BOLLINGEN SER.IES LXII Hellmut Wilhelm CHANGE Eight Lectures on the I Ching Translated from the German by Cary F. Baynes Bollingen Series LXII Pantheon Books Princeton University Press edition 2019 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-61922-4 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-65649-6 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 92 107 INDEX 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