Rudolf Ritsema was a devoted student of the I Ching since his first encounter with it in 1944. He was director of the prestigious Eranos Foundation for 30 years and after his retirement he published English, Italian and German translations of the I Ching. He passed away in 2006. The present definitive version of the Eranos I Ching is the distillation of his lifelong involvement with the book. Shantena Augusto Sabbadini worked as a theoretical physicist at the University of Milan and at the University of California, where he contributed to the first identification of a black hole. Later he became interested in religion, philosophy and psychology, and in 1991 he joined the Eranos circle and became involved in the Eranos conferences as organizer and lecturer. THE ORIGINAL I CHING ORACLE OR THE BOOK OF CHANGES BY RUDOLF RITSEMA AND SHANTENA AUGUSTO SABBADINI THE ERANOS I CHING PROJECT Contents Part One Introduction 1. The Book of Yi THE NAME OF THE BOOK YIN AND YANG SYNCHRONICITY A KALEIDOSCOPE OF IMAGES A MIRROR OF THE PRESENT GETTING STARTED 2. Interrogating the Oracle FORMULATING A QUESTION LINES, TRIGRAMS, HEXAGRAMS THE CONSULTATION PROCEDURE The coins method The yarrow stalk method Primary and potential hexagram Finding your hexagram READING YOUR ANSWER Layers of significance Rolling the words in your heart Chinese as an imaginal language BASIC FEATURES OF THE ERANOS TRANSLATION Core-words Fields of meaning Oracular and exegetic texts SECTIONS OF A HEXAGRAM Image of the Situation Outer and Inner Trigram Counter Hexagram Preceding Situation Hexagrams in Pairs Additional Texts Patterns of Wisdom Transforming Lines Image Tradition REMARKS ABOUT THE ERANOS TRANSLATION Romanization of Chinese characters Sources of the Fields of meaning Composite entries Special cases Idiomatic phrases Great and small THE CONCORDANCE 3. Myth and History THE TRADITION The first emperor The Pattern King MODERN VIEWS OF THE ORIGINS OF THE YI Bones and tortoise shells The yarrow stalk oracle THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK The Book of Encompassing Versatility The canonization of the Yi Philosophical and oracular tradition The Palace Edition The Mawangdui manuscript THE YIJING COMES TO THE WEST THE YIJING AT ERANOS Olga Froebe Rudolf Ritsema The Eranos Round Table Sessions 4. Correlative Thinking THE UNIVERSAL COMPASS The yin-yang cycle The yearly cycle and the four directions The five Transformative Moments THE EIGHT TRIGRAMS AND THEIR ATTRIBUTES CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE NOTES Part Two The 64 Hexagrams LIST OF HEXAGRAMS THE 64 HEXAGRAMS Part Three Concordance BIBLIOGRAPHY Key to the Hexagrams ZHOUYI This book is the result of the lifelong study of the Yijing by my coauthor, the late Rudolf Ritsema, as well as the meeting and merging of our sensibilities. While the text is essentially the same as in the original 2005 edition, I felt it was appropriate to endow it with a new Introduction, both to streamline the access to the practice of the oracle and to give adequate space to Rudolf’s involvement with the Yijing and with the creation of the Eranos Round Table Sessions. It is a story well worth telling that Rudolf’s self-effacing style kept from being included in the previous Introduction. A special thank-you goes to my wife, Cruz Mañas Peñalver, for substantially contributing to the Introduction of this new edition of The Original I Ching Oracle. Part One Introduction 1 | The Book of Yi THE NAME OF THE BOOK The title of this book, Yijing, as it is written in contemporary pinyin romanization, can be translated as “Book of Changes” or “Classic of Changes.” An older form of the title is Zhouyi, “Changes of the Zhou,” from the name of the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE), under which it came into being. Jing simply means “classic”: its canonization as a classic took place under the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), in the framework of the great unification of Chinese culture undertaken by the empire. Since then, the Yijing has been regarded as the Classic of Classics: for 2,000 years it has been to the Chinese the ultimate map of “heaven and earth.” The essential word in the book’s name is yi, which means, amongst other things, “change.” Change, as we all know, is the only permanence: existence is constant change, from the regular alternance of day and night, the sequence of the seasons, the growth and decay of all living forms. But the yi the title of the book points to encompasses also another type of change, the unpredictable change that sometimes irrupts into our life, the painful confrontation with our human limitations, stressful situations in which the usual bearings no longer suffice for orientation. The Book of Yi comes to our rescue in such situations. It was born in the first millennium BCE as a divination manual, i.e. as a practical tool to help people ride the waves of change and harness their energy: a tool to deal with yi, with critical times of change. In many ancient cultures these times were seen as intrusions of the divine, of gods and spirits, into human life, and a proper interrogation of these higher powers, engaging them in a dialogue, was considered essential in order to overcome the crisis. The Yijing was born and kept being used throughout its long history as one such method of divination, as an oracle. Divination is mostly associated in people’s minds with predicting the future. That is not the approach to divination we propose in this book. We do not view the Yi as a tool to predict the future, because we believe the future is unpredictable—and depends, among many other factors, on the course of action we choose. We suggest to use the Yi as a “mirror of the present,” as a tool for introspection, a tool to assess the appropriateness of a specific course of action in a given situation, a tool to open a dialogue with our own deeper wisdom and