The Original I Ching: The Eranos I Ching Project

Description

Often referred to as the Eranos edition, this revised and updated translation offers the most substantial advance in I Ching since Richard Wilhelm introduced the oracle to the West in the 1920s. The I Ching is one of the oldest Chinese texts and the world's oldest oracle. Accumulated from over 2,500 years of diviners, sages and shamans and born out of the oral tradition, the I Ching as we know it today is a collection of texts, imagery and advice, philosophy and poetry, divided into 64 chapters. There are 64 hexagrams, created from a collection of six lines, either broken or solid. In order to "read"from the book, you must cast a hexagram. The traditional method required yarrow sticks but nowadays is based on tossing three coins six times. The Original I Ching Oracle or Book of Changeswas inspired by Carl Gustav Jung's insights into the psyche and researched for more than 60 years through the Eranos Foundation of Switzerland. It presents the oracular core of the I Ching as a psychological tool- the symbols interact with our minds in the same way dream images do.

Rudolf Ritsema(1918-2006) was a renowned I Ching scholar and director of the international Eranos Centre for East West Studies, founded in the 1930s by C G Jung and Olga Froebe-Kapteyn. Ritsema refined and tested the initial translation of the text through the Eranos Round Table Sessions. Shantena Augusto Sabbadini,a former theoretical physicist, joined Rudolf Ritsema to help run the Round Table Sessions and together they produced this translation of the I Ching, a distillation of the Eranos Round Table Sessions experience and of the authors' I Ching studies.