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

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. “Heraclitus, who held that life was movement and that it developed through the conflict of opposites, also conceived a harmonious world order, the Logos, that shapes this chaos. But to the Chinese, as we shall see, the two principles, movement and the unchanging law governing it, are one: they know neither kernel nor husk—heart and mind function together undivided.” —Hellmut Wilhelm Originally published as 'Change: Eight Lectures on the “I Ching”' by Hellmut Wilhelm and 'Lectures on the “I Ching”: Constancy and Change' by Richard Wilhelm.