The Yijing and the West

FactThe Jesuits and the Figurists

In the early Qing, the French Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730) studied the Yijing at the court of the Kangxi Emperor and, with Prémare and Foucquet, formed the 'Figurist' school, which read the Changes as preserving traces of an ancient revelation. Their manuscripts are a record of the first deep dialogue between Chinese and European thought. Prof. John T. P. Lai of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has published an annotated selection of Bouvet's Yijing manuscripts (2020) and a critical edition of the Yijing benzhi by the Qing Catholic Lü Liben (2024).

FactLeibniz and binary arithmetic (1701–1703)

Leibniz had written up binary arithmetic in manuscript by 1679. In 1701 he explained it to Bouvet; on 4 November 1701 Bouvet replied from Beijing, enclosing the 64 hexagrams in the Fu Xi (Shao Yong) 'Earlier Heaven' order and pointing out the correspondence. The letter reached Hanover only in April 1703, and within a week Leibniz sent his 'Explication de l'arithmétique binaire' to the Paris Academy—its full title says it 'gives the meaning of the ancient Chinese figures of Fohy'. Read yin as 0 and yang as 1, from the bottom up, and the Earlier Heaven order runs from 0 to 63.

To be precise: binary was not 'invented' from the Yijing, but Leibniz saw in it an ancient confirmation of his system and was deeply impressed.

ConsensusBinary, six-bit codes and computing

64 = 2⁶: every hexagram is a six-bit binary number. Binary underlies all digital computing today, and Leibniz is recognised among its pioneers. To say the Yijing 'invented the computer' is an exaggeration; to say its structure is isomorphic to the language of the digital age is a fact.

FactTranslations: Latin, English, German, Italian

The Latin translation by Jean-Baptiste Régis and fellow Jesuits appeared in 1834–39; James Legge's English version in 1882 in the Sacred Books of the East; Richard Wilhelm's German translation in 1924, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes and published in the Bollingen Series in 1950 with a foreword by Jung. The first Italian translation, from Wilhelm's German by Bruno Veneziani and A. G. Ferrara, was published by Astrolabio in Rome in 1950.

FactJung and synchronicity

Jung said he had used the Yijing for more than thirty years. Writing his foreword to the Wilhelm–Baynes edition in 1949, he asked the book with three coins what it 'thought' of being presented to Western readers and obtained hexagram 50, The Cauldron, with nines in the second and third places, changing to hexagram 35, Progress. He read the cauldron—a vessel for cooking and sacrifice—as the book describing itself: a vessel of spiritual nourishment. From such experiences he developed 'synchronicity', an acausal connecting principle, published in 1952 together with Wolfgang Pauli.

Jung was explicit that he used the book not for fortune-telling but to clarify psychological situations.

FactPauli: a physicist and the archetypes

The Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli corresponded with Jung for years on the relation between psyche and matter, archetypes and mathematical structures. In 1952 they published 'The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche', pairing Jung's essay on synchronicity with Pauli's on Kepler—bringing the conversation into the world of physics.

FactBohr's coat of arms: opposites are complementary

On 17 October 1947 Niels Bohr received Denmark's highest honour, the Order of the Elephant. The coat of arms he designed shows a taijitu, the yin–yang emblem, with the Latin motto Contraria sunt complementa, 'opposites are complementary', expressing his principle of complementarity in quantum physics (wave and particle). The taijitu is not part of the Yijing text, but the Great Commentary says 'in the Changes there is the Supreme Ultimate, which generates the two modes'—the complementarity of yin and yang is the book's basic grammar.

AnalogySchrödinger's cat: a teaching metaphor

In quantum mechanics a system is in a superposition of possible states until it is measured. We use this as a metaphor: a hexagram, especially one with changing lines, describes a situation that has not yet 'collapsed'—several trajectories coexist, and the way we ask and decide shapes how it unfolds.

To be clear: this is an analogy, not a historical influence. Schrödinger devised the thought experiment in 1935 as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation, and his own philosophical inspiration came mainly from Indian Vedanta, not from the Yijing.

DebateJoseph Needham: admiration and critique

In volume 2 of Science and Civilisation in China (1956), Needham admired Chinese 'correlative thinking' but argued that the Yijing's symbolic system could act as a 'cosmic filing system', pigeon-holing new phenomena too early and so hindering experimental science. The question is still debated and deserves to be taken seriously.

DebateHegel's indifference

Not every Western philosopher admired the Yijing. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel judged its thought to remain at the most abstract and superficial categories. Knowing the critiques helps us say more clearly where its real value lies.

FactHesse, Borges, Philip K. Dick

Hermann Hesse wrote admiringly of Wilhelm's translation in the 1920s and, in The Glass Bead Game (1943), has his protagonist study the Yijing with the 'Elder Brother'. Jorge Luis Borges wrote the poem 'Para una versión del I King' (1976). In Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) characters repeatedly consult the book, and Dick said he used it in plotting the novel; Prof. Lai has given a public lecture on precisely this theme.

FactJohn Cage and chance music

In 1951 John Cage used the Yijing's coin procedure to compose the piano work Music of Changes, placing chance at the heart of composition. Global Yijing (Springer, 2025), edited by Prof. Lai, includes a chapter on Cage's experimental music. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards (1975) later continued the tradition of using random prompts to break habits of thought.

AnalogyThe 64 codons of the genetic code

The genetic code consists of 64 three-letter codons—the same number as the hexagrams. Some authors (for example Schönberger, 1973) have compared the two systematically. We regard it as an intriguing numerical coincidence and a teaching analogy, not as evidence.

AnalogyScenario planning and 'reperceiving'

Shell's scenario planning did not predict the future; it helped managers 'reperceive' the present (Pierre Wack). This is very close to how we use the Yijing: not to give answers, but to let decision-makers look at the same situation from several positions. It is the core analogy of our method.