Consulting the Book of Changes

Consulting the I Ching (Yijing, the Book of Changes) is a Chinese divinatory practice built on a classic whose core stratum dates to the Zhou dynasty. The inquirer generates a hexagram, a figure of six stacked lines, each either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang), traditionally by sorting a bundle of fifty yarrow stalks in a lengthy count, or, in the simpler method that spread later, by casting three coins six times. Lines produced as changing yield a second hexagram, so that the reading describes a situation and its tendency to transform.

Each of the sixty-four hexagrams carries a terse judgement and line texts, on which an enormous commentarial tradition has grown, most importantly the appendices known as the Ten Wings that reframed a diviner's manual as a book of cosmological and ethical wisdom central to both Confucian and Daoist thought. The oracle reached the West largely through Richard Wilhelm's translation and Carl Jung's foreword, which read the coincidence of hexagram and question through Jung's notion of synchronicity, an interpretation that says as much about twentieth-century European thought as about the Chinese text.