Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes

Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes

The Book of Changes [I Ching or Chou I] was the first of the Five Confucian Classics and served as the wellspring of both Confucian and Taoist thought. Following in the tradition of his father, Richard Wilhelm, who made the best known and most respected translation of the I Ching, Hellmut Wilhelm came to be regarded as a preeminent authority on the Book of Changes. In these seven lectures, he carried forward his inquiry into its significance, both as a manual of divination and as a work of philosophy. Hellmut Wilhelm, son of the great I Ching translator Richard, inherited a love and fascination for this Chinese text. In Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes , Wilhelm the younger brings together seven lectures targeted to nonspecialist audiences. Each lecture centers on the I Ching , developing a theme, and then marching off into philosophy, poetry, and history. A particularly satisfying example is lecture five, "The Interaction of Heaven, Earth, and Man." In this piece, Wilhelm examines the work of an intellectual named Yang Hsiung, who in his early years was a poet but later abandoned poetry for philosophy. Yang's major work is an imitation of the I Ching , in which he uses graphs of four lines instead of six, each of which can be divided twice, for a total of 81 possible arrangements. The work is an expression of great humanism, which Wilhelm outlines in order to segue into the humanism of the I Ching . A rather demanding study of the I Ching , Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes is rewarding for its forays into areas rarely traversed with such range and intellectual acumen. --Brian Bruya "The appearance of these lectures together in English for the first time is welcome . . . each explores significant concepts and images from the text. Topics covered include the creative principle, wanderings of the spirit, and the building of one's own city as a state of formation. The essays on the concept of time, human events and their meaning, and the interaction of heaven, earth, and man are especially insightful."― Choice Hellmut Wilhelm (1905-1990) was for many years professor of Chinese literature and history at the University of Washington.