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The I Ching Handbook

The I Ching Handbook

The I Ching Handbook is a work by Wu Wei (1999).

Core claims

  • Wu Wei’s Handbook strips the I Ching of its cosmological and philosophical superstructure to produce a purely functional divinatory instrument, inadvertently demonstrating that accessibility and depth are genuinely antagonistic rather than complementary goals in oracular literature.
  • By eliminating the tension between text and commentary that every serious I Ching edition preserves, Wu Wei collapses the hermeneutic space that makes divination psychologically productive — the very ambiguity Jung identified as the oracle’s mechanism for surfacing unconscious content.
  • The book’s real contribution is diagnostic: it reveals what a contemporary Western audience wants from an oracle (clear answers, reduced anxiety, actionable guidance) and thereby exposes the ego’s resistance to the numinous encounter that oracular consultation is designed to provoke.
  • How does Jung’s account of synchronicity in his foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching implicitly critique the handbook approach to divination that Wu Wei represents, and what does this suggest about the relationship between ambiguity and unconscious activation?
  • In what ways does Ritsema and Karcher’s Eranos-based translation methodology in I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change operationalize the same principles of imagistic engagement that Hillman advocates in Re-Visioning Psychology, and how does Wu Wei’s simplification violate both?
  • Alfred Huang argues that the Tao of I is embedded in the sequence of hexagrams rather than in individual hexagram meanings — how does this structural claim parallel Edinger’s notion of the ego-Self axis as a developmental sequence rather than a static relationship?

See also

  • Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/wu-wei-i-ching-handbook/

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