The I Ching or Book of Changes (6 page)
I submitted two questions to the method of chance represented by the coin oracle, the second question being put after I had written my analysis of the answer to the first. The first question was directed, as it were, to the
I Ching
: what had it to say about my intention to write a foreword? The second question concerned my own action, or rather the situation in which I was the acting subject who had discussed the first hexagram. To the first question the
I Ching
replied by comparing itself to a caldron, a ritual vessel in need of renovation, a vessel that was finding only doubtful favor with the public. To the second question the reply was that I had fallen into a difficulty, for the
I Ching
represented a deep and dangerous water hole in which one might easily be mired. However, the water hole proved to be an old well that needed only to be renovated in order to be put to useful purposes once more.
These four hexagrams are in the main consistent as regards theme (vessel, pit, well); and as regards intellectual content, they seem to be meaningful. Had a human being made such replies, I should, as a psychiatrist, have had to pronounce him of sound mind, at least on the basis of the material presented. Indeed, I should not have been able to discover anything delirious, idiotic, or schizophrenic in the four answers. In view of the
I Ching
’s extreme age and its Chinese origin, I cannot consider its archaic, symbolic, and flowery language abnormal. On the contrary, I should have had to congratulate this hypothetical person on the extent of his insight into my unexpressed state of doubt. On the other hand, any person of clever and versatile mind can turn the whole thing around and show how I have projected my subjective contents into the symbolism of the hexagrams. Such a critique, though catastrophic from the standpoint of Western rationality, does no harm to the function of the
I Ching
. On the contrary, the Chinese sage would smilingly tell me: “Don’t you see how useful the
I Ching
is in making you project your hitherto unrealized thoughts into its abstruse symbolism? You could have written your foreword without ever realizing what an avalanche of misunderstanding might be released by it.”
The Chinese standpoint does not concern itself as to the attitude one takes toward the performance of the oracle. It is only we who are puzzled, because we trip time and again over our prejudice, viz., the notion of causality. The ancient wisdom of the East lays stress upon the fact that the intelligent individual realizes his own thoughts, but not in the least upon the way in which he does it. The less one thinks about the theory of the
I Ching
, the more soundly one sleeps.
It would seem to me that on the basis of this example an unprejudiced reader would now be in a position to form at least a tentative judgment on the operation of the
I Ching
.
12
More cannot be expected from a simple introduction. If by means of this demonstration I have succeeded in elucidating the psychological phenomenology of the
I Ching
, I shall have carried out my purpose. As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up—I cannot answer these. The
I Ching
does not offer itself with proofs and results; it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits until it is discovered. It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom—if there be such—it seems to be the right book. To one person its spirit appears as clear as day; to another, shadowy as twilight; to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it is not obliged to find it true. Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning.
C. G. JUNG
Zurich, 1949
BY
C
.
F
.
B
AYNES
A translation of a translation is likely to evoke the questioning protest: Why risk the danger of a double distortion of a text? In the case of Richard Wilhelm’s version of the
I Ching
, the answer is simple and ready to hand. However many other translations of this book may appear, and whatever their excellence, Wilhelm’s will remain unique, both by reason of his relation to the
I Ching
and because of the background out of which his translation grew. Unlike any other translator of this ancient work, he did not envisage the learned world as his only audience, and therefore addressed himself to the difficult task of making the
I Ching
intelligible to the lay reader. He wished to bring this first philosophy, this first effort of men to place themselves in the cosmos, out of the domain of specialists in philology and to put it into the hands of individuals anywhere who, like the authors of the
I Ching
, are concerned with their relation to the universe and to their fellow men.
No less unique than this purpose of Wilhelm’s with regard to his translation were the circumstances that enabled him to carry it out. Long residence in China, mastery of both the spoken and the written language, and close association with the cultural leaders of the day, made it possible for him to understand the Chinese classics from the standpoint of the Chinese themselves. In translating the
I Ching
he was guided by a scholar of the old school, one of the last of his kind, who knew thoroughly the great field of commentary literature that has grown up around the book in the course of the ages.
Quite naturally also, it was Wilhelm’s particular wish to have his translation appear in English, widening by so much the circle of its readers. It is clear that in desiring thus to make available to many people the wisdom that he himself had found in the
I Ching
, Wilhelm presupposed in his readers a degree of spiritual integrity that, together with the essential dignity of the book, would preclude the use of the oracle for trivial purposes, or its exploitation by charlatans of whatever type. Time alone will show whether his faith was justified.
I was studying analytical psychology in Zurich when Dr. Jung asked me to undertake the rendering of the German version into English. The translation was to have had Wilhelm’s supervision; this, it was thought, would compensate my ignorance of Chinese. But his death in 1930 came long before I was ready to submit a manuscript to him. As I proceeded with the translation, I found that one very real compensation for my lack of Chinese remained, namely, the access to its philosophy afforded me through my growing knowledge of the work of Jung. This gave me a key to the archetypal world of the
I Ching
.
The second world war and attendant circumstances beyond my personal control brought many long interruptions to my undertaking. But in the end the delays worked wholly to the advantage of the translation. Shortly after the manuscript had gone to press, Dr. Hellmut Wilhelm, who like his father has devoted much time to the study of the
I Ching
, left his home in Peiping to continue his work in sinology in the United States. I had already had expert advice from him by letter, and had always hoped that by some unexpected turn of fate it would be possible for him to criticize my translation, since he alone knew his father’s work sufficiently well to take the latter’s place. It was now my great good fortune to go over the proofs with him while he checked the translation against the Chinese text—using the very volumes that had accompanied Richard Wilhelm “on many a journey, halfway round the globe.”
With Dr. Wilhelm’s arrival, a question arose as to whether it would be wise to rewrite certain passages of the translation to conform them to findings of modern scholarship that were not available to Richard Wilhelm when he did his work. Dr. Wilhelm decided that the book should be left as his father wrote it, because in no instance was the proposed change of more than minor importance with respect to the work as a whole.
In the parts of the German text that render the Chinese, I have tried to be as literal in my translation as possible, in order to establish a guideline in the highly allusive and symbolic language. (One need only compare passages in Wilhelm’s version with the same passages as rendered by Legge in order to see how completely different two interpretations of the same Chinese sentence may be.) When I have deviated from this rule, it has been in the few places where Dr. Wilhelm pointed out that a paraphrase is needed to cover the Chinese meaning.
The great age and unbroken continuity of Chinese culture are wonderful to contemplate; to keep this perspective before the reader’s mind, I have given, where possible, dates for the works and authors mentioned by Wilhelm. All footnotes added by me are inclosed in square brackets.
Wherever the English names of the hexagrams appear in the body of the text, they are printed in small capitals; in this way they can be distinguished from trigrams of the same name. The Chinese characters for the names of the hexagrams have been rewritten for this edition. I have to thank Dr. Shih Yu-chung for this contribution. Wade’s system of transliteration has been used in putting the German version of Chinese words into their English equivalents. The excellent key to the hexagrams was brought to my notice by Carol Fisher Baumann.
The Chinese title page is from the hand of Professor Tung Tso-pin of the Academia Sinica.
There are few sentences in this translation that were not discussed again and again before they took final form, and the work as a whole has been revised many times. For aid in the early stages of my undertaking I am indebted to Emma Jung and to Frieda Hauswirth. Later, when I returned to this country, I received very great assistance from Dr. Erla Rodakiewicz and from my daughter, Ximena de Angulo. For help at that time on matters of style I am also grateful to Elizabeth M. Brown and to Mary E. Strong. Dr. Wilfrid Lay, who learned Chinese for the sole purpose of reading the
I Ching
, brought to my attention a number of points that I would otherwise have missed. Dr. George H. Danton read the manuscript two years before it reached its finished form, and gave me valuable suggestions. For the final truing up of the translation with the German text, and for rescuing it from the ever-present threat
of translator’s English, I cannot give praise and appreciation enough to my editor, Renée Darmstadter.
Accuracy and intelligibility have been the goals set for this translation, but it must prove itself in a still more vital test. If the reader is drawn out of the accustomed framework of his thought to view the world in a new perspective, if his imagination is stimulated and his psychological insight deepened, he will know that Wilhelm’s
I Ching
has been faithfully reproduced.
CARY F. BAYNES
Morris, Connecticut, 1949
T
RANSLATOR’S
N
OTE FOR THE
T
HIRD
E
DITION
This edition presents the
I Ching
in an entirely new format, more compact as a book, and clearer in its typographical distinctions. Professor Hellmut Wilhelm, of the Far Eastern and Russian Institute in the University of Washington (Seattle), has contributed a preface to the new edition, in which he comments on recent research and on other translations of the Book of Changes and elucidates the principles that guided his father’s work. Professor Wilhelm has approved the editors’ additions, rearrangements of some of the secondary material, and revisions of bibliographical information in footnotes. The rearrangements consist in placing a chart, “
The Major Divisions of the Material
,” adjacent to the new preface, with which it is interrelated; and moving a section “On Consulting the Oracle” to the end of the volume, for convenience. An index of the hexagrams by pattern has been taken over from the German edition, and a general index has been compiled.
As I remarked in a Translator’s Note to the second edition, I am indebted to Professor Wilhelm also for an explanatory note concerning the Chinese title page, and to Mr. R. F. C. Hull, the translator of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, for having called my attention to an error of translation in Jung’s foreword. With minor changes, the foreword was published
in 1958 in
Psychology and Religion: West and East
(Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11).
The Western student of the
I Ching
is always grateful for aid in the understanding of the Book. He will find such aid in two works of Professor Hellmut Wilhelm published since the first edition of the English version of the
I Ching
in 1950:
Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching
(New York: Bollingen Series LXII, and London, 1960) and “The Concept of Time in the Book of Changes,” in
Man and Time
(Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 3; New York: Bollingen Series XXX, and London, 1957).
C. F. B.
Morris, Connecticut, January I967
BY
R
ICHARD
W
ILHELM
This translation of the Book of Changes was begun nearly ten years ago. After the Chinese revolution [1911], when Tsingtao became the residence of a number of the most eminent scholars of the old school, I met among them my honored teacher Lao Nai-hsüan. I am indebted to him not only for a deeper understanding of the Great Learning [Ta Hsüeh], the Doctrine of the Mean [Chung Yung], and the Book of Mencius, but also because he first opened my mind to the wonders of the Book of Changes. Under his experienced guidance I wandered entranced through this strange and yet familiar world. The translation of the text was made after detailed discussion. Then the German version was retranslated into Chinese and it was only after the meaning of the text had been fully brought out that we considered our version to be truly a translation.