I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change

The I Ching Is Not a Book of Changes but a Technology for Dissolving the Ego’s Grip on Meaning

Ritsema and Karcher open with a deceptively radical philological claim: the character I does not mean change. It means versatility — “the ability to remain available to and be moved by the unforeseen demands of time, fate and psyche.” This is not a quibble over translation; it is a total reorientation of what the oracle does. Where Richard Wilhelm’s celebrated 1950 translation, mediated through Confucian commentary and Jung’s foreword, presents the I Ching as a mirror of cosmic processes governed by the complementary dynamics of yin and yang, Ritsema and Karcher excavate something older and stranger: an instrument designed to shatter the ego’s insistence on imposing narrative coherence. Their I is “unpredictable and, as the tradition says, unfathomable.” It originates in trouble, in what crosses your path uninvited. The oracle does not explain the crossing; it makes you versatile enough to survive it. Jung, in his 1949 foreword to the Wilhelm edition, described synchronicity as the principle that makes the I Ching intelligible — “the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance.” Ritsema and Karcher take this further: the oracle’s language itself must become synchronistic, each term a field of simultaneous meanings rather than a fixed signifier. Their one-to-one character-to-English-gerund method — preserving the original word order, adding no connectives, no prepositions, no explanatory syntax — is not scholarly asceticism. It is an attempt to make the English text behave the way dream-images do, combining and interacting without the rational connective tissue that consciousness demands.

Stripping the Confucian Overlay Exposes the Shamanic Unconscious of Chinese Civilization

The translation’s most consequential editorial decision is the exclusion of the Ten Wings and all Confucian moral commentary. Where Alfred Huang’s 1998 translation insists that “without Confucius’s commentaries the I Ching cannot be understood” — the orthodox Chinese position — Ritsema and Karcher argue the opposite. The commentaries do not illuminate the oracular core; they domesticate it. Based on the Kang Hsi Palace Edition of 1715, the same base text behind Wilhelm’s translation, they systematically extract only the oracular texts: the hexagram names, the judgments, the line phrases, and the Image traditions. Everything else — “Confucian moral philosophy and imperial political thought” — is set aside. What emerges is not a philosophical treatise but a diviner’s manual, a grimoire. The authors locate the text’s living center in the Warring States Period (500–200 BCE), when the oracle passed from professional court diviners into the hands of private individuals navigating political fragmentation and existential danger. This is the period that also produced Taoism, Confucianism, and the philosophical traditions that Liu Yiming, in his 1796 Taoist commentary translated by Thomas Cleary, would later use to read the hexagrams as guides to inner alchemical transformation. But Ritsema and Karcher go behind all these appropriations. They want the raw shamanic speech — the “omens, images and magic spells from an oral shamanistic, divinatory tradition” that constitute the oldest textual layer. Their claim is that this stratum is not primitive but primary: it is the generative unconscious from which all subsequent Chinese philosophy emerged, and it remains psychologically alive precisely because it was never rationalized.

The Oracle as Jungian Active Imagination Made Systematic

The book’s deepest affinity is not with sinology but with depth psychology. Ritsema, as president of the Eranos Foundation — the institution that hosted decades of seminars linking Jungian psychology with comparative mythology, religion, and Eastern thought — and Karcher, as co-director of the Eranos I Ching Project, position their translation explicitly as a tool for what Jung called active imagination. The oracle’s images “dissolve what is blocking the connection, making the spirits available.” The consultation process “is an exploration of the unconscious side of a situation.” The hexagram texts “present open-ended clusters of images and ideas that mirror structures of the psyche, a quality they share with dreams and spontaneous fantasies.” This is not metaphorical framing; it is a structural claim about how the oracle works. Jung himself, in his foreword to the Wilhelm translation, described the I Ching as “a method of exploring the unconscious” and noted with evident fascination that “meaningful answers are the rule.” But Jung remained cautious, framing his engagement through the concept of synchronicity — an acausal connecting principle that explained how chance coin-throws could yield psychologically relevant answers without positing literal spirit-communication. Ritsema and Karcher are bolder. They restore the language of spirits, gods, and shamanic communication not as metaphysical claims but as descriptions of psychological experience. “In every symptom, conflict or problem we experience there is a spirit trying to communicate with us,” they write. “Each encounter with trouble is an opening to this spirit, usually opposed by the ego because it wants to enforce its will on the world.” This is the language of James Hillman’s archetypal psychology transposed into the key of Chinese divination — the ego as the problem, the image as the cure, the symptom as the god’s speech.

Why the Multivalent Translation Method Is Itself the Teaching

The concordance — the first in any Western language — is not an appendix but the book’s philosophical spine. By rendering each Chinese character with a single English core-word throughout all 64 hexagrams and accompanying each with a constellation of possible meanings drawn from across the history of the language, Ritsema and Karcher create something unprecedented: a translation that refuses to interpret for you. Where Wilhelm offers polished, coherent English sentences that read like wisdom literature, and where Huang provides accessible modern prose grounded in Chinese orthodox pedagogy, this translation delivers raw symbolic fields. The reader must do the work of meaning-making — turning and rolling the words in the heart, as the tradition instructs. This is not a flaw in the translation; it is the oracle functioning as designed. The I Ching, for Ritsema and Karcher, “fills an important gap in the modern approach to the psyche” because it connects archetypal study directly to individual experience through a participatory act of imaginative engagement. No other translation in English makes this demand or offers this possibility with such rigor. For anyone working within the depth psychological tradition — whether through Jungian analysis, Hillman’s imaginal method, or the broader project of recovering what modernity repressed — this book provides not commentary on the unconscious but a living technology for entering it.