Understanding the I Ching: The Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of Changes

Description

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching Preface 3 1 Origins 8 2 The Concept of Change 20 3 The Two Fundamental Principles 33 4 The Trigrams and the Hexagrams 47 5 The Hexagrams Ch 'ien and K'un 63 6 The Ten Wings 83 7 The Later History of the Book of Changes 101 8 The Oracle Book 120 Lectures on the I Ching: Constancy and Change Introduction 139 Opposition and Fellowship 154 The Spirit of Art According to the Book of Changes 194 Constancy in Change 236 Death and Renewal 286 Notes 317 Index 327