Stephen Karcher, How to Use the I Ching, A Guide to Working with the Oracle of Change (Boston: Element Books, 1997).
Part Two, pp. 10-12. [Part One is here]
THE NAME OF THE BOOK
The most important ‘spirit,’ however, is contained in the name of the book itself: I (pronounced ‘ee’). The book really has three names. I Ching, the most familiar in the West, means ‘Classic of I.’ This comes from the time when five ‘classic’ books were established in China, around 200 BCE. The older name is Chou I, or ‘The I Book of the Kings of Chou,’ who were the first to assemble and use it around 1100 BCE. Quite frequently it is simply called ‘The I.’
This word is usually translated as ‘change’ or ‘changes’, but it is really more precise than that. The I Ching contains models of orderly change, such as the change of the seasons, the movement of the planets or the stages of life, and models of transformations like water becoming ice, or a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. What is called ‘I’ really occurs outside these models of predictable change.
The first meaning of I is ‘trouble.’ It indicates sudden storms, loss, times when what is thought to be stable suddenly becomes fluid or vanishes. Structures break down; something extraordinary occurs.
The second meaning of I is the response to this kind of trouble: versatility, imaginative mobility, openness, something easy and light, not difficult and heavy. It suggests a fluid personal identity and a variety of imaginative stances. Through I you can change and move as fluidly and unpredictably as the creative force it describes. The I and its symbols describe the movements of the spirits that are the ‘seeds of events’ in the world. The spirits and their symbols connect the I of the universe to your own I, your creative imagination, if you choose to use them.
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE BOOK
The Chou I
The creation of the Chou I, the original name of the book, was associated with the rise of the Chou Kings and the fall of the previous Shang Dynasty. This is characterized in the book itself as a ‘difficult time,’ full of sorrows. The eventual victory of the Chou nobles was thought to have restored the Golden Age to China. One of the most important tools in their struggle was their ‘Book of I.’
By about 500 bce the Chou kingdoms had fallen apart. It was during this time of civil unrest, the Warring States period, that the individual use of the oracle began. The book’s purpose was transformed. It helped individuals find their way through the chaos of a crumbling social order.
The Classic of I
During the Han Dynasty (206 bce - 220 ce), what was called the Chou I or ‘Changes of Chou’ became the I Ching or ‘Classic of Change.’ The Han was the first great Imperial state in China, and it gathered and standardized many things. The written language was codified and clarified and five canonical texts or ‘Classics’ were established. The first was the ‘Classic of I’, the I Ching. Imperial scholars edited the text and put it into the new form of writing. They also collected and wrote down the various oral ‘traditions’ or teachings about how the oracle was used. These became the ‘Ten Wings’ that were attached to the central text. One of them in particular, the Hsi tzu chuan or Ta chuan, the ‘Commentary on the Attached Words’ or ‘Great Commentary,’ became one of the most important documents in Chinese culture. It explained how the world worked and how, through divination, we could find our proper place in it.
Confucianism
This version of the I Ching lasted well into the twentieth century. It was used and interpreted in many different ways, from popular to academic. A very influential system of interpretation grew up among the scholar-bureaucrats who served the government, a system called Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism. This moral and philosophical system was based on a particular interpretation of the tao. Neo-Confucians said that tao was a set of hierarchical cosmic and social relations: just as heaven is above, and earth below, so man is above, woman below; the husband above, the wife below; the elder above, the younger below; the ruler above, the subject below; the yang power above, and the yin power below. These ideas of above and below were a judgment of value and intrinsic worth, a strict moral and social hierarchy. Internalizing this hierarchy was the Confucian idea of ‘being in tao’. They developed an elaborate interpretation of the words and figures of the I Ching to support this hierarchical morality.
The Change Today
This century has brought a historic revision of the I Ching, taking the Neo-Confucian interpretation apart. Independent sources of the earliest types of written Chinese were discovered, and much light has been thrown upon divination practices and the meanings of words and phrases outside of their Confucian definitions. The identity of the book itself is once again changing. We can now recover its old oracular power and, at the same time, find a new place for it in the imagination of our time.
END OF PART TWO
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