tradition’s opus contra naturam.

The thread is load-bearing for Seba because it establishes the I Ching not as an exotic Eastern curiosity but as a cognate grammar for the same work the Western individuation and alchemy traditions map. The hexagrams and the alchemical stages both articulate transformation as the work of a lifetime under the figure of the self. Jung’s encounter with The Secret of the Golden Flower — the Taoist alchemical text that first brought him into dialogue with Chinese inner-alchemical literature — was the historical channel through which this cognate was recognized.

Sources

• thomas-cleary / Liu I-ming: the I Ching as the path of the gold elixir
• carl-jung: the I Ching as evidence for acausal meaning; the Golden Flower bridge
• richard-wilhelm: translator of both the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower