Consulting the I Ching

Consulting the I Ching (Yijing, the Book of Changes) is a Chinese divinatory practice built on a classic whose core stratum dates to the Zhou dynasty. The inquirer generates a hexagram, a figure of six stacked lines, each either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang), traditionally by sorting a bundle of fifty yarrow stalks in a lengthy count, or, in the simpler method that spread later, by casting three coins six times. Lines produced as changing yield a second hexagram, so that the reading describes a situation and its tendency to transform.

Each of the sixty-four hexagrams carries a terse judgement and line texts, on which an enormous commentarial tradition has grown, most importantly the appendices known as the Ten Wings that reframed a diviner's manual as a book of cosmological and ethical wisdom central to both Confucian and Daoist thought. The oracle reached the West largely through Richard Wilhelm's translation and Carl Jung's foreword, which read the coincidence of hexagram and question through Jung's notion of synchronicity, an interpretation that says as much about twentieth-century European thought as about the Chinese text.

The Book of Changes reached its present form in at least two historical stages that Chinese tradition itself distinguishes. The core layer, the sixty four hexagrams and their brief, often cryptic line judgments, dates to the Zhou dynasty and is the oldest material; the Ten Wings, a set of commentaries explaining and philosophizing on that core text, were added later and were traditionally attributed to Confucius himself, an attribution modern scholarship generally treats as a later reverential claim rather than established authorship. Generating a hexagram has always allowed more than one method: the older procedure, described in the Ten Wings, involves a lengthy manipulation of fifty yarrow stalks through several rounds of division and counting to build each of the six lines individually, a slow, deliberately meditative process that can take the better part of an hour. A far quicker method using three coins, each toss standing in for a full round of the yarrow procedure, became common later and is what most casual users of the oracle practice today, trading the older method's duration for convenience while producing mathematically different odds for certain line types.

The text's major modern Western reception traces largely to the German scholar Richard Wilhelm's translation, rendered into English by Cary Baynes in the twentieth century, which introduced the oracle to a Western audience largely through a psychologically inflected lens quite different from its role in classical Chinese Confucian and Daoist thought.