Jung, the Tao and the Classic of Change

Stephen Karcher Ph.D.

Harvest: A Journal for Jungian Studies 1999, vol. 45, No. 2

A short biographical note can be found here.

 

The ideas presented here were elaborated in a series of lectures and seminars given in London and Cambridge in early 1999 and benefited greatly from participants' comments. In it, I look at the connection between Jung's psychology and the Chinese oracle book called I Ching , usually translated as Classic of Change , and some of the implications it has for both depth psychology and the act of divination. This connection centers on a mysterious symbolic awareness that Chinese philosophers call tao or way. This symbolic awareness involved Jung, his psychology and his readers in a very special "orientation," a Journey to the East.

 

Jung's Orientation

At first glance Jung's contact with the East 1 seems quite ambivalent. On the one hand, Jung's orientation helped him to imagine the way the psyche worked. The dialogue with Eastern religious practices helped shape his main ideas: the self and individuation, the function of the archetypes, the dynamics of the psyche and the autonomous complex were all profoundly influenced by Eastern thought. It mobilized his great creative energy. On the other hand, Jung constantly railed against Europeans who too facilely took up eastern ways and "shirked" their cultural duty. This very harsh criticism was aimed specifically at Theosophists and "yoga enthusiasts" who, in his opinion, were pretending to be something they were not ( CW 9i, §21-29, 1934). 2 For Jung's orientation also made him painfully aware of the West's cultural ills: its greedy materialism, its worship of scientific rationalism and its adoration of the ego. We are spiritual beggars, he maintained, and we have no business putting on borrowed riches.

 

But more than anything else, Jung's orientation is reflected in his involvement with tao , the central term in Chinese thought that he saw as the true "spirit of the East" ( CW 8, §78/90, 1930). This involvement was not just professional; it was a crucial part of his spiritual and creative life. The East is our philosopher's stone, he said again and again. It is the catalyst through which change takes place. It is at the bottom of the spiritual change we are passing through and out of its depths new spiritual forms will arise. Our growing familiarity with the spirit of the East was a sign that we are finally beginning to relate to the alien elements in ourselves ( CW 13, §72, 1929). Jung encountered the tao during his own “confrontation with the unconscious” and it acted as the basis for all his later thought.

 

The first time we meet tao in Jung's writing in is Psychological Types. It is described through a series of quotations from the Tao te ching , 3 the fifth century BCE classic of philosophical Taoism ( CW 6, §358-369, 1921; see also §916-924, 1952). Tao , according to Jung, is elusive. Westerners have translated it as way, method, principle, life force, process of nature, idea of the world, primal cause, the right, the good, the moral order or God. 4 It is an image without substance that depends on nothing, the mother of all things. If you can be without compulsive desire, you can see it. "The soul can be emptied and it is tao that fills the emptiness. You have insight and have no need of intellectual knowledge" ( CW 8, §917ff, 1952).

 

Jung saw this tao as an irrational union of opposites, a psychological attitude that frees you from their conflict. It "tames all that is wild without purifying or transforming it into something higher," he said. Our Western mind, which lacks all culture in this respect, never devised a concept for the union of opposites that could compare with the Chinese sense of tao . Tao is the most legitimate fulfillment of the meaning of the individual's life. It signifies the emergence of a new center of the personality no longer the ego, a point halfway between conscious and unconscious. It is a new equilibrium, a new center of the whole personality, a new and more solid foundation. It is the human's individual fate. "Submission to this inner guidance and its quieting effect is of primary importance in human life" ( CW 7, §327/365, 1945).

 

According to Jung, what the Chinese sages call tao "is a method to unite what is separated, the separation of consciousness and life. It is the realization of the opposite hidden in the unconscious, the reversal or reunion with the unconscious laws of our own being." Tao grows out of the individual, he maintained ( CW 13, §30/80, 1929). It is the restoration of the world, the union of yin and yang, the unio mentalis and the substance of Heaven ( CW 14, §711, 1954). This undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche, a flow of life-water that moves irresistibly toward its goal. "To rest in tao means fulfillment, wholeness, mission done, the perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in things. Personality is tao " ( CW 17, §323, 1934).

 

Tao and Synchonicity

Thus Jung used tao to describe both the process and the goal of his psychology, the emergence of a new center in the personality. He had another, more western term that he used interchangeably with tao . "The eastern word for non-causality is tao ," he said, "and we know that tao can be anything; I call it synchronicity .” 5 He first used this word, he says, in his tribute to Richard Wilhelm in 1930. Here is an example of Jung's synchronicity. Say you are standing on the seashore and the waves wash in an old hat, a box, a shoe, a dead fish and a condom. When asked to comment on this ominous occurrence, you, like a good westerner, will comment: Nonsense! The Chinese gentleman beside you, however, says: What does it mean that these things occur together? "You see," Jung remarks, "he is using a method of forecasting possibilities and recognizing meaning that I call tao or synchronicity ” ( CW 18, §143-144, 1935).

 

For Jung, space and time in the psyche are elastic and only become fixed in consciousness because of our inveterate need to measure and categorize our experience. As we do this, we invariably repress significant conflicted parts. These repressed and thus unconscious dimensions of experience will, sooner or later, constellate and break through into consciousness as affect. To make this an experience of synchronicity, two things happen: an image or affect emerges into consciousness and we experience an objective situation that somehow coincides with the image. This is the omen, and it represents the opening of a dialogue with the Way.

 

 

Synchronicity asserts that the terms of this coincidence are connected by a simultaneity of meaning, individual meaning. This is what Wilhelm called tao , Jung states: It is meaning, Sinn , "a borderline conception lying at the extreme edge of the world." It is a kind of gnosis, a "knowing" or acquaintance with spirit that creates a way out of the world of material cause and effect. "It is the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity" ( CW 8, §921, 1952).

 

Die Schule der Weisheit

In 1923-24, two very important events occurred in the annals of depth psychology. A German Evangelical missionary to China , proud of the fact he had never converted a single Chinese, prepared to publish his translation of an old book called I Ching . As he did so, he encountered a Swiss psychologist at Keyserling's Schule der Weisheit in Darmstadt who was passionately interested in this old Chinese book. Shortly after this meeting, C. G. Jung gave Richard Wilhelm's manuscript to Cary F. Baynes, an American woman who was studying with him, asking her to translate it into English. It took her twenty years, but the result, the Wilhelm/Baynes version of the I Ching , with a Foreword by Jung, became an underground classic and Princeton University Press's biggest selling book. In Jung's words, it “inoculated” its readers with the living power of tao .

 

Jung was passionate about the I Ching . He saw it as a way to connect with tao , the goal and process of his psychology and the origin of synchronicity. It gave access to the "new center" of personality that mediated between conscious and unconscious and was a way to a “living” religious experience. He actively used the book and its divinatory way with friends, colleagues and analysands, calling it "a formidable psychological system that organizes the play of the archetypes so that a reading becomes possible" ( CW 14, §401, 1954). It was an "intuitive technique for grasping the total situation, placing it against a cosmic background," which could make "the hidden qualities of the moment readable" ( CW 8, §863, 1952). This mysterious book was an answer to the West's spiritual needs, for its 64 polysemous symbols "traced the course of the valley spirit, the tao , winding like a dragon or a river" ( CW 14, §636n, 1954).

 

For Jung realized that the I Ching does not just tell people what to do. It establishes a creative relationship with the unconscious. It constellates the mysterious center of personality he called tao . It is not an example of sychronicity; it creates synchronicity by giving its users access to the place where time and space become relative. For Jung, this was a psychological and spiritual phenomenon of the first order, and it led him to make a rather enormous statement. He insisted that "psychology in the stricter sense is bound up with the whole practical use of the I Ching ”. 6 We can sense what lies behind this radical conviction by looking at what he felt for the person who "gave" him the I Ching , the missionary and sinologist Richard Wilhelm.

 

In Memoriam

In May 1930, Jung gave the Eulogy at a memorial service in Münich for Richard Wilhelm, who had died in March of that year. He was profoundly moved by Wilhelm's premature death, and he exposed his feelings in a totally uncharacteristic way. His address may give a sense of his emotional intensity and its historical referents ( CW 15, §74-96, 1930).

 

Jung said that Wilhelm kindled a light that was one of the most significant events of his life. He gave the West the precious heritage of a culture thousands of years old, perhaps now destined to die forever. With no trace of Christian resentment or European arrogance, Wilhelm was like a receptive and fruitful womb, giving us the living spirit of Chinese civilization and making us one with those who know the way ( tao ). He "inoculated us with the living germ of the Chinese spirit and we found ourselves partaking of the spirit of the East as we experience the living power of the I Ching . It is capable of working a profound transformation of our thought."

 

This is because the I Ching is responding to something in us that is in need of further development, Jung said. For our souls are weary of scientific specialization, rationalism and intellectualism. Wilhelm gave us a new light, and "we must translate this meaning, as Wilhelm translated tao , into life. Realizing tao is our task."

As European science, technology and greed overwhelm China , our unconscious is swarming with eastern symbolism. "The spirit of the East is really at our gates” 7 and "this search for meaning ( tao ) has become a collective phenomenon. Wilhelm brought the spiritual root of ancient China and planted it in the soil of Europe ."

 

Today, Jung stated, we have a Gnostic movement that is the exact counterpart of the Gnostic movement that spread throughout the ancient world nineteen hundred years ago when "solitary wanderers spun the spiritual threads from Europe to Asia .” He saw Wilhelm as one of those great Gnostic intermediaries who brought the Hellenic spirit into contact with the cultural heritage of the East and thereby caused a new world to rise out of the ruins." 8 This gnosis , this experience of the "living spirit of the East," is embodied in the I Ching.

 

Jung said that Wilhelm's work with the I Ching was of such immense importance to him personally because it confirmed what he had been seeking in his efforts to alleviate the psychic suffering of Europeans. "I heard from him in clear language the things I had dimly divined in the confusion of the European subconscious. I received more from him than from any other man."

 

The Ominous World of the Unus Mundus

Marie-Louise von Franz once remarked that Jung's attitude towards the unconscious was the attitude of the archaic religions that valued and followed omens, dreams and divinations as signs from the spirit and the spirits. 9 He was, in essence, re-creating those old religious rituals that were based on a world of omens and symbols. Among other things, Jung called this “living world” the unus mundus . The omens and symbols it produced were the ground of what he called “direct religious experience.” The deep need for this experience and the challenge it posed were key qualities of what he saw as the kairos of our times.

 

As the matrix of religious experience, the unus mundus , archetypal or psychoid unconscious creates symbolic fields that unite both images and events. Leading the events of our lives back to these fields, which a traditional society called spirits or gods, was a profoundly religious act, one that a thinker like Corbin called epistrophe or ta'wil . It was the heart of those “archaic religions.” In what he called the Self, Jung felt he had found a unifier, a field that ordered the fields and created an awareness akin to what the Greeks called daimon , the Yoruba called your “head” or patron spirit and the Chinese called both fate ( ming ) and spirit ( shen ). Let us not be misled here by the polemics of polytheism and monotheism or the supposed hidden agendas of Jung's word “wholeness.” “Self” and “whole” don't simply refer to senex megalomania or greedy monotheism. They point at the inclusion of a dimension of spirit, a connection to the imaginal world in and through the observation of the ominous events of each day. “Wholeness” lies in the connection of spirit and soul or inner and outer. For Jung, it was the source and goal of our psychic lives, a dynamic ground out of which a vast symbolism is generated. His deep respect for Taoist and Buddhist thought was grounded in their call for this direct religious experience. In this sense, the ritual associated with the Classic of Change is a great engine for opening and understanding the dialogue with the unus mundus , the Tao or Way. It points at the experience of meaning.

 

The efficacy of such an omen or symbol begins in its “compensatory” action, another much maligned word. It is this action that, in Jung's thought, connects it with the Self. In divinatory terms, compensation means that a ritually produced symbol will first correct, complete or reinforce a conscious desire through inclusion of un-known or repressed psychic contents. It includes shadow. Reading the omen or symbol thus depends on both being aware of what you are feeling and desiring and on letting the symbol deconstruct your ego desires. This, in the language of the I Ching , is “turning and rolling the words in your heart,” letting them act on you. It opens an encounter with the unconscious, the unus mundus or, in Taoist terms, with the paradise state of the Way. It is a response to the challenge of direct religious experience, attending to the “waking dreams,” that flow from the world of spirit. For Jung, the I Ching could draw out the meanings that connect us with the imaginal world, creating a new awareness and a new experience. It is a realization of fate is that takes the whole of the world as its stage.

 

Three Words on the Way

The drama that Jung saw in the realization of the Self, and the place divination can play in that drama, might be seen in three Chinese terms 10 used throughout the commentary section of the I Ching called the Great Treatise or Ta chuan .

 

The first of these terms, kuei shen or “ghosts and spirits,” represents the kinds of experience connected with the various nature of soul, the non-human beings or “autonomous complexes” we encounter on the Way. Their interaction gives us an idea how the psychology of divination works.

 

Kuei and shen are complementary opposites, like yin and yang. Shen is a “bright spirit,” very mobile and potent. In the oldest thought, it existed completely outside the individual. Sages and mediums ( wu ) went through elaborate rituals to induce shen to take up residence in their bodies, for through such in-dwelling they would acquire a “helping-spirit,” a daimon . The shen confer intensity, clarity and depth on the soul. They make the oracle work and are “conjured” by its numbers and its symbols.

 

Kuei are quite different. If shen make the oracle work, kuei are the problems it confronts. They are dark, earth-bound spirits that can become malevolent ghosts through anger, insult or injury. They represent compulsive negative emotion and pain that can easily paralyse a person or a situation. Buddhists call this deep negativity, anger and desire addictive or afflictive emotion. Once constellated, we must come to grips with the kuei through propitiation or exorcism or spiritual and bodily death can result.

 

The oracle's job is to move the kuei , to transform the fixed emotion so that the process of living can go on. The act of consultation focuses the bright spirit of the shen directly into the problem, the heart of the dark, bound kuei . It offers the knot of pain and suffering a chance to be seen, to be mirrored in the symbolic order. It transforms the experience of a past life or lives. As this past comes to light, we are released from its compulsive emotion.

 

Hsiang , the second term, is the tool used by shen to move the kuei . Ritually produced in response to a given situation, these symbols have the power to connect the worlds. The symbols of the I Ching are hsiang and came into being through a kind of imaginative induction called hsiang , for this term is also a verb. We use the oracle to hsiang something, to create symbolic awareness. It is a creative process, a magic spell, a form, a figure, a likeness, a pattern or model. We make the connection between the invisible world of the spirit and the visible world of our lives by acting these symbols out: creating images, imitating, acting, playing, writing, living the “symbolic life.”

 

The third term is ming , both fate and mandate. Awareness of ming , called shen ming , bright spirit or the light of the gods, emerges from the transformation of the kuei . As fate, ming shows us an individual destiny, marked off by the great limits of birth and death, given texture by character and articulated by significant meetings and events. This fate is not implacable, by it is very hard to see, buried as it is in the body and the unconscious. As mandate, the term ming shows something else: a clear command from on high, from T'ien or heaven that gives us the authority to speak with the voice of the gods. T'ien ming or Heaven's Mandate was a very important phrase politically, but it is not just the power given to a ruler. It is an in-dwelling part of each person, the heaven, Self or daimon that creates the events of our lives.

 

The process of divination and the awareness it creates lets you understand what heaven wants of you. It can transform your fate into a mandate from heaven, letting you acquire the imaginative power and virtue ( te ) to be who you are meant to be and live in the flow of the Way.

 

The Classic of Yi

Jung, who felt that his psychology was bound up with the "whole practical use of the I Ching ," saw the book as a vehicle or engine of tao, synchronicity and individuation. It was both a carrier of human experience and a door to the energy of the archetypes. He offered it as a double of his psychological process and the book's use became a part of the praxis of the whole first generation of analysts. 11 Among all his metaphors for psychology - Alchemy, the Mystery Cults, Gnosticism, and Occultism - this was the most enduring. His sense of its cultural and psychological importance never varied.

 

I Ching literally means the Classic or Canon of Yi. 12 It was traditional China 's most important imaginative and spiritual structure. It probably began as a divinatory language used by the wu , female and male mediums who could go into trance and speak with the voices of shen or spirits. It was first written down and organized about 1100 BCE, going through several editions and revisions over the next 500 years. The name I Ching is late. It comes from the Han Dynasty (200 BCE - 220 CE), when a group of imperially sponsored scholars codified the book. They assembled and edited the old texts and added new ones collected from oral traditions, calling them the Ten Wings . Before the transformation that made it a “classic,” the book was called Chou I , "The Yi -book of the Kings of Chou." Today, the entire tradition is often simply called Yi .

 

The character of the book is reflected in its name. Yi is usually translated as "change," but that can be a bit misleading. The term really has two faces. Though it includes regular change, like the change of the seasons, and transformations or quantum jumps such as the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly, water into ice or a live person into a dead person, yi really points at something more mysterious. I translate this sense of its meaning as "trouble:" sudden destabilizing change, like a storm that threatens to devastate the fields or the sudden realization that someone has stolen all your cattle. It means that the unconscious has intervened to break down conscious order.

 

Another set of meanings for yi shows us how to deal with trouble: versatility, imaginative mobility and the ability to change quickly, a fluid identity that can take up a series of guises or masks. The quality yi forces you to change your conscious identity. By doing so, it seeks to re-connect you with the river of meaning called tao or way. This pattern of disruption, change and reconnection is the heart of the Classic of Change .

 

Making the Book

The book of Change is constructed around two kinds of lines that are said to reflect the actions of the two primal powers in Chinese thought, often called yin and yang. The 64 gua , the diagrams or "hexagrams" of the Classic of Change consist of all the possible combinations of six of these opened (yin) and whole (yang) lines. A series of oracular texts is attached to each of the 64 gua . The ensemble of lines and texts is usually called a Figure or Symbol ( hsiang ). There are texts associated with the Figure as a whole, texts associated with each of the six lines and various techniques of consultation, ways to obtain a Figure as answer to a question that are based on what we call "chance" or random selection.

 

The old diviners found that the combination of emotion or affect in the psyche and the "random production" of a symbol is a kind of synchronicity that doubles the way we are imagining reality. 13 In traditional language, it lets us "talk to the spirits." It “provides symbols ( hsiang ),” images empowered through a certain kind of projection with the numinous ability to link the visible and the invisible. Through "matching" these symbols to the situation ( dang ), 14 an inquirer is said to become aware of the hidden source of events and glimpse the way fate is moving.

 

Contrary to our usual positivistic way of thinking, this dialogue with fate is not a matter of belief. Users of Change do not believe in the spirits, they entertain them. They let them into the heart-mind where they can work their magic. The images re-arrange awareness so something new can spontaneously arise. For when we entertain spirits in this way, we acquire their numinous perception.

 

Though divination with Change is said to "provide symbols," more precisely it provides a certain symbol to a certain person at a certain time. This creates a "moment" ( shih ), a kairos or "dragon hole" in linear time that unites the inquirer, the question and the "spirit" that answers the question. This articulation occurs only if something outside the ego selects the symbol. "Chance" lets the spirits or shen decide which symbol they wish to use. It gives the spirits "a voice in your life."

 

Reading the Answers

Ta chuan , the Great Treatise on divination and spirituality that accompanies the I Ching 15 suggest how the symbols in Change can be read:

 

This Teaching describes an unceasing flow moving through the six empty places of the gua. Nothing is fixed. Each encounter is unique. What happens cannot be circumscribed by rules or analysis, for, symbolically, it is life itself in its dance of entrances and exits. It allows the inquirer to look into the seeds in order to see what the results of an action or desire might be. There is a particular attitude and a particular process described that facilitates this. The inquirer must not think of the book as a master or guard, but feel as if her or his parents, very numinous figures for traditional Chinese, draw near to help and sustain them.

The key is allowing the words to move your heart ( hsin or "heart-mind"). It is impossible to "figure out" what the words of Change mean. The book cannot be "distanced" through systems of analysis. The inquirer must let the words enter the heart-mind and shape it from within. Then, and only then, rules of conduct and the way to act will spontaneously arise. Without this opening, the way ( tao ) will not open to the inquirer.

 

Reading Change in this way was not thought of as contradicting the rational; rather it compensates for the inadequacy of the rational. Westerner diviners called this compensation a lumen naturae , a light of nature given to humans as a gift. The key to the process is divination. The mediating power is words. Whenever a problem arises, the inquirer must pose the question to Change in words and “turn and roll the words of the answer in the heart-mind.” A hidden symbol governing the situation spontaneously arises, like a spirit that has been evoked. If the inquirer wishes to move or act, she or he will focus particularly on the words of the transforming or “calling” lines ( yao ). As they are turned and rolled in the heart-mind, an image of the best way to act will spontaneously appear.

 

I suggest that this describes the process that Jung saw as the goal of psychology "in the stricter sense." It gives voice to unconscious contents through symbolic activity and acts in the imagination to change the way the ego is constructing reality. By practicing this sort of divination, aspirants were said to "set foot on the way," becoming what fate meant them to be. In the words of Change , as one embarks on this process "Heaven will come to your aid and the way will open before you."

 

Projection: Empowering the Oracle

In his Foreword to the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching , Jung openly consulted the oracle about what he was doing in writing about it, much to the horror of his translator, Cary Baynes. This reading, in which the I Ching gave him a very coherent and insightful answer, was the centerpiece of his introduction. At the end of the piece, he remarked:

 

Far from being a catastrophe, what Jung called projection or transference (projection within a therapeutic situation) freely entered into seems to play a key part in the relation between oracle and inquirer. Jung defined projection as the transfer of a subjective process onto an object that is based on an "archaic identity" of that subject and object. It can be passive, that is unconscious, or active - a "feeling-into" that "brings the object into an intimate relation with the subject." The object is "animated" by the transference and related to the subjective sphere ( CW 6, §742-3, 1921).

 

In the case of the oracle, this projective bridge seems to be the archetypal process called the Old Wise Person, what Jung occasionally referred to as the mana personality, a form of the Self that somehow embodies our “fate.” We connect with the oracle through projecting this figure, consciously or unconsciously. It creates a numinous aura around the answers and sets up a field in which synchronous events are likely to occur ( CW 8, §394/841/912, 1952).

 

This field, which is particularly characteristic of the Old Wise Person or puer-senex , offers a reasonable analogy to what the I Ching calls the Sage Mind. It is a form of the Self, and "the Self invariably expresses a situation in which the ego is contained , a circumambient atmosphere in which synchronistic phenomena occur" ( CW 9ii, §257, 1951, my emphasis). It is "a source of synchronicity,” possessing qualities of a parapsychological nature. “It relativizes space and time and behaves as though it were not localized in one person" ( CW 10, §849-50, 1958). I would suggest that the synchronistic meaning or tao created in a dialogue with the oracle comes from the emotional field around this projected archetype ( CW 18, §1190, 1958).

 

If this projection establishes a connection and a synchronistic field, the immediate charge to the oracle comes from a specific affect that the inquirer experiences as a problem, difficulty or dilemma. According to Jung, this situation occurs because consciousness has become fixed. The unconscious contents that have been split off constellate as an affect. As the unconscious image emerges into consciousness, the inquirer finds her/himself in an objective situation that somehow coincides with it. The divination searches for the meaning of the situation, the connection between outer situation and inner affect ( CW 8, §863/912, 1952).

 

The affect is focused by diviner and inquirer and transferred to the oracle through a question. This transference activates the oracle, which returns the affect as a symbol, an archetypal "counter-transference" that has the ability to change the inquirer's conscious attitude. It can oppose, modify or re-enforce the conscious desire articulated in the question, thus giving the unconscious a voice. It therapeutically mirrors the inquirer's situation and identity. Such an interaction reflects our lifelong human need to be seen, to have our identity validated on a spiritual level. It is connected with the ego-Self axis and gives the Self a voice in the events of everyday life.

 

This archetypal or synchronous mirroring works itself out in a "matching" ( dang ) that fits symbol and situation together, "arranging collateral and coincidental facts which represent suitable expressions of the underlying archetype." This parallels the makeup of "the psychic arrangement in general, which is based on synchronicity." It is an intuitive, not a rational phenomenon ( CW 18, §128, 1935).

 

Journey to the West

The I Ching or Book of Changes, the Richard Wilhelm Translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, first published in 1950, really introduced Change to the West. Though there were previous translations, from the partial Latin translations of 17 th century Jesuits to Legge's version in Sacred Books of the East , Wilhelm was the first to make what Arthur Waley called a "scriptural" translation. He treated the book not as an historical text or an incoherent "collection of magic spells," but as a living spiritual document. This was Jung's I Ching and its tao or way became an important part of the Jungian practice of the time. Yet Cary Baynes was able to buy the English rights to Wilhelm's German text for only $100 and when her translation was finished, 25 years after the book's appearance, only about 3000 of its original press run of 5000 had been sold.

 

The English translation was another matter. First published in 1950, by 1965, fifteen years after its publication, sales were over a half million. It became an enduring part of the American counter-culture. It remains the biggest seller on Princeton 's list, inspiring CD-ROMs and other programs, and has been translated into 40 other languages. It was Change' s window on the west. An important part of it, giving readers a way to think about the experience of using Change , was the Foreword by Jung. It is arguably Jung's most famous work.

 

There are two readings at the center of Jung's Foreword , readings through which he ostensibly asked about the future of the book in the west. The way Jung "matched" the symbols to the situation has proved, in some ways, to be quite accurate. But there was a dimension that Jung left out or, perhaps, deliberately obscured. By looking at another dimension of the way in which these famous answers were read, we can perhaps see more clearly into Change 's Journey to the West.

 

Jung says that he "made an experiment strictly in accordance with the Chinese conception: I personified the book in a sense, asking its judgement about its present situation, i.e., my intention to present it to the English-speaking public" ( CW 11, §975, 1950, my emphasis). He had discussed his theory of synchronicity, the "peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with subjective (psychic) states of the observer" as a key to understanding the I Ching . He said, however, that this argument never entered a Chinese mind. According to the old tradition, it is "spiritual agencies, acting in a mysterious way, that make the yarrow stalks give a meaningful answer. These powers form, as it were, the living soul of the book. As the latter is thus a sort of animated being, the tradition assumes that one can put questions to the I Ching and expect to receive intelligent answers" ( CW 11, §972-75, 1949).

 

Jung proceeds to animate the book through his projection, pose his question using the coin method to generate the Figures and "match" the answers to his situation. He remarks that "although this procedure is well within the premises of Taoist philosophy, it appears exceedingly odd to us." However, it allows the reader to watch "a psychological procedure that has been carried out time and time again throughout the millennia of Chinese civilization, a supreme expression of spiritual authority and a philosophical enigma" ( CW 11, §976, 1949).

 

As answer to his question about his intention to present the I Ching to the English-speaking public, Jung received 50 Vessel as the Primary Figure, with Transforming Lines in the Second and Third places that generate 35 Prospering as the Relating Figure. The Primary Figure describes the present situation, while the Transforming Lines focus on potentials for change. The Relating Figure suggests how the inquirer is related to the situation. It can describe a goal, a feeling tone, an experience, a desire or a possible outcome. 17

In his interpretation, Jung maintained that the I Ching was the speaking person. "The I Ching is here testifying concerning itself," he said, describing itself as a ting or Vessel holding spiritual nourishment. He quoted Wilhelm on the ting :

 

This may be, but Jung leaves out something important here, something that he would certainly be aware of as a highly intuitive psychologist who had worked with Change for over 25 years. He invited the I Ching to comment on "my intention," and it is that "intention" that carries the affect in the situation. The book may well be the ting , but here Jung is invited to put his "intention" into the Vessel to be cooked. The imperative would be: "Contain it! Look into it! Transform it!" So we have two stories being constructed, "matching" the symbols to two different situations. The overt or "outer story" deals with the I Ching 's future in the Western book market. This involves the book itself, its "future in the west" and Jung's presentation of it to the English-speaking public. The covert or "inner story," however, deals with the nature of Jung's "intention."

 

The answer to the question Jung posed created two Transforming Lines. "When any of the lines of a given hexagram have the value of six or nine, it means that they are specially emphasized and hence important in the interpretation. In my hexagram the 'spiritual agencies' have given the emphasis of a nine to the lines in the second and third place" ( CW 11, §979, 1949). Let us look at the first of these Transforming Lines:

 

Nine at Second

There is something real in the Vessel. My companion is afflicted but cannot approach me. The way is open.

 

Again Jung maintained that this was the I Ching speaking of itself: " 'I contain (spiritual) nourishment,' it said. Since a share in something great always arouses envy, the chorus of the envious is part of the picture. The envious want to rob the I Ching of its great possession, that is, they seek to rob it of meaning, or destroy its meaning. But their enmity is in vain. Its richness of meaning is assured; that is, it is convinced of its positive achievements, which no one can take away" ( CW 11, §980, 1949).

 

This "outer story" is very interesting and, considering the lengths to which western philosophers, academics and clinical psychologists have gone to suppress this sort of meaning, it has a definite ring of truth about it. But the pronoun reference of I, me, my ( wo ), a word quite rare in the book's texts, is not just the Vessel. This term puts a very strong emphasis on the subjective experience of the inquirer . The "outer story" says nothing about Jung's "intention," though the image itself is very much concerned with a subjective sense of its "emotional politics."

 

This concern revolves the word companion ( ch'iu ), mistranslated, in my opinion, as the plural "comrades." There is a deep ambivalence in the word and the experience it represents, for it embodies a profound contradiction. It indicates someone or something that is closely tied to you through bonds of real affection on the one hand and, on the other, is a rival or enemy. Here the companion is afflicted ( chi ), not just sick, but full of anger, resentment and the desire to do harm. The obvious question in the process of "matching" symbol and situation is: What person, idea or imago in Jung's "intention," in his psychological and imaginative experience of the oracle, could be this close and this ambivalent? Assuming this is the oracle's image of Jung's inner attitude, there is only one possible answer: Richard Wilhelm and his translation.

 

If we remember the deep feeling about Wilhelm and his work Jung showed in his Eulogy, we can see that this "match" of symbol and situation is devastating. And being the psychologist he was, I am sure Jung would have been aware of it. But to understand this more than personal opposition, we must understand a bit more of the history of Change . For the split is also a part of the Vessel itself.

 

Wilhelm's translation was a landmark. It was readable and usable. It took the book seriously as a spiritual document and psychological tool. Wilhelm gave his life to this work, which he saw as crucially important, and it seemed to accord well with Jung's psychology. There was a deep bond between the two men. However, for all his dedication and sincerity, we know now that Wilhelm did not translate the I Ching as such. He translated a very particular version of it taught him by his teacher Lai Niu Hsüan, a Neo-Confucian scholar and official. Wilhelm gave us the Confucian I Ching , complete with its hierarchical vision of morality, spirituality and social philosophy. The Confucian I Ching is one, albeit highly opinionated, version of Change . But it is not the version Jung seems to be talking about when he speculates on the tao of the book or pays homage to its depth and understanding. Jung, in line with his lifelong preoccupation, seems to be talking about a Taoist Book of Change , while Wilhelm translated a Confucian one.

 

Confucians and Taoists

Confucianism and Taoism 18 were the two poles of traditional Chinese culture, with Buddhist thought, which came later, usually tending toward the Taoist end of the spectrum. The fundamental texts of both schools originated in the Warring States period (400-226 BCE), a time of both widespread social breakdown and great creativity. Confucianism, an intensely conservative, moralistic and hierarchical teaching, emerged first. It went on to become the official philosophy of Imperial China. It defined a political and cultural elite who identified the way or tao with the internalization of a particular set of social relations. Taoism, the second child, mocked social values and established power alike. An intensely individualist and radical teaching, it developed methods of dis-identifying with social institutions and commonly held motivations. Its central value was wu wei , not doing, a practice whereby the ego is emptied of conventional values so that the tao may fill the soul. Taoists valued freedom, imagination and unconventionality, laughing most heartily at the Confucian concern for dignity and presence. For them tao was the great mystery at the heart of all. Here is a famous text from the Lao t'zu or Tao te ching that was a direct reply to Confucian moralizing:

 

This sort of dialogue was a battle fought for the meaning of all the culture's key texts and terms. For Taoists realized that when you reify a moral ideal, you split off its opposite, calling it evil. It falls into the unconscious where it becomes a center of attraction, necessitating a constant heroic effort to maintain the repression. Internalizing Confucian ideals involves you in this endless repression of undesirable psychic contents and, even worse, of the people on whom they are projected: women, foreigners, misfits, rebels and the disobedient.

 

In many ways Jung " Classic of Change , opening a window through which it could enter western culture. I suggest that this Transforming Line indicates that he also passed on the task he failed to do: peeling away the Confucian morality overlaying the "spirit of tao " within the vessel. And as we do this, the Vessel truly becomes usable and its awareness, its lumen naturae , fully enters our world.

 

The final image in this encounter, an encounter that certainly includes those of us now who read and use the oracle is the Relating Figure generated when the two Transforming Lines of 50 Vessel change into their opposites. This image is 35 Prospering . It includes the meanings: emerge into the light; advance and be noticed, receive gifts; spread prosperity, the dawn of a new day; grow and flourish, as young plants in the sun; permeate, impregnate. The ideogram shows birds taking flight at dawn.

 

If this is the I Ching prognosticating about its own future, that future seems assured. It will slowly and surely rise from obscurity and confinement, spreading light, warmth and joy, a spiritual friend to those it contacts. We can, however, see this as the culmination of the "inner story" as well, as the "real" I Ching shakes off the shadows of the past and rises from the obscuring veil of interpretation that confined it.

 

The Friendship of the Spirit

In the 50 years since the publication of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, the Confucian interpretive facade has slowly been stripped away from Change , revealing something quite different beneath. This view, most clearly seen through a re-reading of Ta chuan , the Great Treatise on divination and spirituality that accompanies the Classic of Change , opens a potent, mysterious yet knowable world, a world and a way that Jung perceived. It gives us access to a “bright spirit" ( shen ming ) that protects while it encourages its users to act out of the best parts of their nature. It is a personal way to the spirit, a way of transformation allied to early practices of mediumship and spirit possession. The experience of this "helping spirit" can make you "sage:" clear-seeing, knowing death and birth, feeling the friendship of the spirit and compassion for fellow humans.

 

I suggest that a group of early Taoist practitioners originated this practice of using Change as a process of spiritual transformation about 400 BCE, and it is this "way" or tao we are now recovering. It was a radical re-invention of the oldest practices of “talking with the spirits,” created or re-created in a very dangerous time. It responds directly to individual concerns and offers protection, insight and self-realization. This way of the spirits is the most powerful and perennial appeal of Change , the thing that has drawn people to it for thousands of years.

 

So the substance in the vessel now being uncovered might be compared to one of those early spirit-mediums, the women and men who were wu . 19 This person can “see and hear what is occulted.” She or he gives to “those above ( shen , the light spirits) and those below ( kuei , the dark ghosts) what is due to them.” This imaginative generosity causes a luminous spirit ( shen ming or bright spirit) to descend. As this spirit takes up its home within, the wu becomes “daimonic and clear-seeing,” profoundly connected to the invisible world. The inner chapters of Kuan tz'u , 20 perhaps the earliest Taoist text from about 400 bce, gives us a sense of this practice:

 

There is a limit to "knowing," and that limit is imagination. Change puts you on the way, vitalizes your imagining with its symbols, opens your heart and that is enough.

 

This is the kind of figure whose teachings went into the “ New Way " of using Change . It is, I would suggest, at the heart of what Jung saw in this old Book of Oracles. This way proposes that we, too, can be like the sage-mediums of old. We can use Change to re-fashion our imagination. We can invite the shen , the bright spirit, to take a place in our heart. And as we go on with the work, day by day, suddenly the spirit arrives.

 

Notes

1 J. J. Clarke, Jung on the East , London : Routledge, 1995 collects the references in Jung's work and provides a good bibliography. I take the use of "orientation" as "directed toward the East" from his Jung and Eastern Thought , London : Routledge, 1994. This orientation was a deeply felt process for Jung, a part of his own individuation. He found a deep confirmation of his ideas in eastern thoughts on the Tao. I will paraphrase him extensively throughout this article to give a sense of this intimacy and intensity. I have included dates of his works to show the consistency of his opinions throughout his life.

 

2 Citations from C. G. Jung, Collected Works , trans. R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 and Letters , trans. R.F.C. Hull, eds. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Except for the occasional use of the word " yi=i " to avoid the awkward “ I ” as a word standing alone, I use Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese characters to accord with Jung and Wilhelm's practice.

 

3 The Lao-t'zu , named after its mythic author, also called Tao-te ching (Way Power Classic), was an oral tradition written down about 400 BCE. It is a founding text of "philosophical Taoism" and has been translated many times. I recommend Arthur Waley's translation, The Way and its Power: The Tao te ching and its Place in Chinese Thought , London : Allen & Unwin, 1934, rpt 1977, which was used in the Collected Works . For an interesting, if rather plodding, comparison of ideas central to Taoism and Jung's psychology, see Belinda S. L. Khong and Norman L. Thompson, (1997) “Jung and Taoism: A Comparative Analysis of Jung's Psychology and Taoist Philosophy, ” Harvest 43/2 , 1997, 86-105. They conclude that Jung's use of tao in psychology is “as much a watershed as Freud's introduction of the notion of infantile sexuality” (p. 103).

 

4 A good modern translation of tao is "the on-going process of the real," introduced by Willard Peterson in "Making Connections: Commentary on the Attached Verbalizations of the Book of Change ," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies , 2/2, 1992, pp. 67-112.

 

5 Modern examinations of synchronicity in a Jungian context include: Robert Aziz, C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity , Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1990; Roderick Main, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal , London: Routledge, 1997; Victor Mansfield, Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making , La Salle ILL: Open Court Press, 1995; and Ira Progoff, Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny , New York: Dell Books, 1973.

 

6 Letter to Olga Fröbe-Kaptyn, 29 January 1934 , in preparation for the second Eranos Tagung . There is a serious mistranslation of this phrase in the English Letters. In German, Jung differentiates in a quite acerbic fashion between “ zuviel ostliches wissen, ” or academic sinology, and psychology, a road no one takes until

“ bei dem alle anderen Seitenwege versagt haben ,” that is, until all the other ways have betrayed him. He then states that this psychological traveler must confront the I Ching , for “ zu der psycholgie im engeren Sinne gehört aber der ganz praktische Gebrauch des I Ging , that is, “however, part of psychology in the stricter sense is the whole practical use [ganz praktische Gebrauch] of the I Ching ” (my emphasis). See C.G. Jung Briefe , Erste Band, 1906-1945, Hersg. Aniele Jaffé und Gerhard Adler, Olten und Freiburg im Briesgau: Walter-Verlag, 1972, pp. 182-83.

 

7 "Among the impersonal psychic processes there are quite a number which seem absolutely strange and incomprehensible. They cannot be brought into connection with any of the historical symbols known to us, but we can find plenty of unquestionable analogies in the psychologies of the Orient. The unconscious psyche of Europeans shows a distinct tendency to produce contents that have their nearest analogies in old Chinese philosophy." This spirit of the East is "making itself clearly perceptible in the European subconscious" ( CW 18, §1286, 1930).

 

8 "Modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth century brother, turns to the psyche with very great expectations, with a view to Gnostic experience. He is actually pursuing knowledge , instead of faith , which is the essence of the Western forms of religion. Modern man abhors faith and the religions based on it. He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know - to experience for himself " ( CW 10, §171).

 

9 Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung: His Myth in Our Time , London : Hodden and Stroughton, 1975, p.13, cited in Aziz, p. 220. For the following discussion, see Aziz, ppgs. 9-11, 20-23, 165-167, 221ff and Stephen Karcher, Illustrated Encyclopedia of Divination , Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1997, chapters “Introduction,” “ Learning to Listen” and “Opening the Book of Fate.”

 

10 See Stephen Karcher, “Divination, Synchronicity and Fate,” in Journal of Religion and Health , 37/3, Fall 1988, pp. 215-228.

 

11 See, for example, Gerhard Adler, “Aspects of Jung's Personality and Work,” Harvest 21 , p. 7: “I have long considered the I Ching the most expressive symbol for the profoundest content of analytical psychology … whenever one consults the oracle one commits, knowingly or unknowingly, a metaphysical act of the greatest significance.”

 

12 The I Ching is now available in many translations. Unfortunately, many are simplistic rehashings of old material made without recourse to the Chinese texts. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes , Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1967, the "classic" English translation, now badly outdated; Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Change: The I Ching as interpreted by Wang Bi , New York : Columbia University Press, 1994, is a translation of the first Confucian revision of Change . For those who can read between the lines it is quite frightening; Wu Jing-Nuan, Yijing , Washington, D.C.: Taoist Study Series, 1991, is an interesting and usable Taoist version of the oldest parts of the text; Edward Shaugnessy, I Ching: the Classic of Changes : The First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century B. C. Mawangdui Texts, New York: Ballantine, 1996, is an scholarly but unusable triumph of "ruthless literal-mindedness," to use Richard Kunst's phrase. I am using Stephen Karcher, How to Use the I Ching , Shaftesbury: Element, 1997 and (with Rudolf Ritsema), The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change , Shaftesbury: Element,1995, for text and background. Since this article was written, I have made a significant new version, Total I Ching: Myths for Change, London : Time Warner, 2003, which reunites the oldest layers of the tradition with the received text.

 

13 See Karcher, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Divination ; Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker, Divination and Oracles , Boulder CO: Shambala, 1981; Phillip Peek, ed., African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing , Bloomington IND: Indiana University Press, 1991; Marie-Louise von Franz, Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance, Toronto: Inner City, 1980; Jean-Paul Vernant, ed., Divination et rationalité, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974; and the entry "Divination" in the Encyclopedia of Religion , ed. Mircea Eliade.

 

14 On dang or “matching,” see Smith, Kidder Smith, " Zhouyi Interpretation from accounts in the Zuozhuan. " Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49/2, 1998.

 

15 Translations, commentary and background from Stephen Karcher, Ta chuan: the Great Treatise , St. Martin 's Press, forthcoming. Ta chuan began about 400 BCE as a set of Taoist oral teachings on the use of Change . Written down about 175 BCE, it was the central part of the Ten Wings , the commentary that was added to Change in the Han Dynasty. Ta chuan was the most important cosmological and spiritual document in post-Han China . Through its re-imagining of the ancient practices of the wu or mediums, it turned Change into a way of spiritual transformation.

 

The Journey to the West is an important event in Chinese religious history, when monks traveled from China to India to bring back the scriptures of Buddhism about 650 CE. It is the theme of a famous 17 th century novel by Wu Ch'eng-en, an extravaganza of myth and magic that results in the transformation of all who took part in it. See Arthur Waley, Monkey , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 and A. C. Yu, Journey to the West, 4 vol, Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1977, for translations.

 

17 This process of interpretation, which I have worked on for many years, is described in detail in Total I Ching , in the section titled Tools for Change.

 

18 The dialogue and hermeneutic conflict between Taoist and Confucian for control of the tradition's major texts is an important and hidden part of the history of the Classic of Change. This is described in detail in my commentary in Ta Chuan: The Great Treatise . See also The Two Traditions: The Shaman and the Sage , forthcoming.

 

19 On thought and culture in traditional China, see Sarah Allen, The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue , Albany: SUNY Press, 1997, and The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art and Cosmos in Early China , Albany: SUNY Press, 1991; Marcel Granet, La pensée chinoise , Paris: Albin Michel, 1934; Festivals and Songs of Early China (trans E .D. Edwards), London: Routledge and Sons, 1932; and Danses et legends de la Chine ancienne , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959 (rpt) – a true hidden masterpiece; Henri Maspero, China in Antiquity (trans Frank Kierman), University of Massachusetts Press, 1978; J. Paper, The Spirits are Drunk: Comparative Approaches to Chinese Religion , Albany: SUNY Press, 1995 (both strange and truly brilliant); Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985; and J. J. M. De Groot's vast compendium of traditional belief and practice, The Religious Systems of China (6 vol), Taipei, 1892-1910, rpt 1974. Paper has the best examination of the Wu as spirit mediums available today. On contemporary mediums and possession cults, see Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil , Baltimore: University of Maryland Press, 1978; J. A. Eliot, Chinese Spirit Medium Cults in Singapore , London, 1995; Jane Belo, Trance in Bali , New York, 1960; Erica Bourguignon (ed), Religion, Altered States of Consciousness and Social Change , Columbus OH: University of Ohio Press, 1973 and Trance Dance , New York, 1968; M. L. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971; and Sheila Walker, Ceremonial Spirit Possession in Africa and Afro-America , Leiden: Brill, 1972.

 

20 The inner or ‘psychic' chapters of the Kuan-tz'u are discussed and partially translated in Whalen Lai, “The Interiorization of the Gods: The Psychic Chapters the Kuan-tz'u, Revisited”, Taoist Resources, vol I, no 1, 1-10. See also Stephen Karcher, “Oracle's contexts: Dreams, Shadow, Language”, Spring 53 ; “Which Way I Fly is Hell: Divination and the Shadow of the West”, Spring 55 ; “Making Spirits Bright: Divination and the Demonic Image”, Eranos 61/1992 and “Divination, Synchronicity and Fate”, Journal of Religion and Health, 37/3, Fall, 1998.