A Bibliophile’s Dream I Ching or Book of Changes. Part 1

By Charles Durante

There are some books which are almost unclassifiable, they don’t seem to belong to the conventional genres and defy our need to assign them to a well-known category. They are the librarian’s nightmare, as they don’t fit into the clearly defined labels which are used to catalogue books.

These books are maverick productions, and we get the impression that their authors, when known, had no idea what kind of book they were writing.

Some of these are anonymous so that the author is not available for consultation; others are just rare books, which do not have one overarching theme or topic, but assemble disparate material in a manner which is not readily discernible.

Among them we also find medieval versions of the gospels, beautifully illuminated like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. This category includes the collection of medieval lyrics, the Carmina Burana, once housed in a Benedictine monastery and now in a museum in Munich.

One would stand in awe in front of some of these rare, illuminated treasures, the result of many hours, indeed days and months, of painstaking labour in a cold, dark and uncomfortable scriptorium.

Besides the books already mentioned, I intend to include some material on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, usually classified as a work of philosophy, but brimming over with a mad lyricism and dithyrambic passion.

Then there is the standard book for the inquisitors, the Malleus Maleficarum, a witchfinder’s textbook, full of diabolical lore and instruction on how to hound witches and wizards.

The first book and one which deserves to be considered one of the most baffling productions of the human imagination is the Chinese classic text called The Book of Changes or I Ching. This is a book of divination or, at least, that is the commonly agreed opinion of this very strange composition.

I hope to explore an Anglo-Saxon poem, The Dream of the Rood and, maybe, look at a book written by W B Yeats, A Vision, which he claimed provided the intellectual, symbolic and magical basis for his more mature verse. Like the I Ching, Yeats’s book is full of enigmatic drawings and esoteric lore.

STARTS

Because the I Ching is such a strange and puzzling book, very old and with no known author, if we discount Confucius who contributed to it, we are justified in giving it pride of place in this series of commentaries on enigmatic texts.

The I Ching is unquestionably one of the most important books in world literature. Its origin goes back to mythical antiquity, and it has occupied the attention of the most eminent scholars of China to the present day. The I Ching or I (pronounced ‘ee’) is a fundamental text of traditional Chinese culture. It is a divinatory system with three thousand year-old roots in the tradition of magic and shamanism.

At the outset, the Book of Changes was a collection of linear signs to be used as oracles. In antiquity, oracles were everywhere in use; the oldest among them confined themselves to the answers yes and no. This type of oracular pronouncement is the basis of the Book of Changes. ‘Yes’ was indicated by a simple unbroken line (______), and ‘No’ by a broken line (_ _). However, the need was felt for greater differentiation so that the single lines were combined in pairs:
______. __ __ ______. __ __
______. __. __. __ __ . _____

This way the eight trigrams came into being. These trigrams were conceived as images of all that happens in Heaven and on Earth. At the same time, they were held to be in a state of continual transition, one changing into another, just as transition from one phenomenon into another is continually taking place in the physical world. Here we have the fundamental concept of the Book of Changes. The eight trigrams are symbols for the changing, transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change. Attention centres not on things in their state of being - as is usually at the case in the West - but upon their movements in change.

A brief survey of these eight symbols that form the basis of the Book of Changes yields the following classification - please see inset accompanying this article.

In order to achieve a still greater multiplicity, these eight images were combined with one another at a very early date, whereby a total of sixty-four signs were obtained. Each of these sixty-four signs consists of six lines, either positive or negative. Each line is thought of as capable of change, and whenever a line changes, there is a change also in the situation represented by a given hexagram.

Let us take for example the hexagram K’un, the receptive, earth:

____ . ____
____ ____
____. ____
____. ____
____ ____
____ ____

It represents the nature of the earth, strong in devotion; among the seasons it stands for late autumn, when all the forces of life are at rest. If the lowest line changes, we have the hexagram Fu, return

____ ____
____. ____
____ ____
____ ____
____. ____
-__________

The latter represents thunder, the movement that stirs anew within the earth at the time of the solstice; it symbolizes the return of light.

The I Ching owes the authority it has always enjoyed in China to a number of factors.

One is the fact that it has become the first among the Chinese classics. After Confucius took up the book in the last period of the Chou era, it became the text whose study was authorised by the government; and when the non-Confucian schools were excluded from the imperial academy in 140 BC, the I Ching shared with the other Confucian classics in the monopoly of the established doctrine.

Lastly, the place of the I Ching in Chinese culture rests on an act of imperial will. It may occasion surprise that the decree of a temporal power sufficed to give the classic a position that can be compared to the place of sacred scripture inspired by divine revelation.

A second article next week will conclude what we have to say about this extraordinary book.