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

Front Cover
Princeton University Press, 1995 - Body, Mind & Spirit - 339 pages

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.

 

Contents

Origins
8
The Concept of Change
20
The Two Fundamental Principles
33
The Trigrams and the Hexagrams
47
The Hexagrams Ch ien and Kun
63
The Ten Wings
83
The Later History of the Book of Changes
101
The Oracle Book
120
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
Copyright

Constancy and Change
137

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