Foreword, The I Ching or Book of Changes ![]() These interpretations are equivalent to causal explanations. … he sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the instrument by which the meaning of sixty-four different yet typical situations can be determined. Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity … deals with the coincidence of events. ![]() ![]() Ynchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance …. As the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung comments in his foreword to Wilhelm/Baynes’ translation of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination method is “more akin to the perception of a work of art.” Jung further points out that the idea behind I Ching divination is similar to his own idea of “ synchronicity”-the assumption that events that occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related are actually meaningful coincidences. The basic idea behind I Ching divination is that every moment in spacetime is an all-encompassing picture like a holographic screenshot everything in the moment, down to every trifling minutia (such as the occasional falling of leaves), is an indispensable piece in a unique jigsaw puzzle. Its creation took the work of three sages and spanned across three ancient ages. Luckily this reclassification hadn’t taken immediate effect, though, because otherwise the I Ching couldn’t have survived Qin Shi Huang’s brutal policy of burning philosophical books and burying Confucian scholars in 212–213 B.C.E. The authorship of the I Ching is usually attached to all three historical/mythical figures mentioned above-together with the much younger Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), who allegedly had added the most important commentaries to the book (called the Ten Wings) and played a crucial role in its reclassification as a philosophical book. For example, bagua is now used figuratively in everyday language to mean "gossip," "to gossip," or "gossipy." The major difference between King Wen’s system and Fuxi’s system lies in their different arrangements of the eight trigrams or bagua ‘eight gua’ ( 八卦).įuxi’s “Earlier Heaven” arrangement (left) and King Wen’s “Later Heaven” arrangement (right) of the eight trigrams (sources: Wikimedia Commons 1 2)Ī linguistic aside: The I Ching has influenced the root of the Chinese culture so deeply that many divination-specific terms in it have been fossilized in the Chinese language. King Wen, on the other hand, had built his work upon that of Fuxi (21st century B.C.E.), a legendary early ruler of the Chinese civilization. The established form of the I Ching is attributed to the Duke of Zhou (11th century B.C.E.)-hence its other name Zhou yi ‘Changes of the Zhou Dynasty’ ( 周易) 2-but the core symbolic system of the book, including its eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams, is actually the work of the duke’s father, King Wen of Zhou. The I Ching’s operating principle is that change is the one constant in life, and that our lives are just a series of changes from one set of circumstances to the next. I find the following words from a divination website a good summary. It models the world in terms of transitions between hexagrams, which are little pictures made up of six solid or broken lines such as ䷂ and ䷄. It’s also simply (and sometimes preferably) called I (pronounced “ee”), for its canonization as a Ching ‘classic text’ (in 136 B.C.E.) only happened many centuries after its birth.Īs its name suggests, the I Ching is a book about changes. I Ching or Yijing ( 易經), 1 literally “the Classic of Changes,” is the oldest and most important classic text in Chinese history. Those who already know the basics of the I Ching or are simply impatient can skip the first four parts and directly jump to Part 5. The more I thought about the idea, the more curious I got, so I decided to give it a go and see if I could describe I Ching divination in linguistic terms-just for fun. For instance, the other day I was thinking about I Ching (can’t remember why), the ancient Chinese divination book, and an idea suddenly popped into my head: Isn’t the procedural manipulation of symbols in the divination process a sort of syntactic derivation like that in transformational-generative grammar? ![]() Sometimes our brains make connections in unexpected ways.
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