[74] It is no easy task for me to speak of Richard Wilhelm and his work, because, starting very far away from one another, our paths crossed in cometlike fashion. His life-work has a range that lies outside my compass. I have never seen the China that first moulded his thought and later continued to engross him, nor am I familiar with its language, the living expression of the Chinese East. I stand indeed as a stranger outside that vast realm of knowledge and experience in which Wilhelm worked as a master of his profession. He as a sinologist and I as a doctor would probably never have come into contact had we remained specialists. But we met in a field of humanity which begins beyond the academic boundary posts. There lay our point of contact; there the spark leapt across and kindled a light that was to become for me one of the most significant events of my life. Because of this I may perhaps speak of Wilhelm and his work, thinking with grateful respect of this mind which created a bridge between East and West and gave to the Occident the precious heritage of a culture thousands of years old, a culture perhaps destined to disappear forever.
[75] Wilhelm possessed the kind of mastery which is won only by a man who goes beyond his speciality, and so his striving for knowledge became a concern touching all mankind. Or rather, it had been that from the beginning and remained so always. What else could have liberated him so completely from the narrow horizon of the European—and indeed, of the missionary—that no sooner had he delved into the secrets of the Chinese mind than he perceived the treasure hidden there for us, and sacrificed his European prejudices for the sake of this rare pearl? Only an all-embracing humanity, a greatness of heart that glimpses the whole, could have enabled him to open himself without reserve to a profoundly alien spirit, and to further its influence by putting his manifold gifts and capacities at its service. The understanding with which he devoted himself to this task, with no trace of Christian resentment or European arrogance, bears witness to a truly great mind; for all mediocre minds in contact with a foreign culture either perish in the blind attempt to deracinate themselves or else they indulge in an uncomprehending and presumptuous passion for criticism. Toying only with the surface and externals of the foreign culture, they never eat its bread or drink its wine, and so never enter into a real communion of minds, that most intimate transfusion and interpenetration which generates a new birth.
[76] As a rule, the specialist’s is a purely masculine mind, an intellect to which fecundity is an alien and unnatural process; it is therefore an especially ill-adapted tool for giving rebirth to a foreign spirit. But a larger mind bears the stamp of the feminine; it is endowed with a receptive and fruitful womb which can reshape what is strange and give it a familiar form. Wilhelm possessed the rare gift of a maternal intellect. To it he owed his unequalled ability to feel his way into the spirit of the East and to make his incomparable translations.
[77] To me the greatest of his achievements is his translation of, and commentary on, the I Ching.2 Before I came to know Wilhelm’s translation, I had worked for years with Legge’s inadequate rendering,3 and I was therefore fully able to appreciate the extraordinary difference between the two. Wilhelm has succeeded in bringing to life again, in new form, this ancient work in which not only many sinologists but most of the modern Chinese see nothing more than a collection of absurd magical spells. This book embodies, as perhaps no other, the living spirit of Chinese civilization, for the best minds of China have collaborated on it and contributed to it for thousands of years. Despite its fabulous age it has never grown old, but still lives and works, at least for those who seek to understand its meaning. That we too belong to this favoured group we owe to the creative achievement of Wilhelm. He has brought the book closer to us by his careful translation and personal experience both as a pupil of a Chinese master of the old school and as an initiate in the psychology of Chinese yoga, who made constant use of the I Ching in practice.
[78] But together with these rich gifts, Wilhelm has bequeathed to us a task whose magnitude we can only surmise at present, but cannot fully apprehend. Anyone who, like myself, has had the rare good fortune to experience in association with Wilhelm the divinatory power of the I Ching cannot remain ignorant of the fact that we have here an Archimedean point from which our Western attitude of mind could be lifted off its foundations. It is no small service to have given us, as Wilhelm did, such a comprehensive and richly coloured picture of a foreign culture. What is even more important is that he has inoculated us with the living germ of the Chinese spirit, capable of working a fundamental change in our view of the world. We are no longer reduced to being admiring or critical observers, but find ourselves partaking of the spirit of the East to the extent that we succeed in experiencing the living power of the I Ching.
[79] The principle on which the use of the I Ching is based appears at first sight to be in complete contradiction to our scientific and causal thinking. For us it is unscientific in the extreme, almost taboo, and therefore outside the scope of our scientific judgment, indeed incomprehensible to it.
[80] Some years ago, the then president of the British Anthropological Society asked me how it was that so highly intelligent a people as the Chinese had produced no science. I replied that this must be an optical illusion, since the Chinese did have a science whose standard text-book was the I Ching, but that the principle of this science, like so much else in China, was altogether different from the principle of our science.
[81] The science of the I Ching is based not on the causality principle but on one which—hitherto unnamed because not familiar to us—I have tentatively called the synchronistic principle. My researches into the psychology of unconscious processes long ago compelled me to look around for another principle of explanation, since the causality principle seemed to me insufficient to explain certain remarkable manifestations of the unconscious. I found that there are psychic parallelisms which simply cannot be related to each other causally, but must be connected by another kind of principle altogether. This connection seemed to lie essentially in the relative simultaneity of the events, hence the term “synchronistic.” It seems as though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which possesses qualities or basic conditions capable of manifesting themselves simultaneously in different places by means of an acausal parallelism, such as we find, for instance, in the simultaneous occurrence of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic states. Another example, pointed out by Wilhelm, would be the coincidence of Chinese and European periods of style, which cannot have been causally related to one another. Astrology would be an example of synchronicity on a grand scale if only there were enough thoroughly tested findings to support it. But at least we have at our disposal a number of well-tested and statistically verifiable facts which make the problem of astrology seem worthy of scientific investigation. Its value is obvious enough to the psychologist, since astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.
[82] The fact that it is possible to reconstruct a person’s character fairly accurately from his birth data shows the relative validity of astrology. It must be remembered, however, that the birth data are in no way dependent on the actual astronomical constellations, but are based on an arbitrary, purely conceptual time system. Owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the spring-point has long since moved out of the constellation of Aries into Pisces, so that the astrological zodiac on which horoscopes are calculated no longer corresponds to the heavenly one. If there are any astrological diagnoses of character that are in fact correct, this is due not to the influence of the stars but to our own hypothetical time qualities. In other words, whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time.
[83] Here we have the basic formula for the use of the I Ching. As you know, the hexagram that characterizes the moment of time, and gives us insight into it, is obtained by manipulating a bundle of yarrow stalks or by throwing three coins. The division of the yarrow stalks or the fall of the coins depends on pure chance. The runic stalks or coins fall into the pattern of the moment. The only question is: Did King Wen and the Duke of Chou, who lived a thousand years before the birth of Christ, interpret these chance patterns correctly?4 Experience alone can decide.
[84] At his first lecture at the Psychological Club in Zurich, Wilhelm, at my request, demonstrated the use of the I Ching and at the same time made a prognosis which, in less than two years, was fulfilled to the letter and with the utmost clarity. Predictions of this kind could be further confirmed by numerous parallel experiences. However, I am not concerned with establishing objectively the validity of the I Ching’s statements, but take it simply as a premise, just as Wilhelm did. I am concerned only with the astonishing fact that the hidden qualities of the moment become legible in the hexagram. The interconnection of events made evident by the I Ching is essentially analogous to what we find in astrology. There the moment of birth corresponds to the fall of the coins, the constellation to the hexagram, and the astrological interpretation of the birth data corresponds to the text assigned to the hexagram.
[85] The type of thinking based on the synchronistic principle, which reached its climax in the I Ching, is the purest expression of Chinese thinking in general. In the West it has been absent from the history of philosophy since the time of Heraclitus, and reappears only as a faint echo in Leibniz.5 However, in the interim it was not altogether extinguished, but lingered on in the twilight of astrological speculation, and it still remains on that level today.
[86] At this point the I Ching responds to something in us that is in need of further development. Occultism has enjoyed a renaissance in our times that is without parallel—the light of the Western mind is nearly darkened by it. I am not thinking now of our seats of learning and their representatives. As a doctor who deals with ordinary people, I know that the universities have ceased to act as disseminators of light. People are weary of scientific specialization and rationalism and intellectualism. They want to hear truths that broaden rather than restrict, that do not obscure but enlighten, that do not run off them like water but penetrate them to the marrow. This search is only too likely to lead a large if anonymous public astray.
[87] When I think of the significance of Wilhelm’s achievement, I am always reminded of Anquetil Duperron, the Frenchman who brought the first translation of the Upanishads to Europe. This was at the very time when, after almost eighteen hundred years, the inconceivable happened and the Goddess of Reason drove the Christian God from his throne in Notre-Dame. Today, when far more inconceivable things are happening in Russia than ever did in Paris, and Christianity has become so debilitated that even the Buddhists think it is high time they sent missionaries to Europe, it is Wilhelm who brings new light from the East. This was the cultural task to which he felt himself called, recognizing how much the East had to offer in our spiritual need.
[88] A beggar is not helped by having alms, great or small, pressed into his hand, even though this may be what he wants. He is far better helped if we show him how he can permanently rid himself of his beggary by work. Unfortunately, the spiritual beggars of our time are too inclined to accept the alms of the East in bulk and to imitate its ways unthinkingly. This is a danger about which too many warnings cannot be uttered, and one which Wilhelm felt very clearly. The spirit of Europe is not helped merely by new sensations or a titillation of the nerves. What it has taken China thousands of years to build cannot be acquired by theft. If we want to possess it, we must earn the right to it by working on ourselves. Of what use to us is the wisdom of the Upanishads or the insight of Chinese yoga if we desert our own foundations as though they were errors outlived, and, like homeless pirates, settle with thievish intent on foreign shores? The insights of the East, and in particular the wisdom of the I Ching, have no meaning for us if we close our minds to our own problems, jog along with our conventional prejudices, and veil from ourselves our real human nature with all its dangerous undercurrents and darknesses. The light of this wisdom shines only in the dark, not in the brightly lit theatre of our European consciousness and will. The wisdom of the I Ching issued from a background of whose horrors we have a faint inkling when we read of Chinese massacres, of the sinister power of Chinese secret societies, or of the nameless poverty, hopeless filth and vices of the Chinese masses.
[89] We need to have a firmly based, three-dimensional life of our own before we can experience the wisdom of the East as a living thing. Therefore, our prime need is to learn a few European truths about ourselves. Our way begins with European reality and not with yoga exercises which would only delude us about our own reality. We must continue Wilhelm’s work of translation in a wider sense if we wish to show ourselves worthy pupils of the master. The central concept of Chinese philosophy is tao, which Wilhelm translated as “meaning.” Just as Wilhelm gave the spiritual treasure of the East a European meaning, so we should translate this meaning into life. To do this—that is, to realize tao—would be the true task of the pupil.
[90] If we turn our eyes to the East, we see an overwhelming destiny fulfilling itself. The guns of Europe have burst open the gates of Asia; European science and technology, European materialism and cupidity, are flooding China. We have conquered the East politically. And what happened when Rome did the same thing to the Near East? The spirit of the East entered Rome. Mithras, the Persian god of light, became the god of the Roman legions, and out of the most unlikely corner of Asia Minor a new spiritual Rome arose. Would it be unthinkable that the same thing might happen today and find us just as blind as the cultured Romans who marvelled at the superstitions of the Christians? It is worth noticing that England and Holland, the two main colonizing powers in Asia, are also the two most infected with Hindu theosophy. I know that our unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism. The spirit of the East is really at our gates. Therefore it seems to me that the search for tao, for a meaning in life, has already become a collective phenomenon among us, and to a far greater extent than is generally realized. The fact that Wilhelm and the indologist Hauer were asked to lecture on yoga at this year’s congress of German psychotherapists is a most significant sign of the times. Imagine what it means when a practising physician, who has to deal with people at their most sensitive and receptive, establishes contact with an Eastern system of healing! In this way the spirit of the East penetrates through all our pores and reaches the most vulnerable places of Europe. It could be a dangerous infection, but it might also be a remedy. The Babylonian confusion of tongues in the West has created such a disorientation that everyone longs for simpler truths, or at least for guiding ideas which speak not to the head alone but also to the heart, which bring clarity to the contemplative spirit and peace to the restless pressure of our feelings. Like ancient Rome, we today are once more importing every form of exotic superstition in the hope of finding the right remedy for our sickness.
[91] Human instinct knows that all great truth is simple. The man whose instincts are atrophied therefore supposes that it is found in cheap simplifications and platitudes; or, as a result of his disappointment, he falls into the opposite error of thinking that it must be as obscure and complicated as possible. Today we have a Gnostic movement in the anonymous masses which is the exact psychological counterpart of the Gnostic movement nineteen hundred years ago. Then, as today, solitary wanderers like Apollonius of Tyana spun the spiritual threads from Europe to Asia, perhaps to remotest India. Viewing him in this historical perspective, I see Wilhelm as one of those great Gnostic intermediaries who brought the Hellenic spirit into contact with the cultural heritage of the East and thereby caused a new world to rise out of the ruins of the Roman Empire.
[92] In the midst of the jarring disharmony of European opinion and the shouts of false prophets, it is indeed a blessing to hear the simple language of Wilhelm, the messenger from China. One notices at once that it is schooled in the plant-like spontaneity of the Chinese mind, which is able to express profound things in simple language. It discloses something of the simplicity of great truth, the ingenuousness of deep meaning, and it carries to us the delicate perfume of the Golden Flower. Penetrating gently, it has set in the soil of Europe a tender seedling, giving us a new intuition of life and its meaning, far removed from the tension and arrogance of the European will.
[93] Faced with the alien culture of the East, Wilhelm showed a degree of modesty highly unusual in a European. He approached it freely, without prejudice, without the assumption of knowing better; he opened his heart and mind to it. He let himself be gripped and shaped by it, so that when he came back to Europe he brought us, not only in his spirit but in his whole being, a true image of the East. This deep transformation was certainly not won without great sacrifice, for our historical premises are so entirely different. The keenness of Western consciousness and its harsh problems had to soften before the more universal, more equable nature of the East; Western rationalism and one-sided differentiation had to yield to Eastern breadth and simplicity. For Wilhelm this change meant not only a shifting of the intellectual standpoint but a radical rearrangement of the components of his personality. The picture of the East he has given us, free of ulterior motive and all trace of tendentiousness, could never have been painted in such perfection had he not been able to let the European in him slip into the background. If he had allowed East and West to clash together with unyielding harshness, he could not have fulfilled his mission of conveying to us a true picture of China. The sacrifice of the European was unavoidable and necessary for the fulfilment of the task fate laid upon him.
[94] Wilhelm accomplished his mission in every sense of the word. Not only did he make accessible to us the cultural treasure of ancient China, but, as I have said, he brought us its spiritual root, the root that has remained alive all these thousands of years, and planted it in the soil of Europe. With the completion of this task, his mission reached its climax and, unfortunately, its end. According to the law of enantiodromia, so well understood by the Chinese, the end of one phase is the beginning of its opposite. Thus yang at its highest point changes into yin, and positive into negative. I came closer to Wilhelm only in the last years of his life, and I could observe how, with the completion of his life-work, Europe and European man hemmed him in more and more closely, beset him in fact. And at the same time there grew in him the feeling that he stood on the brink of a great change, an upheaval whose nature he could not clearly grasp. He only knew that he faced a decisive crisis. His physical illness went parallel with this development. His dreams were filled with memories of China, but the images were always sad and gloomy, a clear proof that the Chinese contents of his mind had become negative.
[95] Nothing can be sacrificed for ever. Everything returns later in changed form, and when once a great sacrifice has been made, the sacrificed thing when it returns must meet with a healthy and resistant body that can take the shock. Therefore, a spiritual crisis of these dimensions often means death if it takes place in a body weakened by disease. For now the sacrificial knife is in the hand of him who was sacrificed, and a death is demanded of the erstwhile sacrificer.
[96] As you see, I have not withheld my personal views, for if I had not told you what Wilhelm meant to me, how would it have been possible for me to speak of him? Wilhelm’s life-work is of such immense importance to me because it clarified and confirmed so much that I had been seeking, striving for, thinking, and doing in my efforts to alleviate the psychic sufferings of Europeans. It was a tremendous experience for me to hear through him, in clear language, things I had dimly divined in the confusion of our European unconscious. Indeed, I feel myself so very much enriched by him that it seems to me as if I had received more from him than from any other man. That is also the reason why I do not feel it a presumption if I am the one to offer on the altar of his memory the gratitude and respect of all of us.