Understanding the I Ching: The Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of ChangesThe 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 |
Constancy and Change | 137 |