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Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching
Change — Eight Lectures on the I Ching
Hellmut Wilhelm’s companion volume to his father Richard Wilhelm’s translation — eight lectures delivered at the Eranos conferences that install the interpretive apparatus the Wilhelm-Baynes edition leaves mostly implicit. Hellmut Wilhelm was a professional sinologist (University of Washington) and brought to the text a generation’s more critical scholarship than his father had at his disposal.
The book’s central interpretive claim is structural. The I Ching “embraces both the patterns on earth and the images in the heavens. Thus its scope extends in two directions beyond the situations of the controllable world of phenomena” (H. Wilhelm 1960). The hexagram is not merely a sign but a mesocosm — a middle image that binds macrocosm and microcosm through the dual-layer trigram structure. “The holy sages were able to survey all the confused diversities under heaven. They observed forms and phenomena, and made representations of things and their attributes. These were called the Images” (H. Wilhelm 1960, citing the Ta Chuan).
The lectures treat the Sequence of the Hexagrams (Hsü Kua), the Miscellaneous Notes (Tsa Kua), the Yin-Yang cosmological substrate, and the Image-Judgment-Line triad that governs each hexagram. The book functions as the I Ching’s Jungian secondary literature in the same way Edinger functions for Jungian alchemy — it makes the primary text operable.