1 | The Book of Yi
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 align our actions with the dao.
Such dialogue with our inner wisdom is especially useful at times of crisis. The Chinese term for “crisis” consists of two characters, wei and ji. Wei means “danger,” and ji means, among other things, “moment” and “chance.” So a crisis is a dangerous moment, but also a chance, an opportunity. It is an opportunity for growth, first of all: such times can bring profound transformation—but can be painful, disconcerting and full of anxiety.
Modern chaos theory pays particular attention to these murky transitions, by which forms transmute into each other. In fact, life itself arises at the boundary between order and chaos: it requires both, it is a daughter of both. On the side of perfect order there is no movement: there is only inertia, symmetry, thermo -dynamic equilibrium. Nothing very interesting can happen there: everything is too predictable. But the side of total disorder is not very interesting either: forms appear and disappear too quickly, there is a total lack of symmetry, everything is too unpredictable. It is on the edge between order and chaos that the subtle dance of life takes place: here the real complexity arises, here forms bend and loop and transmute and evolve.
The Yijing is the ancient Chinese map of this dance of order and chaos. It is based on two principles, yin and yang, that are closely related to the ideas of structure and action, form and energy. Pure yin is structure, with no movement; pure yang is chaotic creation and destruction, no form. But the interplay of yin and yang gives birth to the “myriad beings,” the endless variety of life and the marvelous complexity of the world. In the Yijing this dance is encoded in 64 hexagrams, figures composed of six opened (yin) or whole (yang) lines, diagrams of different combinations of the two basic principles.
Yin and yang are the fundamental polarity of this system. These two basic categories of Chinese thought cannot be adequately translated in Western terms. In order to understand them correctly, we must keep in mind that they represent aspects of processes and not qualities of things. Nothing is intrinsically yin or yang.
As a first approximation, we can say that yang refers to action, and yin to concrete form in space. For example, when we look at writing as the action of tracing signs on paper, it can be described as yang; while the signs themselves, the written document produced by this action, can be described as yin.
Yang is sometimes characterized as “creative,” while yin is characterized as “receptive.” But that is not quite correct, because no creation is possible through pure action without ever reaching a consolidated form (and likewise no creation is possible through form without action). All creation is the result of the inter-penetration of these two complementary aspects and of their dynamic interplay.
The following list of qualities associated with yin and yang can be helpful to get a feeling of how these two basic categories are perceived in Chinese thought:
| Yin refers to: | Yang refers to: |
| the shady southern bank of a river | the bright northern bank of a river |
| the shady northern slope of a mountain | the bright southern slope of a mountain |
| water | fire |
| moon | sun |
| dark | bright |
| moist | dry |
| soft | hard |
| hidden | manifest |
| static | dynamic |
| lower | upper |
| inner | outer |
| incoming | outgoing |
| contracting | expanding |
| inertia | activity |
| completion | beginning |
| form | energy |
| structure | movement |
| being | doing |
| waiting | initiating |
| response | stimulus |
| The character Yin suggests clouds and shadows of hills. |
The character Yang suggests sunrise and a sunlit flag. |
As soon as the original Unity moves into differentiation, the interlocked movement of yin and yang arises: the symbol of the One in this differentiating aspect is the taiji:
The alternation of yin and yang is patterned on the cycle of day and night: during the morning hours the light of yang expands into the darkness of yin, reaching a peak at noon; then it starts declining, as the darkness of yin creeps in, and in the evening takes over, enveloping everything in its nightly veil. Midnight is at the same time the culmination of yin and the beginning of the rebirth of yang. In the taiji, at the point where the dark principle of yin reaches its maximum expansion we find a light dot, the seed of the rebirth of yang; and at the point where the light principle of yang reaches its peak we find a dark dot, the seed of the return of yin.
Thus all culmination is necessarily followed by a decrease and all descent by an ascent:
Therefore being and non-being generate each other,
difficult and easy complete each other,
long and short define each other,
high and low lean towards each other . . .1
The early yang can be characterized as “young yang,” while the late yang can be characterized as “old yang,” ready to turn into yin; and the early yin can be characterized as “young yin,” while the late yin can be characterized as “old yin,” ready to transform into yang.
Like many other forms of divination, the oracular practice of the Yijing is based on what in modern scientific terms we call a random procedure. That is an approach utterly foreign to the contemporary scientific mind, which considers random as essentially equivalent to meaningless. But the assumption of orthodox Western science that there is no meaning to be gleaned from random events was certainly not shared by the ancient Chinese. Their divinatory practices and their whole cosmology were based on a qualitative notion of time, in which all things happening at a given moment in time share some common features, are part of an organic pattern. Nothing therefore is entirely meaningless, and the entry point to understanding the overall pattern can be any detail of the moment, provided we are able to read it. This has been very well described by C. G. Jung in his classic fore word to the translation of the Yijing by his friend Richard Wilhelm. He writes: mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed . . .
The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the Yijing, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar
The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all the ingredients make up the observed moment.
Thus it happens that when one throws the three coins, or counts through the forty-nine yarrow stalks, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it—a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the Chinese mind . . .
In other words, whoever invented the Yijing was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast—even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be— inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin.
This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality . . . Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) state of the observer or observers.2
The way in which the oracular use of the Yijing relates to the configuration of events at any given moment is therefore more akin to the perception of a work of art than to a rational analysis of cause and effect. It is a rich tapestry of meaning, in which all details are subtly connected and somehow necessary—not because of deterministic laws, but because they are part of an organic whole. Of course, the Chinese were aware of the existence of causal connections between events; but that aspect was relatively flat and uninteresting to them. On the contrary, they were fascinated by and focused their attention on subtler, more complex and less exactly definable connections. The Western notion that comes closest to their approach is Jung’s idea of archetypes,3and it is no chance that Jung was deeply interested in the Yijing. He saw the ancient Chinese oracle as a formidable psychological system that endeavors to organize the play of archetypes, the “wondrous operations of nature” into a certain pattern, so that a “reading” becomes possible.4
The Yijing can therefore be viewed as a catalog of 64 basic archetypal con -figurations, a road map to the realm Jung called “collective unconscious” and Henry Corbin, in a language less susceptible to reification, “mundus imaginalis.”5
Historically the texts of the Yijing are the result of an accretion process whose beginning can be traced back to shamanic practices of the Shang dynasty (1765–1123 BCE, see below, Modern views of the origins of the Yi). These texts have been described as
a kaleidoscope of images resulting . . . from combinations and recombinations of factual oracular statements. Each one of these images incorporates fragments of ancient statements. In each sentence of the Yijing we find one, two, three, rarely more, of these combined images, simply juxtaposed, and often strewn with forgotten technical divinatory terms. The whole is without any connection, but exactly like with a kaleidoscope, one is seized, in spite of oneself, by an impression of wonder.6
The language of the Yijing is therefore closer to the language of dreams than to that of philosophical discourse. In spite of the many layers of philosophical interpretation that through the millennia have sought to elucidate them, their vitality lies rather in their proximity to the mundus imaginalis. Their constituent images have emerged from shamanic trance, while their organization in terms of the interplay of yin and yang through the geometric code of the hexagrams is the result of a long process of classification, systematization and philosophical reflection. Therefore the Yijing straddles the divide between two radically different frames of mind, between the right and left hemisphere of the brain, metaphorically speaking, or the intuitive and the logical mind, and offers a bridge to move back and forth between the two.
For the oracular use of the Yijing an understanding of the imaginal nature of its texts is of utmost importance. Because, like dream images, the images of the Yijing do not have a unique a priori interpretation. Depending on the context, they can be read in many different ways. And the context is given by the consultant’s situation and question.
It may be useful to state here a bit more explicitly the approach to the oracular use of the Yijing that is proposed in this book. (The Yijing has been used and is still used in so many different ways, that it is worthwhile to describe a bit more precisely what the reader can expect from the Eranos Yijing.) The basic philosophy of this approach is an exploration of potential synchronicities. We assume that the random manipulation of the yarrow stalks, or the tossing of the coins, can offer, through the related Yijing texts and the associative process carried out by the consultant, valid insights about the archetypal energies active in the consultant’s situation and psyche and the developmental tendencies contained therein. In this sense, we use the Yijing as a “mirror of the present.”
On the other hand, we do not assume that the Yijing can foretell the future, because we do not assume that the future is univocally determined. A latent tendency in the present situation may develop into an actual consequence: but that is in no way a necessary conclusion, and, what is most important from our human standpoint, is that the outcome can often be affected by our choices and our actions.
Nor should we assume that the Yijing offers any imperatives, moral or otherwise. Quite understandably, when we are in a quandary we would very much like to be told what to do, which is the right choice, and sometimes we approach the Yijing hoping for that kind of answer. Here again the analogy with dreams may prove a valuable guideline. A Yijing consultation produces a series of images, which is like a dream connected with a given situation and a given question. Dream images may give us a clear sense of what we want or have to do in a situation, but they never tell us what to do. The same applies to the images of the Yijing. It is important to realize that the responsibility for all choices always rests with the consultant herself or himself.
This is particularly relevant when one is engaged as facilitator guiding an individual consultant or a group. Even when we are tempted to read the Yijing texts in a way that seems utterly evident to us, it is essential to offer our interpretation in a most respectful way, leaving ample space for the consultant to arrive at her or his interpretation.
If you are not familiar with the Yijing, the next sections of this Introduction (up to and including Basic features of the Eranos translation) should give you sufficient instruction for you to start practicing. Consulting the oracle is the best and easiest way to get acquainted with the book. With practice, you will become familiar with the language of the oracular texts and with the unique way in which they speak to you. The rest of the Introduction, while not strictly necessary for a practical use of the Yijing, is geared to a more in-depth appreciation of the oracular texts, their historical and mythical background, the correlative thinking underlying them and the specific devices adopted in this translation.