The Impact of Carl Jung’s Psychological Views on Cary Baynes’s Translation of the I Ching

1 Introduction

The I Ching or Book of Changes, whose first edition came out in 1950, translated by Cary F. Baynes from Richard Wilhelm’s German translation, has so far always been one of the best sellers related to the I Ching or Yijing. Its far-reaching influence is inseparable from C. G. Jung’s painstaking efforts to spread the wisdom of the I Ching as widely as possible in the whole world. According to Jung, “for more than 30 years [he has] interested [himself] in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the unconscious, for it has seemed to [him] of uncommon significance” (Jung 1997, xxii). He contended, “To me the greatest of his (i.e., Wilhelm’s) achievements is the translation of, and commentary on, the I Ching” (Jung 1962, 139). On this account, he was pleased to contribute a “Foreword” to Baynes’s translation. In addition, “it was Wilhelm’s particular wish to have his translation appear in English, widening by so much the circle of its readers” (Baynes 1997, xl). Baynes was born in Mexico City in 1883 and “received an M.D at John Hopkins University in 1911, although she was never to practice medicine.”^[1] In 1921, she moved to Zurich and began to study with Jung. “Throughout the 1920s, Baynes was caught up in the development of Jungian analytical theory and worked with Jung on transcriptions, translations and organising seminars.”^[2] According to Baynes’s note to her translation of the I Ching, “[she] was studying analytical psychology in Zurich when Dr. Jung asked [her] to undertake the rendering of the German version into English. The translation was to have had Wilhelm’s supervision; this, it was thought, would compensate [her] ignorance of Chinese. But his death in 1930 came long before [Baynes] was ready to submit a manuscript to him. [Baynes] found that one very real compensation for [her] lack of Chinese remained, namely, the access to its philosophy afforded [her] through [her] growing knowledge of the work of Jung. This gave [her] a key to the archetypal world of the I Ching” (Baynes 1997, xli). In other words, Jung and his analytical psychology exerted a heavy impact on Baynes’s translation of the I Ching. This paper attempts to expose Jung’s views of the Yijing and his impact on Baynes’s translation of the book, supplementing with a further discussion on the relationship between I Ching philosophy and Jungian analytical psychology.

2 Jung’s Views of the I Ching and his Analytical Psychology

Before he came upon Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, Jung had already been familiar with Jame Legge’s translation of the I Ching, as he stated, “[B]efore I came to know Wilhelm’s translation, I had for years worked with Legge’s inadequate rendering, and was therefore in a position to recognize fully the extraordinary difference between the two. Wilhelm has succeeded in bringing to life again, in a new and vital form, this ancient work in which not only many Sinologues but even many modern Chinese as well can see nothing but a collection of absurd magical formulae” (Jung 1962, 139–140). He thought that Legge’s translation of the I Ching “has done little to make the work accessible to Western minds” (Jung 1997, xxi), whereas he averred that “anyone who, like myself has had the rare good fortune to experience in a spiritual exchange with Wilhelm the divinatory power of the I Ching, cannot for long remain ignorant of the fact that we have touched here an Archimedean point from which our Western attitude of mind could be shaken to its foundations” (Jung 1962, 140). In the eyes of Jung, Wilhelm’s “grasp of the living meaning of the text gives his version of the I Ching a depth of perspective that an exclusively academic knowledge of Chinese philosophy could never provide” (Jung 1997, xxi–xxii). For Jung, “without the assistance of Wilhelm it (the I Ching) would not become central to his thinking in the decades that followed. There are no references to the I Ching in his writings prior to 1921 (when Jung met Wilhelm)” (Stein 2018, 127). Obviously, the I Ching played a very important role in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology.

The most salient feature of Jung’s analytical psychology is manifested in his theory about the unconscious. “It was Jung’s exploration and account of what he called the collective unconscious that gave his work its most distinctive style” (Stein 1998, 85). According to Dr. Murray Stein’s research, “the unconscious is populated by complexes” and “Jung’s theory was sometimes called complex psychology (rather than the more usual name for it, analytical psychology)” (44). In Jung’s opinion, complexes are generally created by trauma. “The trauma creates an emotionally charged memory image that becomes associated with an archetypal image, and together these freeze into a more or less permanent structure.” (54).

Along with his deepening exploration of the unconscious, Jung touched the deepest layer of human psyche, which he named “the collective unconscious” and conceived of its contents as a combination of universally prevalent patterns and forces called “archetypes” and “instincts.” For the relationship between archetype and instinct, “Jung maps the psyche as a spectrum, with the archetype at the ultraviolet end and the instinct at the infrared end” (102). When coordinated, the archetype provides form and meaning to the instinct, and instinct provides raw physical energy to archetypal images to assist them in realizing the “spiritual goal” toward which the whole nature of man strives. “All the archetypal information patterns come from a single source, an entity beyond human grasp for which Jung reserves the term self. […] The archetypal images that link the self and ego-consciousness form a middle realm, which Jung calls anima and animus” (102). This comes from an important inner experience through active imagination. “Since Jung many other people who have engaged in active imagination have discovered similar inner figures. Conventionally, for men the anima is a feminine figure; for women the equivalent inner figure―called animus―is masculine” (126). In his later works, Jung refers to the anima and animus as archetypal figures of the psyche. “The natural function of the animus (as well as the anima) is to remain in place between individual consciousness and the collective unconscious; exactly as the persona is a sort of stratum between the ego-consciousness and the objects of the external world” (128).

In Jungian analytical psychology, persona and shadow are usually opposites of one another. As a loan word by Jung from the Roman stage where it referred to the actor’s mask, the former means “the person that we become as a result of acculturation, education, and adaptation to our physical and social environments” (109), while the latter “is the image of ourselves that slides along behind us as we walk towards the light” (106). As a “functional complex,” the persona is the habitual attitude that an ego adopts to meet the world; “the anima/us is similarly a functional complex, but one that is concerned with adaptation to the inner world” (128).

After spending several years at the anima/animus level of psyche, Jung “began to enter into a territory that revealed the archetype of the self, the most fundamental architect of psychic wholeness and order” (154). Nevertheless, for Jung, “the self is paradoxically not oneself. It is more than one’s subjectivity, and its essence lies beyond the subjective realm. […] In the self, subject and object, ego and other are joined in a common field of structure and energy” (152).

Mandala is also a frequently used term correlated to self by Jung. In his view, “The mandala is a universal symbol that expresses the intuition of ordered wholeness. To name the archetypal factor that is operative in the psyche producing this goal and pattern, Jung chose the term self” (156). As a transcendent non-psychological entity, the self “acts on the psychic system to produce symbols of wholeness, often as quaternity or mandala images (squares and circles)” (158). It is the self who unifies psychic pieces, such as archetypal images, representations of instincts, memories forgotten and recalled and the complexes, that orders the whole psychic system and ties it all together.

Furthermore, Jung raised another important term “individuation.” “The total experience of wholeness over an entire lifetime – the emergence of the self in psychological structure and consciousness – is conceptualized by Jung and called individuation” (171). In other words, “wholeness is the master term that describes the goal of individuation process, and it is the expression within psychological life of the self archetype” (188). It can be seen that “the individuation process is driven by the self and carried out through the mechanism of compensation” (194). Jung contended that archetypes are transgressive, so “the archetype per se is psychoid and does not strictly belong within the confines of the psyche’s boundaries, it bridges between inner and outer worlds and breaks down the subject-object dichotomy” (199–200). Based on this cognition, Jung proposed the theory of synchronicity.

The basic meaning of synchronicity refers to “relative simultaneity of the events” mentioned by Jung in his “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm” in 1930 (Jung 1962, 141), and the term “synchronicity” was formally mentioned as synchronicity in 1949 in his “Foreword” to the English version of the I Ching translated by Baynes (Jung 1997, xxiv). “An extension of the theory of the self into cosmology, synchronicity speaks of the profound hidden order and unity among all that exists” (Stein 1998, 200). Therefore, “to grasp the full scope of the theory of the self, one must consider it within the context of Jung’s thinking on synchronicity; to grasp his theory of synchronicity one must also know about his theory of archetypes” (203). In this way, synchronicity has a “narrow definition,” “that is, the meaningful coincidence between a psychic event such as a dream or thought and an event in the non-psychic world.” Its “broader definition” “has to do with acausal orderedness in the world without special reference to the human psyche” (219–20). This becomes Jung’s cosmological view which can be expressed by the following diagram by which we can realize that “we live in a universe which can best be described using four principles: indestructible energy, the space-time continuum, causality, and synchronicity” (220) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Diagram of Jung’s cosmology (Stein 1998, 221).

3 Jung’s Impact on Baynes’s Translation of the I Ching

As mentioned above, “Throughout the 1920s, Baynes was caught up in the development of Jungian analytical theory and worked with Jung on transcriptions, translations and organising seminars,” and “[i]n the early 1930s, Baynes was encouraged by Jung to translate into English Richard Wilhelm’s German translation of the I Ching or Book of Changes.”^[3] Baynes’s translation of the I Ching was inevitably marked with the spirit of Jungian analytical psychology, which was heavily strengthened by Jung’s “Foreword” to the version of her translation. For the quality and expectation of her translation, Baynes confidently stated that “accuracy and intelligibility have been the goals set for this translation, but it must prove itself in a still more vital test. If the reader is drawn out of the accustomed framework of his thought to view the world in a new perspective, if his imagination is stimulated and his psychological insight deepened, he will know that Wilhelm’s I Ching has been faithfully reproduced” (Baynes 1997, xliii). Obviously, Baynes believed that Wilhelm’s I Ching is closely related to (Jungian analytical) psychology, and thus her translation always exhibits senses related to Jungian analytical psychology, the main contents of which in her translation will be illustrated in the following paragraphs. In Jung’s own opinion, I Ching is a psychological literature, and hopes through the “Foreword” “if by means of this demonstration [he has] succeeded in elucidating the psychological phenomenology of the I Ching, [he] shall have carried out [his] purpose” (Jung 1997, xxxix).

As Jung pointed out that “the I Ching is more closely connected with the unconsciousness than with the rational attitude of consciousness” (xxxii), in her translation of the I Ching, Baynes used many terms mentioned above related to the unconscious.

In the translation of Richard Wilhelm’s “Introduction” to the Book of Changes, for the function of the manipulation of the yarrow stalks, Baynes adopted the term “the unconscious”: “This procedure was regarded as mysterious, however, simply in the sense that the manipulation of the yarrow stalks makes it possible for the unconscious in man to become active.…It requires a clear and tranquil mind” (Wilhelm 1997, liv). Here “the unconscious” is the main field to which Jung had been devoted his entire life, just as Jung told us, “[F]or more than 30 years I have interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the unconscious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance” (Jung 1997, xxii). In the translation of another paragraph, Baynes rendered it in this way: “because the Book of Changes reaches down into the regions of the unconscious, both space and time are eliminated. Space, as the principle of diversity and confusion, is overcome by the deep, the simple. Time, as the principle of uncertainty, is overcome by the easy, the germinal” (Wilhelm 1997, 316). Nevertheless, the original German words for “the unconscious” is “dem Unbewussten,” which literally means “unconscious of” “unaware of.” But Jung created the term “the unconscious” as a special terminology of his analytical psychology. It is arguable that Jung’s application of this term might be inspired by Wilhelm’s German version of I Ching, which directly exerted influence on Baynes’s translation.

Xiang 象 (lit., image) is a most frequently used term in the “Ten Wings” 十翼 (a. k. a. “Commentaries on the Changes”) of the Book of Changes. According to Baynes’s translation, “[t]he eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change” (Wilhelm 1997, l); “every event in the visible world is the effect of an ‘image,’ that is, of an idea in the unseen world” (lvii); “an interesting attempt is made to trace back the origin of all the practices and inventions of civilization to such ideas and archetypal images” (lvii). Here the application of “the unseen world” and “archetypal images” is closely related to Jungian analytical psychology. According to Chinese text of the Yijing, here the “archetypal images” refer to the 11 hexagrams, where the translation stated: “This chapter tells us all the appurtenances of civilization came into existence as reproductions of ideal, archetypal images. In a certain sense this idea contains a truth. Every invention comes into being as an image in the mind of the inventor before it makes its appearance in the phenomenal world as a tool, a finished thing” (Wilhelm 1997, 329). For instance, in regard to the invention of plow, the I Ching tells us:

When Bao Xi’s clan 包犧氏was gone, there sprang up the clan of Shennong 神農氏 (or the Divine Husbandman). He split a piece of wood for the plowshare and bent a piece of wood for the plow handle, and taught the whole world the advantage of laying open the earth with a plow. He probably took this from the hexagram of INCREASE , 42]. (330)^[4]

Wilhelm further interpreted the image in this way:

The hexagram I, INCREASE (42), consists of the two trigrams Xun and Zhen , both associated with wood. Xun means penetration, Zhen movement. The nuclear trigrams are Gen and Kun , both associated with earth. This led to the idea of constructing a wooden instrument that would penetrate the earth and when moved forward would turn up the soil. (330–31)^[5]

Moreover, when interpreting the connotations of the primal images correlated to Qian (, ), Baynes’s translation tells us: “…[U]nderlying reality there is a world of archetypes, and reproductions of these make up the real things in the material world. The world of archetypes is heaven, the world of reproductions is the earth: there energy, here matter; there the Creative, here the Receptive. But it is the same tao that is active both in the Creative and in the Receptive” (300). When discussing how the material world arises, Baynes’s translation indicates: “First of all there is a pre-existent image, an idea; then a copy of this archetypal image takes shape as a corporeal form” (318). “Heaven and earth offer the archetypal image to be imitated” (320). When interpreting the origin of the images, Baynes’s translation tells us: “Here we are shown how the images of the Book of Changes developed out of the archetypal images that underlie the phenomenal world” (304). However, the equivalent for here the “archetypes” and “archetypal images” in Wilhelm’s German version is “Urbild(er),” which literally refers to picture(s) or image(s). Obviously, Baynes’s translation successfully transformed the German concept into the terminology of Jungian analytical psychology.

When translating the “Judgement” regarding hexagram Qian (, The Creative, 1), Baynes extended it this way: “The beginning of all things lies still in the beyond in the form of ideas that have yet to become real. But the Creative furthermore has power to lend form to these archetypes of ideas” (4). Considering Baynes rendered “image” as “idea,” here the “archetypes of ideas” should refer to the “archetypes of images.” As is mentioned above, archetypes are transgressive, here Baynes’s translation is congruent with the original meaning of Chinese text of the I Ching and helpful to add meanings of Jungian analytical psychology to the book.

In Wilhelm’s “Introduction” to the I Ching, from Baynes’s translation, we can see that Wilhelm thought “the Book of Changes opens to the reader the richest treasure of Chinese wisdom; at the same time it affords him a comprehensive view of the varieties of human experience, enabling him thereby to shape his life of his own sovereign will into an organic whole and so to direct it that it comes into accord with the ultimate tao lying at the root of all that exists” (Wilhelm 1997, lviii). This view is in alignment with Jung’s principle of individuation. When talking about tao in the I Ching, Baynes’s translation describes: “the forces constituting the visible world are transcendent ones. Tao is taken here in the sense of an all-embracing entelechy” (323). Since the “experience of individuation” refers to the “attainment of the self” (Jung 1959, 106), and “to rest in Tao means fulfilment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things” (Jung 1981, 186), it can be seen that individuation also means resting in Tao. However, the term “principle of individuation” was mentioned by Wilhelm before Jung extended it to his theoretical and empirical “principle of individuation,” in that according to Baynes’s translation, “[i]n the phenomenal world, each thing has its specific nature: this is the principle of individuation. At the same time this specific nature fixes a boundary that separates each individual being from every other” (Wilhelm 1997, 378). Since the original German term for the “principle of individuation” is “das Prinzip der Individuation,” here Bynes’s translation of the term is a literal translation. Apparently, through adopting Wilhelm’s “individuation” into his analytical psychology, Jung enlarged the connotations of the term to a great extent.

The principle of synchronicity is also emphasized in Baynes’s translation. In the chapter of Shuo Kua 說卦 (Discussion of the Trigrams), when talking about the Book of Changes as whole and to the fundamental principles underlying it, Baynes’s translation states: “Suprahuman intelligence has from the beginning made use of three mediums of expression―men, animals, and plants, in each of which life pulsates in a different rhythm. Chance came to be utilized as a fourth medium; the very absence of an immediate meaning in chance permitted a deeper meaning to come to expression in it. The oracle was the outcome of this use of chance. The Book of Changes is founded on the plant oracle as manipulated by men with mediumistic powers” (262–63). Here the relationship between chance and deeper meaning can be attributed to the “narrow definition” of synchronicity. It is also available in Baynes’s translation of another paragraph related to the significance of the Book of Changes: “[T]he book reveals the meaning of events in the universe and thereby imparts a divine mystery to the nature and action of the man who puts his trust in it, so that he is enabled to meet every event in the right way and even to aid the gods in governing the world” (313). To my mind, it is based on these distinctive features of the I Ching originally from Wilhelm’s translation as Jung avers that “synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers” (Jung 1997, xxiv).

Through Jung’s adoption and transformation of the concepts from Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, the above-mentioned concepts turned out to be terminologies of Jungian analytical psychology with onto-cosmological significance. It says in the Xici zhuan 繫辭傳 (Commentary on the Appended Phrases, a. k. a. the Great Treatise), “There is in the Changes the taiji 太極 (Supreme Ultimate) (○). This produces the two modes (liang yi 兩儀)(). The two modes produce the four images (si xiang 四象). The four images produce the eight trigrams (ba gua 八卦)” (318).^[6] “ ‘[T]he archetype,’ ‘the self,’ and the ‘wholeness’ (as well ‘the mandala’) can be symbolized by the Supreme Ultimate (○),” while the animus and anima, the archetypes and instincts in the collective unconscious, persona and shadow, and so on, can be symbolized by the two-mode () (Zhang and Shen 2021, 983–85). “The form of taiji begins with ○, and transforms into ” (Confucius 2004, 17). In this way, the previously mentioned terms in Jungian analytical psychology are elevated to an onto-cosmological level, by which Jung gave us the “broader definition” of synchronicity and established his cosmological view incorporating “indestructible energy, the space-time continuum, causality, and synchronicity” (Stein 2018, 220) into one.

As is previously mentioned, Baynes began to study analytical psychology with Jung in 1921 and started to translate the I Ching into English in the early 1930s. In 1938, she “met Mary Mellon, founder of the Bollingen Foundation,” when she “had just completed a first draft of the translation and was encouraged in her work by Mellon. The Baynes/Wilhelm I Ching was eventually published by the Bollingen Foundation in 1950,”^[7] when Jungian analytical psychology came out to be mature, systematic and sophisticated. Therefore, in her translation, Baynes borrowed the analytical psychological terms such as archetypes, archetypal images, principle of individuation, the unconscious, and so on to replace the related original German words, which manifests Jung’s impact on her translation of the I Ching.

4 Further Discussion on the Correlations Between the I Ching Philosophy and Jungian Analytical Psychology

In Jung’s eyes, the I Ching could enable archetypes to be readable, as he stated: “the I Ching is a formidable psychological system that endeavours to organize the play of archetypes, the ‘wondrous operations of nature,’ into a certain pattern, so that the ‘reading’ becomes possible” (Jung 1963, 294). In spite of the fact that Jung embraces incisive insights on the wisdom of I Ching, He did not get a holistic view of the I Ching as a book conceiving a kind of systematic philosophy, in that Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching was based on the Zhouyi zhezhong 周易折中 (A Balanced Compendium on the Book of Changes) which did not interpret the book in a philosophical way. In addition, “although Richard Wilhelm and his son Hellmut Wilhelm made a great number of speeches in Germany and Switzerland, they did not systematically elaborate the philosophy conceived in the Yijing” (Zhang and Shen 2021, 970). However, philosophical approaches to the Book of Changes in recent decades could enable us to view the correlations between the I Ching philosophy and Jungian analytical psychology from a profound and extensive aspect, which could help perfect the latter and enrich the functions of the former.

Although Jung did not specially mention the philosophy conceived in the I Ching, his theory of analytical psychology is congruent with the I Ching philosophy. The I Ching philosophy is mainly made up of cosmogony and ontology conceived in it. Its cosmogony is manifested in the diagrams of He tu 河圖 (Yellow River Map) (see Figure 2) and Luo shu 洛書(Luo River Chart) (see Figure 3) respectively, which were the origin of Chinese yin-yang and Five-Element theory. Legend has it that in Fu Xi’s 伏羲 time,^[8] he discovered a dragon-horse appearing from the Yellow River, on whose back there was a diagram including 55 white and black dots (see Figure 4), the origin of the He tu diagram; The Great Yu 大禹 (i.e. Da Yu)^[9] found a turtle emerging from the Luo River, a branch of the Yellow River, on whose back there was also a diagram permutated with 45 white and black dots (Figure 5), the origin of the Luo shu diagram.

Figure 2:

He tu (Yellow river map).¹⁰

Figure 3:

Luo shu (Luo river chart).

Figure 4:

The He tu on the dragon-horse.

Figure 5:

The Luo shu on the supernatural turtle.

Traditionally, yang corresponds to heaven, light, life, masculinity, movement, etc., and that of yin to earth, darkness, death, femininity, and so on. “A salient feature of the He tu is that the odd numbers, which are called heavenly numbers, are attributed to yang and represented by white dots; the even numbers, which are referred to as earthly numbers, are attributed to yin and marked by black dots” (Zhang 2023, 1027).^[10] Obviously, number 5 at the center of the two diagrams is the nuclear number, “which means that Five is a transcendent number, without which none of the five elements will be produced and completed” (1028).

In the He tu diagram, we can see that,

1) from 1-3-5-7-9 forms a clockwise circle, which manifests the waxing route of the yang energy, 2) extreme yang symbolized by Nine will give birth to yin symbolized by Four, so from 4-2-10-8-6 forms a counter-clockwise circle, which shows the waxing route of the yin energy, 3) extreme yin energy symbolized by Six will give birth to the yang symbolized by One again, thus constituting the endless cycles resulting from the waxing and waning of the yin and yang energies. In the I Ching, the yang line () is symbolized by Nine and the yin line () by Six, so the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching reveal a schema of alternations between yin and yang, by which we can predict our future and know the contents of the unconscious. (Merlini and Bernardini 2023, 1028–29)

There also contain correspondences between the five elements or agents in the He tu, namely, 1 and 6 correspond to Water, 2 and 7 to Fire, 3 and 8 to Wood, 4 and 9 to Metal, 5 and 10 to Earth. For the relationship among the five elements, there is a producing cycle (Wood > Fire > Earth > Metal > Water > Wood) and a destroying cycle (Wood > Earth > Water > Fire > Metal > Wood) (Figure 6).

Figure 6:

Producing and destroying cycles of the five elements.

The He tu diagram manifests an ideal balance and complementarity between yin and yang and among the Five Agents. It also reveals an idea of multiformity, which means that, if one of the Five Agents is too strong, it will break the balance and complementarity. In China, this theory is mainly applied to diagnosing and curing diseases in Traditional Chinse Medicine, which has been effectively made up for the deficiency of modern medical science based on linear and conceptual thinking. Nevertheless, this yin-yang and Five-Element theory can also be employed in psychology. We can see some traces of Five Agents in Jung’s theory, as he “postulated five ‘instinctive factors’: hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection, and creativity” (Stein 2006, 121), in which hunger can be attributed to Earth, sexuality to Fire, activity to Metal, reflection to Water, and creativity to Wood.

Compared with the He tu, the Luo shu diagram possesses the following characteristics:

The four directions in the He tu are further divided into eight directions, with the odd numbers of 1, 3, 7, 9 in the cardinal directions and the even numbers of 4, 2, 8, 6 in the corners, which signifies the superiority of the yang energy. In addition, from 1–3 shows a clockwise motion, but from 5–7 exposes a counter-clockwise motion; from 4–2 a clockwise route is displayed whereas from 8–6 a counter-clockwise route is exhibited. This feature shows the frequent and even unexpected encounter between yin and yang energies, and the complexity of the worldly occurrences is manifested as well. The route from 1 to 9 also shows the complexity of the events of the world (Figure 7

Figure 7:

Complexity shown in the Luo shu.

). Another feature of the Luo shu is that 1 + 9 = 10; 8 + 2 = 10; 3 + 7 = 10; 4 + 6 = 10; 5 × 2 = 10, which signifies any happening of events in this world conceals the element Five. (Zhang 2023, 1029)^[11]

Obviously, the He tu reveals simplicity and the Luo shu complexity of the changes. “To put it in a nutshell, these two diagrams could reveal the cosmogony of the changes from the transcendent being (Five) to simplicity, and from simplicity to complexity” (1029).

Actually, the Five revealed by the five dots in the center of both He tu and Luo shu diagrams are made up of the central One and the Four dots around it. So, essentially speaking, the Five is derived from the central One, which is the origin of the universe and human innate nature symbolized by the Supreme Ultimate (○), and its function is accomplished by the Four around it. This idea is also closely related to Jung’s theory of “self” and “individuation,” which will be discussed later in another paragraph of the paper.

Cosmogony conceived in the I Ching is also manifested in the sequence of the 64 hexagrams of the received version of I Ching:

King Wen’s 文王sequence of the 64 hexagrams^[12] discloses the producing procedure from taiji 太極 (Supreme Ultimate) (○) to two-mode (), to the myriad things resulting from the interaction of yin and yang forces, a process of transformations from simplicity to complexity, from xian tian 先天 (Former Heaven) to hou tian 後天 (Later Heaven), from more metaphysical to more physical, from more spiritual to more materialistic, and the speed of transformation becomes higher and higher. Therefore, King Wen’s sequence of the sixty-four hexagrams is also viewed as “a schema of the transformation resulting from the interaction of yin and yang forces manifested by images and numbers” (Zhang 2017, 29). But we should keep in mind that each hexagram can transform into another hexagram according to the number of the moving line(s). This means that the whole set of the 64 hexagrams is interconnected, yet that which is behind each of the hexagrams is the Supreme Ultimate (○). In addition, as it has infinite images, with which infinite things and events are associated, the I Ching is “a paradigm of Heaven and Earth” (Lynn 1994, 51) and could encompass everything and event, metaphysical or physical, transcendent or worldly. This is the cosmogonic (and ontological) significance of the I Ching. (Zhang 2023, 1040)

In this respect, it can be seen that,

The “Indestructible Energy” in this diagram (Figure 1) can be equated with the Supreme Ultimate (○) in the Yijing, the “Space-Time Continuum” with the schema of changes disclosed by King Wen’s sequence of the 64 hexagrams, the “Constant Connection through Effect (Causality)” with the relationship between neighbouring hexagrams, and the “Inconstant Connection through Contingence Equivalence, or ‘Meaning’ (Synchronicity)” with the interchangeability between different hexagrams encountered in divination, by which we can explore the unconscious. Therefore, “this quaternity is meant to describe the totality of factors operative in the cosmos, seen and unseen” (Stein 2018, 136). As his cosmology concerns the evolution of things, it can be referred to as cosmogony. (Zhang and Shen 2021, 982)

Jung also paid much attention to natural numbers, especially the number four. Therefore, he preferred to use various quaternios^[13] (see Figure 8) as symbols of the Self, which is “the most fundamental feature of Jung’s entire vision” (Stein 1998, 151), and use quadrilateral diagrams “like a sort of carbon atom” (194–95) (see Figure 9) to reveal the emergence of the Self. From Jungian psychological perspectives, “the movement from one (the beginning), through intervening two and three, to the number four (completion, wholeness) symbolizes a passage from primal (but still only potential) unity to a state of actual wholeness. Numbers symbolize the structure of individuation in the psyche, and they also symbolize the creation of order in the non-psychic world. So human knowledge of numbers becomes knowledge of cosmic structure” (9).

Figure 8:

Quaternios.

Figure 9:

The emergence of the self.

It can be seen that the “quaternio” that Jung attached importance to has some similarities with the “One and Four” structure (i.e., the nuclear Five) in the He tu (Figure 2) and Luo shu (Figure 3) diagrams mentioned above. The difference is that Jung’s analytical psychology does not have the traditional Chinese concept of ubiquitously available “qi” 氣 or “vital forces,” so he still uses “monad” to explain the origin of the universe. In addition, Jung did not see the complexity of the yin and yang of the acquired world as illustrated by the Luo shu, which is the root cause of the complexes repressed in the unconscious, leading to various psychic diseases.

In addition, the state of Supreme Ultimate (○) can be obtained through meditation, i.e., through “purifying heart/mind in secrecy” (316),^[14] by which we can experience the state of “Self.” This exhibits ontological significance of the I Ching philosophy. “More significantly, on the basis of Jung’s theory of individuation, Jung’s followers such as Murray Stein further set forth strategies to help tradition and politics of nations realize individuation,^[15] which is also congruent with the aim of the I Ching to realize the great harmony and peace of the world under heaven” (Zhang and Shen 2021, 986).^[16]

Therefore, the I Ching philosophy could make Jungian analytical psychology perfect while the latter extends the function of the former in psychological domains. The relationship between them is of complementarity.

5 Concluding Remarks

After his encounter with Richard Wilhelm and the German version of the I Ching, Jung had always been valuing I Ching highly and held that the greatest achievement of Wilhelm is his translation and commentary on the I Ching, the method of which was considered by Jung to be uncommonly significant for him when exploring the unconscious. Baynes began to study analytical psychology with Jung since 1921. Ten years later, she was encouraged by Jung to translate Wilhelm’s German version of I Ching into English. The first edition of Baynes’s translation of the I Ching was finally published in 1950, when Jung’s analytical psychology became systematic and sophisticated. Through analysing certain terms related to Jungian analytical psychology in Baynes’s translation of the I Ching, we can see that, Jung adopted many terms from Wilhelm’s translation into his analytical psychology and then profoundly enlarged these terms’ onto-cosmological connotations, which greatly helped Jung construct his analytical psychology. This might be the final reason Jung showed so much gratitude to Wilhelm. Through analysing these terms, we can see Jung’s impact on Baynes’s translation of the I Ching. Considering the great number of receptive audiences Baynes’s translation of the I Ching met in Europe and America, esp., in the circle of analytical psychology, Jung’s purpose of “elucidating the psychological phenomenology of the I Ching” (Jung 1997, xxxix) through his “Foreword” and Baynes’s translation had been effectively realized. On top of that, the philosophy conceived in the I Ching can make Jungian analytical psychology more perfect and help us construct a peaceful world in which each individual can attain to a sound state of both body and mind.