I Ching Oracle Nederlands

I Ching Oracle Guide Jung asked the I Ching whether he might introduce it to the West

Jung asked the I Ching whether he might introduce it to the West

C.G. Jung wrote a foreword to Cary F. Baynes's English translation of the I Ching, itself based on Richard Wilhelm's German text. According to the surviving signature, he dated it Zurich, 1949. A year later the book appeared with Pantheon Books in New York, for the Bollingen Foundation, as volume XIX of the Bollingen Series, under the title The I Ching or Book of Changes. It was the first English-language American edition.

The translator, Cary Baynes, born Cary Fink (1883-1977), was not, according to the biographical record, one of Jung's analysands, but a valued friend and collaborator. She began the English text in 1929 and continued through the 1930s. She had already helped translate other Jung: with her then husband H.G. Peter Baynes, Contributions to Analytical Psychology and Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, both 1928, and with W.S. Dell, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933.

The current Princeton University Press hardcover also includes the Ten Wings, the appended texts attributed to Confucius. Princeton quotes the New York Times Book Review calling this edition, among readers of the I Ching, still the best and most authoritative.

Jung did something in that foreword that an introduction rarely does. He treated the I Ching as a person he was about to introduce to a critical Western public, and he asked that person, by the coin method, what it thought of the plan.

The caldron introduces itself

The answer was hexagram 50, Ting (鼎, The Caldron). Jung read it as if the book itself were speaking. It describes itself as a ritual vessel with cooked food inside, and that food stood for spiritual nourishment. A Chinese translation of the complete foreword, republished on 搜狐 (Sohu) under the title 荣格：《易经》序, confirms that reading down to the line texts, and agrees there with the English-language secondary accounts.

The moving lines were nine in the second place and nine in the third. Line two: there is food in the caldron; his companions are envious, but they cannot harm him. Line three: the handles of the caldron have been altered, the way is blocked, but good fortune comes in the end.

According to the same Chinese translation, Jung compared the oracle book itself to an inverted, unused caldron full of sediment. By setting the book upright again, that is, by using it again, the sediment is cleared and the vessel can serve.

This is not a philological claim. It is a man letting the book speak about the fact that he is going to recommend the book. Our reading: the caldron is at once the work, the translation reaching the West, and the spiritual food.

The second question and the rule of asking once

Later, when Jung considered writing about that first consultation, about his own conduct in the foreword, he asked again. He received hexagram 29, K'an (坎, The Abysmal), with the third line moving. That line changes to hexagram 48, Ching (井, The Well). The Sohu translation and the English accounts agree on the sequence.

The third line warns: forward and back, abyss upon abyss. The counsel is that one should not behave in this way, or should venture only small things. Jung read in it an instruction to limit himself to a modest aim: to show how the I Ching functions in Chinese thought, rather than to write a full psychological commentary on the whole book.

The answer pleased and satisfied him, he writes; asking the same question a second time would have been tactless. The formula is short: the master speaks but once. One English-language discussion links this to hexagram 4, Meng, where the oracle becomes difficult if asked two or three times.

The second consultation is therefore not a repetition of the first question. It is a question about narrating the first. Our reading: Jung used the oracle not as proof before the West, but as a brake on himself. Hexagram 50 lets the book introduce itself; hexagram 29 cuts the commentary short. The famous gesture in the foreword is thereby stricter than retellings often make it. The book may speak. The psychologist may not say everything he would like to say.

Jung mentions in the foreword that Confucius is said to have received only one inappropriate answer, hexagram 22; the gloss that he was disappointed comes from an English-language discussion.

Not a sinologist, still a witness

Jung writes that he is not a sinologist, and that a foreword from his hand must therefore be a testimony of his own experience with the book, not a philological or scientific judgment. That reserve appears in both the Chinese and the English-language accounts of the text.

According to the English summaries, he calls it embarrassing to set archaic magical formulas before a modern public, and he asks for the reader's goodwill and imagination. In the foreword he is also said to state that Western sinologists and authoritative Chinese scholars have told him the I Ching is nothing more than a collection of outdated magic spells. Yet he takes, on the basis of his experience in psychotherapy, a pragmatic view: nothing occult need be assumed, he holds, in order to explain why the book seems to give meaningful answers.

Writing in 1949, he says he has interested himself in this oracle technique for more than thirty years, and that he was already fairly familiar with the book when he met Wilhelm in the early 1920s. That agrees with a Chinese secondary account, which places the intensive work around 1920 at Bollingen: he is said to have spent a summer there in a thorough self-examination of the book, sitting for hours under an old pear tree by his tower, with a bundle of reeds instead of yarrow stalks.

The foreword ends, in the wording Wikiquote and Princeton transmit, with the claim that the I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, does not impose, and is not easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered. Anyone not drawn to it need not use it.

Wilhelm, Lao Naixuan, and the crossing

The English edition rests on the work of Richard Wilhelm (卫礼贤, Wèi Lǐxián). According to the Chinese translation of the foreword on Sohu, Wilhelm was born in Germany in 1873, studied theology in Tübingen, was ordained in 1897, went to Qingdao (青岛, Qīngdǎo) in 1899, and then remained in China for twenty-two years. The years 1873, 1899, and 1930 are confirmed by 澎湃新闻 (The Paper).

Wilhelm learned the philosophy and the use of the I Ching from Lao Naixuan (劳乃宣, Láo Nǎixuān), a scholar and official of the late Qing. The Paper, in the 2023 article 《易经》及其相关解读：中国哲学在西方的传播, reprinted from Princeton University Press China, states that Lao urged Wilhelm to study the I Ching, and that the two of them founded Qingdao's first public library. Wilhelm is said to have spent nearly ten years on the German translation, which appeared in 1924. Lao is described there as a representative of the li-jiao current: ritual-oriented Confucians.

The same article contains, elsewhere, a demonstrable error: it has Cary Baynes begin the translation in 1967, on Jung's recommendation. She began in 1929, well before the 1949 foreword, and the first printing appeared in 1950. The mistake is worth recording because this article is used as a source elsewhere.

Jung and Wilhelm met, according to one non-academic source, in the early 1920s at a gathering of Count Hermann Keyserling's Schule der Weisheit in Darmstadt. That placing could not be independently confirmed. The same source does report that Jung invited Wilhelm to Zurich in 1923, where Wilhelm lectured on the I Ching for the Psychological Club. Jung called Wilhelm's translation and commentary his most important work, and praised his capacity to listen without prejudice to the revelations of a foreign mentality.

When Wilhelm returned to Europe and became a professor at the China-Institut in Frankfurt, Jung told him, according to the same source, that the West was taking possession of him again and he was becoming unfaithful to his mission. Wilhelm had contracted amoebic dysentery in China in 1910; after a relapse he died on 1 March 1930 in Tübingen, at fifty-six. Jung visited him in hospital in Frankfurt and saw that Wilhelm's dreams were set in Asian steppe landscapes. In the 1930 memorial In Memory of Richard Wilhelm, Jung again named the I Ching translation Wilhelm's greatest life work.

Our reading, not Jung's: the inverted caldron full of sediment and the man who watched the West reclaim his translator lie against each other. The English edition of 1950, twenty years after Wilhelm's death, with Jung's foreword in front of it, looks like the setting upright of that caldron after the intermediary himself had fallen back into a European chair.

What Chinese scholars see

As we read it, the foreword is in the West mostly famous for the two consultations. In Chinese yixue (易学, Yijing studies) the stake is different. There is attention to Jung and the I Ching, but on this 1949 foreword specifically, less journal material is directly available than, for example, on the silk text from Mawangdui. Searches in 周易研究 (Zhouyi Yanjiu) and on the site of the 山东大学易学与中国古代哲学研究中心 (the Center for Zhouyi and Ancient Chinese Philosophy at Shandong University) yielded no publicly open article that takes this foreword as its subject.

The nearest piece is a lecture by someone from that same center, delivered elsewhere. On 27 March 2023, Zhang Wenzhi (张文智), professor and deputy director of that center, spoke at 中山大学 (Sun Yat-sen University) on 《易经》哲学与荣格分析心理学. According to the report by the School of Philosophy there, nearly all the core concepts of Jung's analytical psychology show an inner coherence with I Ching philosophy, and Jung's synchronicity corresponds to the cosmological originating principle of the I Ching. What that concept contains belongs to another essay in this guide.

Zhang also states a disciplinary criticism, not a nationalist one. Jung's individuation, in his view, does not render the interweaving of the eight items (八目) from the Da Xue, and does no justice to the I Ching notion of returning from virtue to the Dao (由德返道): from what has been acquired back to the original. Jung also fails, Zhang holds, to connect qian yuan and kun yuan (乾元, 坤元), the originating forces of Qian and Kun, with yin and yang (阴阳两仪), and so to find the ontological ground of taiji (太极).

Our reading: Zhang's critique touches ground on which Jung himself said he could not speak as a sinologist; whether Jung saw the gap that way, the sources do not say.

A second Chinese voice concerns not the foreword but a later anecdote often read into it. Chen Bingyu (陈炳聿) wrote in 2014, on 新浪博客 (Sina), the piece 荣格与胡适对易经的歧见. He places the meeting with Hu Shih (胡適, Hú Shì) in the 1930s, and the remark that the I Ching is nothing but an old collection of magic spells without meaning, explicitly in Jung's memoirs Memories, Dreams, Reflections, not in the I Ching foreword. When Jung asked whether a fitting answer was nevertheless of interest, Hu Shih hesitated and then agreed. English summaries sometimes imply that the scene stands in the foreword. This essay follows Chen for the location; whether the scene also stands in the foreword was not checked here.

Chen reads the disagreement as a tension between the general and the particular: Jung's interest in abstract psychological patterns against Hu Shih's personal experience of the shadow-image of Chinese fatalistic superstition. Hu Shih's criticism therefore has, in Chen's account, a side fed by experience. The Paper adds, as a note on Western Yijing reception in general, Iulian Shchutskii, who went back to the original text rather than starting from the biased structure with which most Western scholars study the book. That is an implicit criticism of the reading to which Wilhelm and Jung can also be counted.

It follows, we think, that the foreword became, in the West, a detour around the specialists, and in Chinese yixue a side path beside the history of the text. Jung himself says that sinologists and authoritative Chinese scholars dismissed the book as outdated spells. He did not refute them philologically. He went to a lay public, with two hexagrams as witnesses. Princeton can still have the New York Times call the Wilhelm and Baynes edition the authoritative one among enthusiasts. In our searches we did not find the foreword treated as a central text in the Chinese specialist press. Both can be true.

In 2023 Zeng published, in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, the article The I Ching as a Potential Jungian Application: History and Practice. Title, author, journal, and year are verified; the full contents of that article could not be read for this essay.

Sources

The old ritual Cast the yarrow stalks Ask your question and build your hexagram line by line, with the classical odds.

Further reading

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