In 2017, don’t leave home without the I Ching
Andrew Sheng finds inspiration in these uncertain times in the classic Chinese text, Book of Change, which prepares us for the future not by divining it, but by accepting the role played by chance and seemingly random events
On the eve of Christmas, Christians around the world will be celebrating family time and the birth of Jesus Christ. In Vietnam, where I’d been travelling, Christmas was everywhere in the shops, hotels and restaurants. It was nice to witness universal joy at this time of giving.
As a Christmas present, I was given a copy of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching (Book of Change), with a foreword by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
The I Ching is probably the oldest surviving text on how to deal with uncertainty. Jung was one of the first Western scientists to recognise that if man is affected by nature and the unpredictable behaviour of other men or women, then “every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception”. In other words, Chinese thinking starts from a different premise than the Western science of causality, which are statistical patterns that must allow for random events.
The dating of the earliest version of the I Ching goes back to probably 4,500 years ago, when the first eight trigrams were formulated as an early attempt to classify different ways of responding to random events. If correct, the I Ching predates the Axial Age, a period of flowering of civilisation in the eighth to third centuries BC in Greece, Babylon, India and China. The I Ching is considered the fount of many sources of Chinese culture, including mathematics, astronomy, historiography, music, architecture, medicine, philosophy, martial arts, art and religion.
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There are three fundamental principles of change embodied in the I Ching. The first constant is that everything changes (变易). The second principle is change through simplification (简易). The third principle is that even though things change, things may not change (不易).