I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change

I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change is a work by Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher (1994).

Core claims

• Ritsema and Karcher’s translation is not a philological exercise but a deliberate reconstruction of the I Ching as a psychological instrument — each Chinese character rendered as a gerund force-field rather than a fixed noun, restoring the oracle’s function as what Jung called a “method of exploring the unconscious.”
• By stripping away Confucian moral commentary and imperial political interpretation while preserving strict word-order, the translation recovers a pre-philosophical stratum of the text — the shamanistic divinatory core that precedes and generates all later Chinese philosophy, ethics, and cosmology.
• The book’s central interpretive move redefines the character I (易) not as “change” but as “versatility” — a term that reframes the oracle’s purpose from describing external transformation to cultivating the psyche’s capacity to remain fluid, available, and responsive to what the authors call “the unforeseen demands of time, fate and psyche.”

Related questions

• How does Ritsema and Karcher’s claim that “in every symptom there is a spirit trying to communicate with us” compare to James Hillman’s re-visioning of symptom as the soul’s speech in Re-Visioning Psychology, and does the I Ching’s oracular structure offer what Hillman’s method lacks — a systematic procedure for responding?
• Jung’s foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching frames the oracle through synchronicity as an acausal principle, while Ritsema and Karcher frame it through shamanic spirit-communication and active imagination — does this represent a deepening of Jung’s position or a departure from it, and what does Jung’s own account in Collected Works Volume 11 reveal about this tension?
• Alfred Huang argues that without Confucius’s Ten Wings “the I Ching cannot be understood,” while Ritsema and Karcher systematically exclude them to recover the oracular core — how does this dispute illuminate the broader tension in depth psychology between moral frameworks and imaginal autonomy, as articulated in Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/ritsema-i-ching-classic-chinese-oracle/

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