Wilhelm's German I Ching did more than any prior European rendering to present the text as a serious work of philosophy rather than a curiosity of divination, carrying into German both the core hexagram text and substantial portions of the Chinese commentarial tradition surrounding it. His approach favored fidelity to how Chinese scholars themselves had read the book across the centuries over any single simplified interpretation, a choice that shaped how the West would come to understand the text.
The German edition itself reached a comparatively narrow readership until Cary Baynes, a Jungian analyst's wife working at Carl Jung's suggestion, translated Wilhelm's German into English; Bollingen Foundation published her translation, with a foreword by Jung himself, in 1950. That English edition became the standard I Ching most Western readers have used ever since, carrying Wilhelm's scholarly framing, filtered twice through translation, to an audience far larger than his own German original ever reached in his lifetime. Wilhelm died five years after finishing his life's central project without seeing the scale its later reach would take.
Wilhelm's translation work extended well beyond the I Ching: he also produced German renderings of the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi and the Liezi, and, in his final years, worked with Carl Jung on The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929), a translation and joint commentary on a Chinese alchemical meditation text that paired Wilhelm's sinology with Jung's emerging psychological framework. That collaboration with Jung, continued afterward through Cary Baynes's English translations of both men's work, tied Wilhelm's sinology permanently to the psychological reading of Chinese texts that shaped their reception in the West for the rest of the twentieth century.