I Ching (Book of Changes)

The I Ching or Yijing ("Book of Changes") is one of the oldest Chinese classics, built on sixty-four hexagrams, each a figure of six broken or unbroken lines, to each of which are attached a "judgement" and short line-texts read to interpret the flux of a situation in divination. Its oldest core, the Zhouyi, is a Western Zhou divination text of roughly the ninth to eighth century BCE, terse and oracular, reflecting the practice of casting yarrow stalks (earlier, of reading the cracks in heated turtle shells).

What turned this manual into a philosophical classic is a set of later appended commentaries, the "Ten Wings," traditionally but wrongly ascribed to Confucius and actually composed over the following centuries, which read cosmology and ethics into the hexagrams and gave the book its account of yin and yang, of change as the fundamental reality, and of the sage's attunement to it.

The I Ching's modern Western fame rests heavily on one translation: the German version of the missionary-sinologist Richard Wilhelm (1924), rendered into English by Cary Baynes (1950) with a celebrated foreword by C. G. Jung. Jung used the book to illustrate his idea of "synchronicity," meaningful coincidence, treating the oracle as a mirror of the questioner's unconscious rather than as prediction, a reading that made the I Ching enormously popular in the 1960s counterculture but that is a twentieth-century European interpretation, not the book's own self-understanding.

Earlier and more philological translations, such as James Legge's (1882), and later scholarly ones such as Richard Rutt's reconstruction of the Zhouyi (1996), aim instead to recover the ancient divinatory text and to separate its Bronze Age core from the philosophical wings and from the layers of later reception.