Decoding the Changes

Qingdao, Wilhelm, Baynes, and translation and change in the Yi Jing(I Ching)

When I lived in Qingdao, I spent an inordinate amount of time strolling past the red-rooved houses in Badaguan to find the place where Richard Wihlelm lived when he translated the I Ching from Chinese to German.

I asked locals, spoke with professors, read books. No-one knew.

The red rooves of Badaguan, and the famous beer, Tsingdao, stem from the German occupation at the tale end of the Opium Wars. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered his troops to seize Jiaozhou Bay. Qingdao thus became the first European protectorate on the Chinese mainland. Like other colonies, the Europeans built a new town after the original inhabitants were driven out.

Segregation occurred in living areas, (Chinese people were prevented from entering the new town) health and education. That meant separate hospitals and schools for Chinese and Germans, with those disregarding segregation practices punishable under German law.

Richard Willhelm came to Qingdao a couple of years after the initial occupation, as part of a missionary endeavour. He learnt Chinese and with the support of a high-level Qing official, Lai Naixuan, began his translation project. Wilhelm was dedicated to produce the most accurate translation of the I Ching that he could: after translating parts of the text into German, he would retranslate the German back to Chinese, and ask his friend Lai Naixuan for his approval. Cary Baynes translated Wilhelm’s text into English, forming the well-known English version of the book, known as the Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

Cary Baynes was born in Mexico, grew up in Kentucky, and moved to Germany where she was friends with Carl and Emma Jung. The Jung’s encouraged her to translate Wilhelm’s German version of the I Ching into English, and thus, the Baynes/Wilhelm I Ching version became the most commonly known English book of this divinatory text.

I’d had the Wilhelm-Baynes book for decades, and only now discovered that Cary Baynes, to whom we owe the first popular English translation of the I Ching, was a woman!

It was hard to find a photo - nothing showed up in a web-search, until eventually, I found this photo of her picnicking with Carl Jung in 1935.

“易经 -Yi Jing” calligraphy,creative commons picture from Wikmedia.

易经 is phoneticized as Yi Jing under the modern pinyin system of transliteration. Previously, the Wade-Giles system rendered it as I Ching.

The character sounds like “yee” (yi) not like the English word “I”.

From henceforth, I will refer to this text as the Yi Jing, or simply the Yi.

Our understanding of the Yi has changed and developed over time, with a whole discipline arising interpreting the classic text in various ways. Notably, archaeology has lent a significant means to interpretation, locating the Changes, due to textual evidence, firmly in the period of the Western Zhou, and possibly relevant to particular historical events.

tomb goods of Lady Fu Hao at Mawangdui, were silk manuscripts of the Yi Jing were found.

Other disciplines, such as archeo-astronomy, add perspective. This is a discipline where the ancient skies are calculated according to the precession of the equinoxes. This then can be used to date events.

Luckily, the ancient Chinese had extensive astronomical records, and a whole discipline has emerged which dates specific events - like the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou - according to astronomical clues in ancient texts. Hexagram 55 records “seeing the stars (stars of 北斗 bei dou or the Big Dipper) at noon, and has been interpreted to mean a solar eclipse. The rest of Hexagram 55 has been interpreted to refer to a time when King Wen was preparing to attack the Shang. The timing of the Zhou overthrow of the Shang can then be dated by looking at when eclipses may have occurred.

Further translations add context. While living in Qingdao, I purchased a small paperback, which ‘translated’ the Zhou Yi into modern Chinese! Other English translations have appeared. Joel Biroco gives a great outline of different translations.

The Yi is a contradiction. At once apparently timeless, giving meaning to life to countless people across cultural and temporal divides, it is at the same time deeply routed in a specific period of ancient China.

Daoists believe the 八卦 ，ba gua, or eight hexagrams of the 易经. Yi Jing to be a multidimensional. The Yi has been linked to DNA, the development of binary mathematics, quantum physics, and it’s philosophical concepts are deeply connected to the theories of Traditonal Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Johnson Yan’s 2011 book explaining the correlations with the bagua and dna strands

That we have the text at all in English is due to the painstaking work of Richard Wilhem, translating to German, and the equally painstaking work of Cary Baynes, translating the German to English.

I never did discover where Richard Wilhelm’s house had been in Qingdao. But I did fine out, through the internet, where his grave was, in Germany. Apparently, his grave his laid out in the formation of the sequence of hexagrams.

Richard Wilhelm’s gravesite.

Notes

I was having a discussion with Lucia Deyi over at Moon Rabbit Musings the other morning, that led me to writing this post. Lucia was asking about my relationship with the Yi Jing (I Ching). I guess the best way to answer that is to say “it’s complicated.” 😂

1. For more information on the German occupation of Qingdao see https://public.websites.umich.edu/~geostein/docs/Qingdaocolony.pdf

2. Constancy in Change, A COMPARISON OF JAMES LEGGE'S AND RICHARD WILHELM'S INTERPRETATIONS OF THE YIJING, T ZE-KI HON , Monumenta Serica , 53 (2005): 315-336 %Jr.

Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/40727466?seq=1

3. Wilhelm’s translation was based on Li Guangdi’s Zhouyi zhezong , which was based on Zhu Xi’s reinterpretation. Zhu Xi was a Song dynasty Confucian scholar.

4. Joel Biroco gives a good overview of the many different translations of the Yi.

https://www.biroco.com/yijing/survey.htm

5. Johnson Yan’s book on DNA and I Ching is here

   https://www.penguin.com.au/books/dna-and-the-i-ching-9781556430978

6. Yang Li wrote The Book of Changes and Traditional Chinese Medicine in 1998. It remains as a ground-breaking excursion into the philosophic underpinings of the Yi and TCM.

   https://www.abebooks.com/9787530420256/Book-Traditional-Chinese-Medicine-Yang-7530420259/plp

7. Information about Richard Wilhelm’s grave can be found here https://www.yjcn.nl/wp/going-back-to-the-source-the-manuscripts-of-richard-wilhelm-4-the-end/