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The I Ching or Book of Changes
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The Bollingen Foundation’s 1950 English edition of Richard Wilhelm’s German translation, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes under Jung’s supervision, with Jung’s foreword and, in the third edition, Hellmut Wilhelm’s preface. This is the I Ching as it entered the Western depth tradition.
The edition is organized into three books: Book I, the Text (sixty-four hexagrams, each with Judgment, Image, and six line-statements); Book II, the Material (Richard Wilhelm’s historical and philosophical apparatus, including his reconstruction of the ethical turn from divination to wisdom literature under King Wen and the Duke of Zhou); Book III, the Commentaries (selections from the Ten Wings, especially the Great Commentary / Xici zhuan). The work integrates Wilhelm’s German rendering with the commentarial tradition he received from his Qing-dynasty teachers, producing an I Ching that is at once translation and commentary.
Jung’s foreword is the work’s load-bearing interpretive apparatus for the Western reader. In it Jung casts the oracle twice — receiving hexagrams 50 (Ting, the Caldron) and 29 (K’an, the Abysmal), with moving lines producing 35 (Chin, Progress) and 48 (Ching, the Well) — and reads the resulting fourfold sequence of vessel-pit-well-progress as a coherent statement the book makes about itself. “Had a human being made such replies, I should, as a psychiatrist, have had to pronounce him of sound mind” (Jung, foreword). The foreword is the single most consequential act of reception between the book and the Jungian tradition.