The Story of the I Ching

Three thousand years ago, a man knelt on the cold stone floor of a cell and wept. He had once been known as the wise king, beloved for his kindness and grace. But now he was the prisoner of a cruel tyrant whose greed and lust were turning the world to ash. The wise king did not weep for himself but for his people. He'd heard the stories, grim tales of bloodshed and starvation passed through the prison's walls like the wind and the damp.

The tyrant had crushed the nation with taxes and backbreaking labor so he could build a golden swimming pool filled with wine and islands of trees that had skewers of roasted meat hanging from their branches. There, the tyrant spent his days floating in a canoe with his concubines, reaching up when hungry or scooping wine if thirsty, all the while dreaming of elaborate tortures for his prisoners. The latest required his victims to hug a boiling cauldron until their flesh peeled away. The wise king squinted through his tears at the wall of his prison, wondering if a cauldron was in his future, but he saw something else. As he gazed at the tallies scratched into the wall by the men who had marched their time before him, these lines reminded him of the stories his parents used to tell.

Stories that have been passed mouth to mouth since history began. Once upon a time, we were savages, drinking blood and eating flesh and hair, living without law or family or virtue. Until one day, the pattern on a tortoise shell led their leader to begin contemplating the rhythm of the stars, the mountains, the tides, and the hearts of men. With a few simple lines, he sketched eight diagrams that would civilize humankind. But the world is always in flux, these stories cautioned, and civilization was a fragile thing.

Squinting at the wall, the wise king considered the lines before him. He began to see new patterns, new rhythms of virtue and vice. Taking a broken quill from his sleeve, he began to write. A cracked tortoise shell, a jailed king, and a boiling cauldron. This is our best understanding of the birth of the I Ching, which people have used for guidance in everything from the weather to warfare to romance.

When the legendary ruler, Fu Shi, noticed the patterns in a tortoise shell five thousand years ago. He developed the eight trigrams we know today, each representing a feature of nature in the psyche. Although the origin of these symbols belongs to myth, archaeological records indicate that in the late twelfth century BCE, a deposed king named Wen of Zhou was held captive by the vicious emperor, Dxing. Wen had a vision of Fuxi's eight trigrams organized into a more complex system. He spent his days in prison writing meditations on the meaning of each of these symbols until the people demanded his freedom.

Upon his release, Wen sought to end Di Xing's terror, a difficult errand that was completed by his son, Wu, in eleven fifty two BCE. After establishing the Zhou dynasty, Wu expanded his father's commentaries, and the I Ching began to appear in its present form. The I Ching is fundamentally made up of lines, solid and broken, and these two lines are based on the complementary forces of yin and yang. The broken line is yin, which represents receptiveness, rest, darkness, introspection. Solid line is yang, which represents action, energy, brightness, expression.

These two lines are opposite and complementary. They speak to the interrelatedness of all things and form the foundation of ancient Chinese philosophy and practices, including Taoism, Tai Chi, and Qigong. Ong. Together, these opposites drive the ebb and flow of life within the individual, society, and the cosmos. The solid and dashed lines were combined in every three line possibility to form the eight trigrams.

Each trigram represents a force of nature, such as earth, mountain, water, wind, and each is associated with particular attributes such as receptivity, stillness, resilience, adaptability. These trigrams were then paired in every possible arrangement to form the 64 hexagrams, thereby generating a system that describes the tensions and cycles within the natural world as well as the soul. The relationship between elements such as sky and water became intertwined with stories about their psychological counterparts, such as creativity and failure. Each hexagram includes a reading and commentary on the ways these concepts can be applied to our own predicaments and concerns. And the continuous flow of change is built into the philosophy of the I Ching.

One consults the I Ching by throwing coins or sticks, and through this process typically receives two readings, one regarding the moment and one regarding how things will change with time. And so this book began to circulate, emerging a bit more polished after passing beneath the pens of philosophers like Lao Tzu, Mencius, and Zhuan Tzu. In the fifth century BCE, Confucius was putting the final touches on his version of the commentaries when he announced that his greatest regret was that he had not spent enough of his very long life studying its lessons. If we follow the I Ching's advice and consult it regularly, he said, we can attain creative awareness in any situation. And so the I Ching became a familiar sight in the hands of rulers and generals who adopted it as a tactical manual, as well as ordinary people searching for guidance on how to weather their own day to day battles.

Its teachings left a mark upon the religions and mythologies that moved through China, from Buddhism to Taoism to Confucianism, a development which had greatly pleased our regretful philosopher. Meanwhile, echoes of the I Ching sensibility began to appear in the theories of the ancient Greeks, particularly Heraclitus' belief in a world of constant flux, as well as Aristotle's golden mean, which suggests any virtue can become a vice if taken to extreme, and we should therefore always seek the middle ground. Thus, courage is the midpoint between recklessness and cowardice, and devotion might sit between ambition and contentment. Although the theorems of Plato and Aristotle ultimately led to the stark dualism of good versus evil that color so much of the western mind, the solid and broken lines of the I Ching describe a much more complex interconnected system in which any quality is a necessary part of a greater cycle. An idea best expressed by the yin yang, which appeared alongside the I Ching as a symbol that presents the interplay of darkness and light.

It's a fact to be embraced rather than a battle to be fought. Yet many Chinese scholars found themselves fighting a very different kind of battle as they shielded the I Ching from emperors and aristocrats who thought the book was subversive, even haunted, and that it should be banned. Thankfully, a handful of philosophers and academics persisted in their belief that the I Ching should be recognized not as a prop for soothsayers and faith dealers, but as a treasured archive, a philosophy dedicated to living a better life. Thus, it was spared from several bouts of nationwide book burning when so much was purged from history. And while it disappeared from China's bookstores when communism took hold in 1949, Mao himself remained a firm believer in the I Ching's power and consulted it regularly.

Many still believed it was a diagram of the mind of God. The Yi Chang's adventures beyond China were gradual at first, starting in the early seventeenth century with the first translations by Jesuit missionaries. When the German philosopher and mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, encountered the book in seventeen o three, it provided the inspiration for his binary arithmetic, which would one day lead to the development of the computer. He also believed its solid and broken lines proved the existence of God. Just as a zero cannot become a number without some underlying material or force, he argued.

Nothing cannot become something without the influence of the divine. Although the I Ching was taken seriously by a few European philosophers, for the most part, it was viewed as an exotic curiosity that belonged to tales of curses and superstition. And this continued when the book arrived on the shores of America with Chinese miners during the gold rush of the eighteen hundreds. The I Ching's reputation began to change in 1949 when Richard Wilhelm's translation caught the attention of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. He was immediately struck by how its symbols harmonized with his theories of archetypes, A collection of subconscious images, which he believed represented our shared desires and fears, such as the hero, the devil, and the mother goddess.

Jung believed this universal language allows us to recast our lives in mythic terms to commune with the lessons of ancient myths and gods, and the I Ching seemed like the perfect vehicle for this journey. He also observed the similarities between the Yi Ching and modern physics. Quantum theory suggests that much like the digital world which dominates our lives today, the world is illusory, a psychophysical structure composed of the unseen tensions and attractions between constantly changing particles. Just as the microphysics of our universe are influenced by an observer, the I Ching maps the relationship between external events and the psychic weather of the individual. When he accepted the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics, the physicist, Niels Bohr, credited the Yid Ching as an influence.

It has fired the imaginations of writers such as Philip k Dick, Jack Kerouac, and Jorge Luis Borges. And it has shaped the music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Brian Eno. So here is a sprawling catalog of metaphysics constructed by two simple lines, one solid and one broken. It is as old as we are, surviving cataclysms, both natural and man made, passing through book burnings and expurgations, garbled by new languages and dialects, yet nonetheless reappearing unscathed to continue teaching its lessons in action and patience, intuition and chance. You might dismiss these merits, but as Jung asked, why not venture a dialogue with an ancient book that purports to be animated?