Change Eight Lectures on the I Ching

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/change-eight-lectures-on-the-i-ching/

Click Download Now

 Contents

PREFACE Vll

1 Origins )

2 The Concept of Change I)

3 The Two Fundamental Principles 2)

4 The Trigrams and the Hexagrams 35

5 The Hexagrams Ch'ien and K'un 48

6 The Ten Wings 64

7 The Later History of the Book of Changes 79

8 The Oracle Book 92
INDEX 107
 Translator's Note

This translation has been read and criticized by the author. I am also
indebted to my daughter Ximena de Angulo for a rigorous critique of
the manuscript. Errors that remain are my responsibility.
CARY F. BAYNES
Morris, Connecticut, Spring 1960
 Preface

This little volume consists of lectures given in Peking in the winter of

1943· This was the grim time when the war in China had been going
on for almost six years and Peking was under Japanese occupation, a
time when all creative forces seemed frozen and darkness ruled the day.
During that period there was a group of German-speaking people in
the city who kept apart from the activities of the German community
and everything connected with it. This group found a center in the
home of Wilhelm Haas. Wilhelm Haas is a man with the courage of
perseverance; even in the most hopeless situations he has never yielded
to despair. And thus it was not by chance that one day he suggested to
me that I give some lectures at his house on the Book of Changes.
Hesitantly, and only with reluctance, I acceded to his suggestion. This
book, its language and imagery, was completely unfamiliar to the au-
dience; moreover, there was at that time a tendency to evade the hard-
ships of the day by dabbling in the occult, and this was a trend I did not
wish to encourage. Wilhelm Haas was able to convince me, however,
and so I risked the experiment.
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, also called the Chou I, owes the
authority it has always enjoyed in China to a number of causes. One,
undoubtedly, is the fact that it has become the first among the Chinese
vii
 CHANGE

classics. After the Confucian school took up the book in the last period
of the Chou era, it became one of the texts whose study was authorized
by the government; and when all the non-Confucian schools were ex-
cluded from the imperial academy in 140 B.C., the I Ching shared with
the other Confucian classics in the monopoly of established doctrine.
At that time chairs of study were created at the academy for this book,
as for the other classics, and this tradition has continued throughout
Chinese history. Thus the place of the Book of Changes in Chinese
culture rests, in the last analysis, on an act of imperial will. It may
occasion surprise that the decree of a temporal power sufficed to give
the classics a position that can be compared in other cultures to the
place of sacred scriptures inspired by divine revelation. The reason
seems to lie in the concentration of divine as well as temporal power in
the person of the emperor, in China as well as in other oriental societies.
The emperor was not only the sole source of political decisions, he was
also the Son of Heaven, the representative of the deity among men; he
alone could enact the sacred rites of the great sacrifices, and his decisions
consequently had a quality of irrefutability not peculiar to temporal
power in the West.
With respect to the I Ching there would seem to be, over and beyond
the sufficiency of imperial power, reasons why the decree was univer-
sally accepted. In the framework of Confucian thought, we must re-
member, education was not an end in itself. A man was educated for
public service, and in a system of increasingly rigid institutions, this
meant service as a public official. Now, as an official, an educated man
was indeed defenceless vis-a-vis the emperor, and the imperial will was
to him an ineluctable fate. The emperors often played their role of
fate-makers with a remarkable lack of restraint, and a great number of
the educated came to experience this in jeopardy of life and limb. Under
such circumstances, the Book of Changes offered a means wherewith a
man confronted with imperial whim could still mold his own fate. To
the persons in public service, the existing institutions and the position
of the emperor were the given conditions of their lives, and indeed the
Book of Changes took these conditions into account; within the system,
viii
 Preface
however, the counsels of the book enabled such persons to remain
masters of their fates. Furthermore, the concept of change on which
the book is based again and again counteracted a tendency toward
permanent ossification of the institutions. During the entire course of
China's history, her great reformers almost without exception have
drawn their inspiration from this book. Since it was a classic, they found
in it authoritative backing which helped to smooth the path for their
reforms.
In addition to these causalities in the world of Later Heaven, the
predominant place of the I Ching not only among the educated but
among the whole people is due to its character, which differentiates it
from the remaining classics. Confucius, despite all his fire, was a person
of considerable reserve. His religion was to him a purely personal con-
cern, and not the subject of sermons. What lay beyond the threshold and
what motivated his own actions so immediately were things of which he
seldom spoke. In later Confucianism, this personal attitude became a
trend that gave the whole movement an almost agnostic and certainly
a distinctly secular cast. The mission in this world which Confucianism
had taken upon itself seemed indeed to require such an attitude. By
contrast, the Book of Changes represented the gate to the whole man
and to the whole world, and this complement was as necessary to the
emperor and to the official as it was necessary to the subject people, for
whom not only the will of the emperor but also that of the official was
a component of destiny.
And so it was that until very recently the Chinese turned to the
Book of Changes whenever problems arose in the conduct of life. At
temple fairs and at the weekly markets were special stalls where one
could obtain oracles. At street corners, soothsayers skilled in the oracle
had their permanent tables and gave counsel on how to recover a
strayed dog or how to deal with a domineering mother-in-law. And at
night in the cities, the flute song of blind fortunetellers was to be heard;
called into the house, they would feel the signs on the coins with delicate
finger tips and would bring forth the wisdom and counsel of the book
from the treasure house of memory.
ix
 CHANGE

The central position of the I Ching is also reflected in the Chinese

literature on the subject. In 16gz, a bibliography of works on the
Chinese classics was published, which contains approximately two thou-
sand titles on the Book of Changes. Some of this material is discussed in
the seventh and eighth lectures of this volume. Nor has the tradition
been interrupted; up to our own day Chinese scholars have written
much, at times perceptively, on questions connected with the book.
During the last generation especially, interest grew particularly strong.
Western Sinologues, too, have devoted a great deal of attention to it:
among the earliest investigators, the Jesuit missionaries at the court of
Peking during the seventeenth century. Since then, seven different
translations, in Latin, French, and English, have appeared,* and
the scholarly journals of the last twenty years have repeatedly published
discussions of questions arising out of the texts of the book. In the light
of all this, my father's primary object in his translation was to reproduce
the living tradition of the book and its contents. His close relations with
Chinese scholars and men of affairs to whom this tradition was still of
personal concern made his task easier.
The lectures reprinted here are based throughout on the work of
my father. The texts quoted from the I Ching are given in his version.
Only very occasionally, where recent research has led to results not yet
available to my father, have I deviated from his translation; and in my
interpretation I, too, have frequently based myself on the Chinese
literature. The present edition reprints the lectures unchanged, in
the form in which they were set down at the time.
HELLMUT WILHELM

Seattle, Spring 1958

*[In addition to the German translation of Richard Wilhelm: I Ging, Das Buch der
W andlungen (Jena, 1924; latest edn., Dusseldorf, 1956). Translated by Cary F.
Baynes: The I Ching, or Book of Changes (New York [Bollingen Series XIX] and
London, rgso), 2 vols. This translation is cited in the present work by bracketed
references to volume and page. Minor variations in wording are not noted.]

X
1

Origins

Our object is to spend some hours together discussing the Book of

Changes. Of course, such an undertaking is not without hazards. This
book is difficult to understand; it is so full of cryptic sayings and seem-
ingly abstruse matters that an explanation is often not readily available,
and we are tempted to fall back on interpretation to get at the meaning.
To us children of an essentially rational generation it poses a problem
we are at first reluctant to face; we are led into a region in which we do
not know the terrain, and which we have forbidden ourselves to enter
except possibly in rare moments of imaginative daring. We ask our-
selves if what we are to meet there is not a kind of speculation that lacks
any connection with our world. Worse, are we perhaps entering that
twilight realm which seduces our generation away from meeting its
tasks in the here and now? It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit
scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe,
those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all
later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves
the study of the I Ching is not a thing to be undertaken lightly. By an
unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready
to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when
he first took up the Book of Changes.
 CHANGE

If nonetheless we undertake to devote some hours to this book, it is

because we have important reasons. A book that has stood in such high
repute among the men who have determined the fate of China, and that,
beginning with Leibniz (we shall have more to say on this point later),
has had so much influence on the leading minds of Europe, will have
something to offer us also. If we can obtain from it some insight into
the minds of our hosts in this country whose guests we are, that in
itself will be rewarding. And if, moreover, we should succeed in deriving
from it not only understanding, but also genuine illumination, our
undertaking will have been entirely justified. We shall do well, though,
to keep our doubts in mind as we proceed, rather than suppress them.
So may we avoid overenthusiasm and its resulting undertow.

Let us first glance at the appearance and composition of the Book of

Changes, in order to get a summary view of the material we are to
discuss. The book is based on sixty-four hexagrams, that is, sixty-four
six-line figures, each figure or complex being composed of undivided
and of divided lines. These hexagrams form the point of departure for
what the book has to say. Later we shall deal in detail with the meaning
of these lines and with the way in which they are grouped. In the hexa-
grams, situations are symbolized; they are characterized by the appended
names, and these names already take us into the sphere of the book.
We find images representing the primary needs of man-for instance,
The Corners of the Mouth, symbolizing nourishment-and also images
that picture the evolution of personality: Youthful Folly, Molting, Biting
Through, Possession, Return (The Turning Point), The Obstacle, Op-
pression, Standstill, Waiting, Decrease, Retreat; then Break-Through,
Pushing Upward, Development, Increase, Abundance, and (the two
last images) After Completion and Before Completion. Then there are
situations taken from social life: The Marrying Maiden, The Clan, The
Well, Fellowship with Men, Holding Together, Approach, Wooing,
Coming to Meet, Following, The Power of the Great, Peace; but also
Opposition and Conflict. Further, individual character traits are singled

4
 Origins

out: Modesty, Grace, Innocence, Enthusiasm, Inner Truth. Finally, we

find images of suprapersonal significance: The Clinging, The Arousing,
Holding Still, The Gentle, The Joyous, and, above all (the first two
hexagrams), The Creative and The Receptive.
The linear complexes with their appended titles provide the frame-
work of the subject matter discussed in the Book of Changes. Various
categories of Texts elaborate the material in detail. In each hexagram
we find at the beginning a brief text, often rhymed, called T'uan, a
word that originally meant "pig's head" and has been tentatively
translated "judgment" or "decision." This judgment sums up the
situation, what one may expect of it, and what its chief attributes are.
A second text of more recent date is called Hsiang,* "image." This
starts from the symbolic meaning of the linear complexes and indicates
their basic application to a human, social, or cosmic situation. These
image texts, also concise and brief, often have a remarkable beauty of
expression. We frequently find in them references to historical situa-
tions, or to typical actions and attitudes of compelling symbolic force,
and which therefore arouse a desire to emulate. For example, in hexa-
gram 0 6, Darkening of the Light, it is said:

The light has sunk into the earth:

The image of Darkening of the Light.
Thus does the superior man live with the great mass:
He veils his light, yet still shines. [I, 150]

In hexagram z8, Preponderance of the Great, the image reads:

The lake rises above the trees:

The image of Preponderance of the Great.
Thus the superior man, when he stands alone,
Is unconcerned,
And if he has to renounce the world,
He is undaunted. [I, 119]

[*Part of the Third and Fourth Wing. Seep. 66.-TRANS.J

5
 CHANGE

In hexagram 52, Keeping Still, we have:

Mountains standing close together:
The image of Keeping Still.
Thus the superior man
Does not permit his thoughts
To go beyond his situation. [I, 215]

A third text, Yao, adds words to each of the six lines of a hexagram,
counting the lowest line as the first and going upward. This group of
texts is charged with images and symbols; their immediate relevance to
the situation is often hard to see, and at first we must simply accept them
as they are, bearing in mind that in the course of our study an explana-
tion may emerge. It is said, for example, that one is:
Wrapped in the hide of a yellow cow. [I, 203]

Or it is said:
The wild goose gradually draws near the shore.
The younger son is in danger.
There is talk. No blame. [I, 219]

Or,
A crane calling in the shade.
Its young answers it.
I have a good goblet.
I will share it with you. [I, 252]

Or,
Someone does indeed increase him.
Ten pairs of tortoises cannot oppose it.
Supreme good fortune. [I, 172]

Or,
One sees the wagon dragged back,
The oxen halted,
The man's hair and nose cut off.
Not a good beginning, but a good end. [I, 159]
6
 Origins

These texts, six for each hexagram, often have a common leitmotif
that runs through all six lines. Often this is taken from the name of the
hexagram, but often too, a metaphor is introduced and different aspects
or stages of it are appended to the individual lines.
To these three categories of texts, which are regarded as the basic
parts of the book, still other material has been added. First, for each
hexagram there is a commentary on the t'uan text, or the judgment,
which is known as the Commentary on the Decision (T'uan Chuan)
and often gives the reason for the choice of the words in the t'uan; and
often there is an exposition and elucidation of the attributes of the
hexagram.
Another text complex is regarded as a commentary on the words
appended to the individual lines. It is made up of brief, often rhymed
mnemonic verses that have a connection with the imagery of the line
texts.
\

Still another important text complex is the Wen Yen, or Commentary

on the Words of the Text. This seems to be a very early commentary, or
rather collection of commentaries, of which only fragments concerning
the first two hexagrams are extant.
Then there follow two collections of texts, one of which explains
the sequence of the hexagrams, giving in many instances interpreta-
tions of their names, while the other gives a brief definition of each
hexagram as a whole, often drawing a contrast between two of them.
Together with these five texts that can be divided up and all?cated
to the individual hexagrams, two essays representing a sort of introduc-
tion to the work have been incorporated in the book. They are, first,
the ShuoKua, Discussion of the Trigrams [r, z81], which interprets the
two primary trigrams making up each hexagram, and the symbolic
values represented; and second, the so-called Great Treatise, known also
under the name Hsi T'zu, or Appended Judgments [r, 501], which
gives a general introduction to the text of the book as a whole. Further
on, we shall discuss this commentary in more detail.

7
 CHANGE

As to the purpose of the I Ching and the kind of environment that gave
rise to it, these are questions to which a simple answer is not easy to find.
It is certain that it was regarded as an oracle book and used as such at a
very early date. If, as a starting point, we stick to this fact, something
can be deduced about the nature of the soil in which the book grew.
The mental attitude which leads a person to consult an oracle, is,
after all, not foreign to our own culture either. We too, are familiar
with sybils, prophets, and places from which prophetic sayings emanated.
Such places and institutions owe their existence to the desire for
greater understanding inherent in every aspiring individual. To be
aware of the situation in which he finds himself and of the consequences
that may grow out of it must be the aim of every person who wants to
guide his life rather than merely drift with the current. Search for this
knowledge by way of oracles has occurred at all times and everywhere,
and even today has not wholly died out. Modern psychology has shown
us the substructures of the human psyche, which are the source of our
strivings to see meaning and order in what is apparently coincidental.
Out of this grows our conscious attempt to fit ourselves into the content
of this order, so that, in the parallelism between what is without and
what is within us, the position and course of the one may also be mean-
ingful for the other. This attitude is old; indeed, it is inherent in human
nature. The continents and eras differ only as regards the place where
this dark door is sought. Vapors arising from the earth and the stars in
their courses have been enlisted again and again as means of obtaining
the much sought-for knowledge. In addition, clues that should give the
key to this parallelism have been sought in the forces of organic life,
especially animal life. Animal oracles of various kinds have existed
everywhere. In China, the bone oracle was extensively used from the
earliest times.
In contrast to these and even more mechanical efforts, it is impor-
tant to point out that the oracle of the Book of Changes uses as its key
the forces of vegetable rather than animal life. It was a plant growing in
sacred places, the yarrow, whose stalks gave access to the oracle when
manipulated in a certain way. Clearly, this distinction between the
8
 Origins

vegetable and the animal indicates not only a difference in method but
also a difference in the nature of the oracle.
Another thing that distinguishes the oracle system of the Book of
Changes from other similar phenomena is the circumstance that it
makes the questioner independent of the mediumistic gifts, or intuition,
of an oracle giver. Thus all sorts of influences to which an oracle priest
may be exposed were eliminated. It was not a human medium that was
consulted but a collection of texts whose authority and value the oracle
seeker accepted unquestioningly. For these texts represented to him a
fully rounded system, an ordered framework, within which a point to
be established would give his momentary situation and what it implied.
This system was created by men of ancient times, whom the questioner
revered as custodians of a wisdom full of awareness of the connection
between what is decreed and what happens. It was from them that he
drew his information. This means that the oracle was not born over-
night, but must have been preceded by a coherent idea of the cosmos, a
definite system of the images of life, that is, a picture of the world,
which was then laid down in the Book of Changes.
This brings us to the thing that makes the Book of Changes interest-
ing to persons other than those consulting the oracle. Even if we shrink
from approaching the book with the willing faith of an oracle seeker,
we can still meditate on this image of the cosmos for its own sake and
seek to understand it. The history of the book's origins shows us what
can be gained from these reflections.

From what we know of its origins, we cannot say with certainty whether
the logical precedence taken by the book and its philosophy over its
oracle system corresponds to a precedence in time also; that is, whether
the Book of Changes and its picture of the world antedated oracle-taking
and, as many persons still think today, did not originally serve the oracle
system.
We have seen that the material out of which the book has been
composed is heterogeneous throughout, that it does not stem from one
9
 CHANGE

period, much less from one man. Chinese tradition concerning its
sources, disputed by modern research in every point with more or less
reason, places the origin of the different parts in different eras. Tradition
says that the legendary culture hero Fu Hsi first devised the linear
complexes of the book. Fu Hsi is usually represented as a mountain out
of which a leaf-crowned human head emerges. Though this ascription
does indeed seem legendary, it is certain at least that the fundamental
idea of complexes of whole and divided lines goes back to remote
antiquity. Then we are told that the present book has resulted from the
revision of two earlier books, also based on the hexagrams, but differing
from the present book in the arrangement and names of the individual
hexagrams. Of these two books almost nothing trustworthy is preserved
to us today except the titles. The first was called Lien Shan, "Mountains
Standing Together," and is placed in the Hsia dynasty (2205-1766 B.c.,
traditionally); the later book had the nameKuei Ts'ang, "Reverting to
the Hidden," and was in use in the Shang era (1766-1150 B.C.). The
fact that the Hsia book began with the hexagram for mountain and the
Shang book with that for the earth agrees with what we know of the
religious beliefs of those times. But these two books contained little of
importance besides the linear complexes and their names. A few cryptic
sayings of uncertain authenticity· that have come down to us in con-
nection with the books tell us but little today. Obviously, various ac-
cretions to the saga occurred, if not in writing then in an oral tradition,
and these were made use of in the later version. Modern Chinese re-
search has shown that historical allusions harking back to the Shang
period are to be found in our texts, indicating that this material of this
book must have begun to crystallize in that early time.
The composition of the present Book of Changes, henceforth named
I Ching or Chou I, is attributed to King Wen, father of the founder of
the Chou dynasty (115o-249 B.c.), the name of which has been identi-
fied with the book ever since. He is said to have established the present
arrangement and to have added the T'uan texts (Judgments). It is
recounted that he completed this work at a time when the last Shang
ruler held him captive in his capital. There is nothing in itself improb-
10
 Origins

able in this tradition. Modern Chinese research, which for a long time
held widely divergent views as to the time of origin of the I Clu'ng, has
now come back to placing this stratum of text in the time of King W ~n.
The reversal of the positions of the first two hexagrams, giving the
father predominance over the mother, clearly carries the imprint of
the patriarchal Chou dynasty. And whatever else we know about the
man W~n, who is honored as a culture hero, does indeed bear out the
notion that he occupied himself with the I Ching. It is possible, of
course, that our present text does not transmit the exact words of King
W ~n. This reservation applies especially to the auguries ''good fortune,"
"misfortune," "remorse," "humiliation," and so on, which are often
appended to the judgments. These terms are so very reminiscent of the
tortoise oracle, with which the Book of Changes is otherwise not con-
nected, that we are more or less forced to believe them to be additions
made by later adepts in divination who were still familiar with the
technique of the tortoise oracle.
These additions probably stem from the same period as the third
stratum of text, the Yao, or explanations of the individual lines. Tradi-
tion has it that these originated with King W~n's son Tan, Duke of
Chou, the man who, after the death of his brother, King Wu, carried
out the regency for his nephew, Ch'~ng in so exemplary a fashion. It is
questionable whether Tan's authorship can be validated, but it is certain
that this textual stratum also belongs to the early Chou period. In writ-
ings of the pre-Confucian period we find it cited along with other oracle
books that are no longer extant. If we recognize in whose hands divina-
tion rested in the early Chou period, it will be easy to show in what circle
the editors of these texts are to be sought. We know that Chou society,
in which the use of oracles probably had no place originally, was in the
habit of employing a class of the Shang people-a class that had fulfilled
like functions in the time of their own dynasty-for divination and
related professions. These persons may have filled out the compendium
of the I Clung by adding the texts to the individual lines. It may be
assumed that, in doing this, they made use of the oral traditions con-
nected with the book. Allusions that go back to the early period of the
11