How the West Received It, Through Wilhelm and Jung

The I Ching's modern Western fame rests heavily on one translation: the German version of the missionary-sinologist Richard Wilhelm (1924), rendered into English by Cary Baynes (1950) with a celebrated foreword by C. G. Jung. Jung used the book to illustrate his idea of "synchronicity," meaningful coincidence, treating the oracle as a mirror of the questioner's unconscious rather than as prediction, a reading that made the I Ching enormously popular in the 1960s counterculture but that is a twentieth-century European interpretation, not the book's own self-understanding.

Earlier and more philological translations, such as James Legge's (1882), and later scholarly ones such as Richard Rutt's reconstruction of the Zhouyi (1996), aim instead to recover the ancient divinatory text and to separate its Bronze Age core from the philosophical wings and from the layers of later reception.