The Book of Changes - I Ching

[free]

I've read a few versions of translation and interpretation of this Chinese book for future telling by the use of coins or stalks of a specific plant throwing and then reading the given form's result in hexagrams depicted in the book, but I find that the Richard Wilhelm's is the best. There is an interesting Preface by K.G. Jung. Both of them have succeeded to bring the book's ideas closer to the Western mind.

Have you read it and what is you opinion?

[JBI]

It's a fortune teller, with little room for "interpretation" and more room for actual fortune telling. The western world merely has taken another piece of Asian religion and "philosophized" it into this idea of a "wisdom".

[Jack of Hearts]

It's a fortune teller, with little room for "interpretation" and more room for actual fortune telling. The western world merely has taken another piece of Asian religion and "philosophized" it into this idea of a "wisdom".

Ostensibly, this is completely wrong, but this reader is hesitant to say this to you because aren't you the guy that is the Chinese expert/speaks Mandarin/actually lives on China? Or, if Jack of Hearts is wrong, maybe you can scrutinize where and we can all be the more wiser for it.

Pardon the following exercise; Jack of Hearts' background is in western philosophy, but has dabbled (albeit mostly non-academically, or than Confucianism) in eastern philosophy.

The story we're about to tell starts with language. Ancient Greek philosophers debated over the nature of things like "What is good?" or "What is courage?" This went on for a very long time until the narrative bumps into two other philosophers from the 19th century. First, we hit Friedrich Nietzsche, who is lifting concepts from philosophy in the east/middle east, sometimes through the work of the American transcendentalists who did so first (specifically Emerson). These decidedly western philosophers are suddenly making strange and striking works, sometimes vivid and near poetry. The second philosopher is one named Frege, who isn't working with natural language at all as he has discovered it's insufficiency to function as a logical paradigm. So what is language doing, then?

Enter a really prominent third philosopher who shall remain nameless here, and the punchline is that language and verbal/analytic thinking is shown to be redundant/therapeutic and not fit to serve as a descriptor or interpreter of reality (phil of language is on fire these days). This line of thought has drastic implications for the nature of science.

But that's the western scope. When speaking of the Book of Changes in the western world, you have to talk about Carl Jung. Jung had a pre-disposition toward mysticism to say the least, and influence largely by Nietzsche, had reservations about the evolving paradigm of modern science.

Jung's draw to the I Ching was based on a principle he was articulating called synchonicity.

Trick is, all of this is presented in the Tao. The idea is that the world is a continuous system that finds common expression. Or, as Jung puts it, phenomena in reality are connected in some way that is acausal.

And, as far as the I Ching is concerned, it cannot be a 'fortune teller' in the way a western mind would want to understand it. When you cast the stalks or the coins, it's a sort of 'communing with reality' or allowing for expression of the system. The idea is that the nature of the mind and the nature of the drawn hexagram both are in the same muck, (again, also in Wittgenstein), and are expressing something connected-but-not-causal.

Second trick is, both this explanation and any question you could ask the oracle are nonsensical. It's like trying to see negative space, it's hard to think about, if it even can be thought about, Tao says no (and yes).





J


EDIT: Oh, sorry. The real punchline is pan-theism.

[free]

The way I understand it is that there is an endless reality in which everything is connected on a certain level and everything affects everything else. The old wise men understood it and studied it. They summoned the expression of it in those hexagrams. Jung gives a nice example to clear this. He says that there are people so much specialised in wines production, that, by merely tasting a wine, they can tell where the grape it was made of was grown, and the year when it was picked up. So, when you toss coins or stalks, the form they take when they are on the ground gives the picture of the state of everything in the very moment this form is taken. It, also, takes into consideration the person that is tossing them. R. Wilhelm explained the meaning of the ancient language symbolism, translating it to match with our time and space. In fact, the book is only an intermediary between us and our subconscious or super-conscious which we are not aware of in everyday life.

Synchronicity is amazing, too. It happens all the time if you just pay attention to it. It seems like something completely useless, but I am sure that it has a deeper meaning and use. We are just not so much familiar with it to completely understand.

[JBI]

If we immerse ourselves into the world of Eastern thought, we notice quickly what we call philosophy as a sort of empirical thought outside of mysticism or superstition is actually non existent in the daily lives and thought patterns of the subjects we discuss. We can rewrite our own "I-Ching" into the terms of Jung and the subconscious, but ultimately the book's reception over 2000 years, its general structure, its functional use, and its influence have been both pseudo-scientific and superstitious. When Confucius supposedly advocated its use for regulating things, he meant quite simply because it gives the power to predict the future through fortune telling, a practice which existed far into the 20th century and still exists in many places in China today.

That fortune telling was sought after and believed, and such "experts" were consulted by both commoners and emperors alike is the main point. The book is very much a codified form of divination, which, excepted as being able to read the world, or "Changes", was perhaps the most popular book in Chinese history.

Now, the range of philosophical interpretations of the book, by both modern-looking Chinese persons, as well as Western Romantics and 3rd age thinkers (as well as Jung) seems to be rooted the obscure almost cryptic language of the text. The text, while constructing interpretations of the hexagrams, is still fundamentally a fortune teller. So if there is a quote saying, "flying to high, Dangerous" for a solid line above 5 broken lines, it of course illustrates a Chinese philosophical background, but fundamentally it is part of the fortune telling apparatus, as the book's primary function is to seek answers to questions.

As for new age meanings, well, we can find that in everything. My big problem is this sort of double standard we have toward Eastern mysticism where we do not scrutinize it the same way we do western equivalents. We are lenient toward giving philosophical meanings to religious works of Chinese culture, yet do not do so lightly with our own.

In the end, Chinese culture has historically been as much, if not more so religious than Western culture. The Yi Jing, or Zhou Yi, or simply the "Yi" (or changes) has been central in codifying a sort of fortune telling and mysticism throughout the country.

Now, if we want to assign new meanings to the fortune teller, and read all sort of new meanings into arbitrary symbols, so be it. Such readings are without historical foundation, as the book is primarily a fortune teller. But generally, if we were to just go on Wikipedia and hit Random page, and find "meaning" in our lives that way, the result would be quite similar.

All this talk about its subconscious elements and the nature of mysticism read more like mere forms of 3rd-age nonsense and 3rd-rate Orientalism. This talk about the book as an intermediary between the self and the subconscious is an European appropriation on a book which is supposed to be the intermediary between the heavenly order (which to this day is believed to exist by many) and the human world. In that the Chinese traditionally conceived of the world as a big expanding sort of web, with an ever-moving force of Dao, the changes it speaks of are more like a pattern to be read through the divination with the book. Not through our understanding of looking for patterns, but in the same way a charlatan may look into a Chrystal Ball and sprout nonsense. That the figures are so vague or cryptic as to not show anything only intensified the need for fortune telling "experts" to give proper philosophical readings. Such experts still exist today, and when asked a specific question, like will someone overcome their illness, may answer differently every time. That there is a religious belief in an ordained pattern allows for the belief of a foresight through the book, though such a belief is completely and specifically trapped within the nonsense of the pseudoscientific nature of the work itself.

There is no such thing as accurate fortune telling. Regardless of where it comes from, fortune telling is still fortune telling. Because we take Chinese thought to be rationalizing and moralizing we merely convert such a tradition of fortune telling into a more acceptable "philosophy" or book containing wisdom.

[free]

JBI, do you have something called 'memory signals'? As in the Bible, when Peter heard a rooster crow he remembered someting. Maybe these hexagrams could be contemplated like it?