Books by Richard Wilhelm

Wilhelm Wilhelm Wilhelm Wilhelm Wilhelm Wilhelm Wilhelm Wilhelm

Wilhelm Wilhelm

Carl Jung: I owe to Wilhelm the most valuable elucidations

“I owe to Wilhelm the most valuable elucidations of the complicated problem of the I Ching and also the practical evaluation of the results obtained. . . .

When Wilhelm was staying with me in Zurich, I asked him to work out a hexagram on the state of our Psychological Club.

The situation was known to me, but to him not at all.

The diagnosis that resulted was startlingly correct, and so was the prognosis, which described an event that occurred later and that I myself had not foreseen.

To me personally, however, this result was no longer so amazing, since I had earlier already had a number of remarkable experiences with the method.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 24.

I do not use the I Ching very often myself but it has always given me something. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 56.

The I Ching can change me, if I have the patience to meditate. It is like a wine of noble vintage. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 56.

This book [I Ching] lies just under the threshold of Chinese consciousness, it is rationally despised under European influence, but every Chinese believes in it at bottom and is perfectly right to do so, for it is an extraordinarily intelligent book. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 109.

I forgot to tell you that I Ching 16 place 1 refers to “putting in music” the problem of priv. boni, i.e., understanding it as a feeling problem. You would get a more complete picture if you contemplate such ideas not only from an intellectual but also from a feeling standpoint. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 79.

But as you can see from the I Ching, heaven sometimes separates from the earth, thus producing a disorderly and unfavourable state of affairs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 259-261

In China, for instance, a philosopher like Hu Shih is ashamed to know anything of the I Ching, the profound significance of Tao has got lost, and instead people worship locomotives and aeroplanes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 322.

The experience you had with the I Ching, calling you to order when trying to tempt it a second time also happened to me in 1920 when I first experimented with it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 343-344

The idea of the pairs of opposites is as old as the world, and if we treated it properly, we should have to go back to the earliest sources of Chinese philosophy, that is to the I Ching oracle. Curiously enough, the pairs of opposites do not appear as such in Egyptian thought, but they are a basic part of both Chinese and Indian philosophy. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 80

The legend says of the I Ching that a horse came up out of the Yellow River bearing on his back the trigrams out of which the symbols are built up. The sages copied it and it was known as the River Map. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83

Obviously there is no law to prove that this is so, but we cannot assume that the products of our brains do not derive from nature; therefore I see no reason why we would not find astonishingly true things in the thought of the ancient sages, such as the I Ching represents. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 84

As you have found out for yourself, the I Ching consists of readable archetypes, and it very often presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585

One could even define the I Ching oracle as an experimental dream, just as one can define a dream as an experiment of a four-dimensional nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 584-585

If I understand anything of the I Ching, then I should say it is the book that teaches you your own way and the all-importance of it. Not in vain has the book been the secret treasure of the sages. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 201

But as you can see from the I Ching, heaven sometimes separates from the earth, thus producing a disorderly and unfavourable state of affairs. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 259-261

The “Processing” is the alchemistic procedure; this, Taoism and the Book of Changes are all the same thing, according to Wei Po-Yang. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 109.