By C.G. Jung to: The I Ching. Trans. by Richard Wilhelm; rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes; Princeton University Press; 1977.

Since I am not a sinologue, a forward to the Book of Changes from my hand must be a testimonial of my individual experience with this great and singular book.  It also affords me a welcome opportunity to pay tribute again to the memory of my late friend, Richard Wilhelm.  He himself was profoundly aware of the cultural significance of his translation of the I Ching, a version unrivaled in the West.

If the meaning of the Book of Changes were easy to grasp, the work would need no forward.  But this is far from being the case, for there is so much that is obscure about it that Western scholars have tended to dispose of it as a collection of "magic spells," either too abstruse to be intelligible, or of no value whatsoever.  Legge's translation of the I Ching, up to now the only version available in English, has done little to make the work accessible to Western minds.  Wilhelm, however, has made every effort to open the way to an understanding of the symbolism of the text.  He was in a position to do this because he himself was taught the philosophy and the use of the I Ching by the venerable sage Lao Nai-hsuan; moreover, he had over a period of many years put the peculiar technique of the oracle into practice.  His 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.

I am greatly indebted to Wilhelm for the light he has thrown upon the complicated problem of the I Ching, and for insight as regards its practical application as well.  For more than thirty years I have interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the unconscious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance.  I was already fairly familiar with the I Ching when I first met Wilhelm in the early nineteen twenties; he confirmed for me then what I already knew, and taught me many things more.

I do not know Chinese and have never been in China.  I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of thinking.  In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind.  It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese has never developed what we call science.  Our science, however, is based upon the principal of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth.  But a great change in our standpoint is setting in.  What Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics.  The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions.  We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law.  If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.

The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events.  What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed.  We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance.  An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance.  Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance.  It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism.  The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged.  But in nature one finds not two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal.  The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one.  The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with.

The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures.  The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes.  The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for coincidence.  While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.

Thus it happens that when one throws the three coins, or counts through the forty-nine yarrow stalks, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it - a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the Chinese mind.  With us it would be a banal and almost meaningless statement (at least on the face of it) to say that whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment.  This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one.  There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from appearance, taste, and behavior of wine the site of its vineyard and the year of its origin.  There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an object d’art or piece of furniture on merely looking at it.  And there are even astrologers who can tell you, without any previous knowledge of you nativity, what the position of the sun and moon was and what zodiacal sign rose above the horizon in the moment of your birth.  In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long-lasting traces.

In other words, whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time.  To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast - even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be - inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin.

This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality.  Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas 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.

The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure.  The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation.  Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of events.  The causal point of view tells us a dramatic story about how D came into existence: it took its origin from C, which existed before D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc.  The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence.  How does it happen that A’, B’, C’, D’, etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place?  It happens in the first place because the physical events A’ and B’ are of the same quality as the psychic events C’ and D’, and further because all are exponents of one and the same momentary situation.  The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture.

Now the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the instrument by which the meaning of sixty-four different yet typical situations can be determined.  These interpretations are equivalent to causal explanations.  Causal connection is statistically necessary and can therefore be subjected to experiment.  Inasmuch as situations are unique and cannot be repeated, experimenting with synchronicity seems to be impossible under ordinary conditions.  In the I Ching, the only criterion of the validity of synchronicity is the observer’s opinion that the text of the hexagram amounts to a true rendering of his psychic condition.  It is assumed that the fall of the coins or the result of the division of the bundle of yarrow sticks is what it necessarily must be in a given “situation,” inasmuch as anything happening in that moment belongs to it as an indispensable part of the picture.  If a handful of matches is thrown to the floor, they form the pattern characteristic of that moment.  But such an obvious truth as this reveals its meaningful nature only if it is possible to read the pattern and to verify its interpretation, partly by the observer’s knowledge of the subjective and objective situation, partly by the character of subsequent events.  It is obviously not a procedure that appeals to a critical mind used to experimental verification of facts or to factual evidence.  But for someone who likes to look at the world at the angle from which ancient China saw it, the I Ching may have some attraction.

My argument as outlined above has of course never entered a Chinese mind.  On the contrary, according to the old tradition, it is “spiritual agencies,” acting in a mysterious way, that make the yarrow stalks give a meaningful answer.  these powers form, as it were, the living soul of the book.  As the latter is thus a sort of animated being, the tradition assumes that one can put questions to the I Ching and expect to receive intelligent answers.  Thus it occurred to me that it might interest the uninitiated reader to see the I Ching at work.  For this purpose I made an experiment strictly in accordance with the Chinese conception: I personified the book in a sense, asking its judgment about its present situation, i.e., my intention to present it to the Western mind.....