INTERVIEW: The ineffable mystery of how the I Ching works
By Bill Tarrant
For nearly four decades living in Asia, most of those years in East Asia, I searched for scholars and practitioners of the I Ching, the Taoist “oracle” that traces its history back 3,000 years. I had been interested in the “Book of Changes” since my college days, when I became enamored with Carl Jung, and figures from the humanistic psychology movement such as Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl, who all seemed influenced by Asian spirituality.
I could not find I Ching scholars in the Taoist temples I visited across Asia, where some variant of kau chim was usually on offer, using fortune-telling sticks (aka chi chi sticks): A supplicant poses a question and then interprets the answer displayed on flat sticks inscribed with text or numbers that have been tossed on an altar, sometimes with the assistance of a temple attendant.
The I Ching (Yi Ching) or Book of Changes also began as a divination tool in ancient China. But it evolved under its Confucian curators, beginning in the 6th century BCE, into something else; a decision-making tool and guide to becoming a “superior man”.
The I Ching, which never had much mass appeal in China, fell into disfavor and obscurity when the communists came to power in China, eschewing the elitism and hierarchies of Confucianism.
Yet even as that was happening, the I Ching was finding new devotees in the West. Carl Jung, who was vying with Sigmund Freud to be the prime mover in the new field of psychiatry in the early 20th century, saw the I Ching as aligned with his theory of synchronicity. Coincidences are unrelated events briefly intersecting in time and space. Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance; it is the intertwining of objective events with the subjective or psychic state of the observer, according to Jung. This was also his theory behind how the I Ching works: the toss of the coins (or yarrow sticks) mystically connects the observer with the world or tableau that their question evokes.
Jung wrote the foreword to the most authoritative translation of the Book of Changes by the German Richard Wilhelm, later translated into English in 1951 by an American, Carey Baynes. The two translations brought the I Ching to Western audiences curious about Asian spirituality, first through beatnik writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and then more widely in the 1960s counter-culture movement.
Since moving back to America six years ago, I’ve been trying to reach out to Western I Ching communities. One is the Djohi Center in Paris, founded in 1984 by Cyrille Javary, author of the popular “Understanding the I Ching” (Shambhala, 1997).
"Djohi" is the phonetic transcription of the formal name of the Yi Jing in China, "Zhou Yi", which roughly translates as the “Classic Book of Changes in the Zhou dynasty” (circa 1,000 BCE), when the first divination manual for the I Ching was recorded. Zhou Yi also introduced the yin/yang dichotomy.
The Djohi Center runs courses and workshops for its 200 or so members and organizes a weeklong annual retreat for I Ching followers in the south of France in August. The Center also produces a range of publications and books published by its members.
I recently interviewed Cyrille Javary to get his take on how the I Ching works, particularly that mystical connection between the “observer” and the real-world tableau that underlies the question posed to the oracle.
The interview is lightly edited for clarity.
Let's cut to the chase. One of the most ineffable aspects of the I Ching is this: how does the random toss of the coins crystallize the moment and give the appropriate hexagram to the user’s question?
Confucius, to a disciple who asked him to explain the meaning of the great sacrifice to the royal ancestors, replied: 不知也。 知其說者之於天下也， 其如示諸斯乎。 指其掌 which Jean Lévi translates as: "I don't know! Whoever knew it would hold the world in this... And he pointed to the hollow of his hand." There is no better answer to your question.
What are the dynamics or energy here?
不知道 “I have no idea.”
Jung saw synchronicity at work. Do you agree?
Not at all. Jung only confused the question by using the narrow I Ching that Wilhelm gave him to give a … foundation to his otherwise enriching constructions.
Is there a "mystical" dimension in which the observer asking a question to the I Ching draws, in some way, from a kind of field of information (in the Einsteinian sense)? Perhaps in which a ritual toss of the coins engages the right brain to tap into a field or perhaps the "collective unconscious"?
Maybe, but these are areas that are too complicated for me.
You do seem to try to grapple with this idea in your book, where you write that the hexagram resulting from the random tossing of coins or sticks "shows the energetic organization of the person” asking the question in his mind at that moment. What is this "energetic organization"?
The same as that used by acupuncturists when they draw precise and actionable information on a person's energy organization from their fingertips.
The ancient Chinese didn't seem to see it quite that way. And as you explain in your concise history, it was first a tool of divination using bones and tortoise shells, before becoming a tool for analyzing the present. Is this correct?
It seems to me that very early on, the operations on bones and shells were a tool of divination used to analyze the present to detect the opportunity (or not ) of what one wishes to undertake.
How do Chinese (Confucian) scholars explain the dynamics/energy by which the random toss of coins is tied to a particular hexagram?
By a passage from "La Grande Étude," where it is said that the yellow oriole, since it can land wherever it wants, always lands where it should. (The “Great Learning” is one of four foundational books of Confucianism)
In your book, you explain that the most important moment in throwing the I Ching is not when the coins or sticks are in the air (chance) but when they land (the moment is crystallized). Is it like the Schrödinger's cat experiment in quantum mechanics? When the observer finds out if the cat is dead or alive when the box is opened? (crystallizing the moment, so to speak)?
I don't know, quantum mechanics is too complicated for my bird's brain.
Could it be that when the pieces fall, random chance turns into a dynamic picture with a few possible futures for the person asking the question? And the advice contained in the resulting hexagram is about how to navigate through this matrix of possibilities.
The image is pretty, but the wording of this question is not very clear.
How does the poetic language of the lines, where archetypal images abound, work on the mind of the questioner? Is this a way of engaging the right brain/subconscious to tap into the area discussed? Does the ritual help to uncover hidden ideas and unrealized thoughts in the person asking the question
I agree with the end of the question, uncovering hidden ideas, but not with the beginning. There is no poetic language in the lines. It is a technical text written in the practitioner's jargon. It was Western translators who made it into a literary text. And there are no archetypal images in this text, at least not in the sense in which Jung uses this term.
You argue that the I Ching has similarities with modern chaos theory. Is it mainly in the way that one or more changing lines can produce a whole new hexagram? And the role that chance plays both in the evolution of a "chaotic" event and in a hexagram?
Exactly!
In his book, Javary says the hexagram resulting from a random toss is “showing us the characteristics of the frozen moment”, which include “contact with powers beyond our control.” He didn't elaborate on those "powers" and in our interview compares the process to how acupuncture works.
But the I Ching differs from acupuncture – and feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice that arranges spaces to be in harmony with nature – by its emphasis on random chance.
“The Chinese are not afraid of chance,” he writes in his book. “It has always seemed to them to be the best way to link themselves with the ever-changing flow of yin/yang.”
How that link works is an enduring mystery.
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