The Original I Ching: The Eranos I Ching Project

1424 Pages·2018·6.61 MB·English

by  Rudolf Ritsema

Rudolf Ritsema was a devoted student of the I Ching since his first
encounter with it in 1944. He was director of the prestigious Eranos
Foundation for 30 years and after his retirement he published English,
Italian and German translations of the I Ching. He passed away in
2006. The present definitive version of the Eranos I Ching is the
distillation of his lifelong involvement with the book.
Shantena Augusto Sabbadini worked as a theoretical physicist at the
University of Milan and at the University of California, where he
contributed to the first identification of a black hole. Later he became
interested in religion, philosophy and psychology, and in 1991 he
joined the Eranos circle and became involved in the Eranos
conferences as organizer and lecturer.
THE ORIGINAL
I CHING
ORACLE
OR
THE BOOK OF
CHANGES
BY
RUDOLF RITSEMA AND
SHANTENA AUGUSTO SABBADINI
THE ERANOS I CHING PROJECT
Contents
Part One
Introduction
1. The Book of Yi
THE NAME OF THE BOOK
YIN AND YANG
SYNCHRONICITY
A KALEIDOSCOPE OF IMAGES
A MIRROR OF THE PRESENT
GETTING STARTED
2. Interrogating the Oracle
FORMULATING A QUESTION
LINES, TRIGRAMS, HEXAGRAMS
THE CONSULTATION PROCEDURE
The coins method
The yarrow stalk method
Primary and potential hexagram
Finding your hexagram
READING YOUR ANSWER
Layers of significance
Rolling the words in your heart
Chinese as an imaginal language
BASIC FEATURES OF THE ERANOS TRANSLATION
Core-words
Fields of meaning
Oracular and exegetic texts
SECTIONS OF A HEXAGRAM
Image of the Situation
Outer and Inner Trigram
Counter Hexagram
Preceding Situation
Hexagrams in Pairs
Additional Texts
Patterns of Wisdom
Transforming Lines
Image Tradition
REMARKS ABOUT THE ERANOS TRANSLATION
Romanization of Chinese characters
Sources of the Fields of meaning
Composite entries
Special cases
Idiomatic phrases
Great and small
THE CONCORDANCE
3. Myth and History
THE TRADITION
The first emperor
The Pattern King
MODERN VIEWS OF THE ORIGINS OF THE YI
Bones and tortoise shells
The yarrow stalk oracle
THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK
The Book of Encompassing Versatility
The canonization of the Yi
Philosophical and oracular tradition
The Palace Edition
The Mawangdui manuscript
THE YIJING COMES TO THE WEST
THE YIJING AT ERANOS
Olga Froebe
Rudolf Ritsema
The Eranos Round Table Sessions
4. Correlative Thinking
THE UNIVERSAL COMPASS
The yin-yang cycle
The yearly cycle and the four directions
The five Transformative Moments
THE EIGHT TRIGRAMS AND THEIR ATTRIBUTES

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
NOTES
Part Two
The 64 Hexagrams
LIST OF HEXAGRAMS
THE 64 HEXAGRAMS
Part Three
Concordance

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Key to the Hexagrams

ZHOUYI
This book is the result of the lifelong study of the Yijing by my coauthor, the late
Rudolf Ritsema, as well as the meeting and merging of our sensibilities. While
the text is essentially the same as in the original 2005 edition, I felt it was
appropriate to endow it with a new Introduction, both to streamline the access to
the practice of the oracle and to give adequate space to Rudolf’s involvement
with the Yijing and with the creation of the Eranos Round Table Sessions. It is a
story well worth telling that Rudolf’s self-effacing style kept from being
included in the previous Introduction. A special thank-you goes to my wife, Cruz
Mañas Peñalver, for substantially contributing to the Introduction of this new
edition of The Original I Ching Oracle.
Part One
Introduction
1 | The Book of Yi
THE NAME OF THE BOOK
The title of this book, Yijing, as it is written in contemporary pinyin
romanization, can be translated as “Book of Changes” or “Classic of Changes.”
An older form of the title is Zhouyi, “Changes of the Zhou,” from the name of
the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE), under which it came into being. Jing simply
means “classic”: its canonization as a classic took place under the Han dynasty
(206 BCE – 220 CE), in the framework of the great unification of Chinese
culture undertaken by the empire. Since then, the Yijing has been regarded as the
Classic of Classics: for 2,000 years it has been to the Chinese the ultimate map
of “heaven and earth.”
The essential word in the book’s name is yi, which means, amongst other
things, “change.” Change, as we all know, is the only permanence: existence is
constant change, from the regular alternance of day and night, the sequence of
the seasons, the growth and decay of all living forms. But the yi the title of the
book points to encompasses also another type of change, the unpredictable
change that sometimes irrupts into our life, the painful confrontation with our
human limitations, stressful situations in which the usual bearings no longer
suffice for orientation. The Book of Yi comes to our rescue in such situations. It
was born in the first millennium BCE as a divination manual, i.e. as a practical
tool to help people ride the waves of change and harness their energy: a tool to
deal with yi, with critical times of change. In many ancient cultures these times
were seen as intrusions of the divine, of gods and spirits, into human life, and a
proper interrogation of these higher powers, engaging them in a dialogue, was
considered essential in order to overcome the crisis. The Yijing was born and
kept being used throughout its long history as one such method of divination, as
an oracle.
Divination is mostly associated in people’s minds with predicting the future.
That is not the approach to divination we propose in this book. We do not view
the Yi as a tool to predict the future, because we believe the future is
unpredictable—and depends, among many other factors, on the course of action
we choose. We suggest to use the Yi as a “mirror of the present,” as a tool for
introspection, a tool to assess the appropriateness of a specific course of action in
a given situation, a tool to open a dialogue with our own deeper wisdom and