About I Ching
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What is I Ching?

The I Ching (Book of Changes) is an extraordinary oracle: complex yet beautifully simple, ancient yet with a strongly modern voice, all-encompassing yet both direct and specific.

Every answer the I Ching gives is completely individual and personal; its meaning emerges from the relationship between questioner, question and answer. Consulting it over many years, and gradually building up an understanding of each hexagram best understand it. No translation or theory can replace this experience. Nor, in fact, can a collection of other people's experiences - but it can be an invaluable way to develop your understanding.

An ancient Chinese system of divination, the origins of the I Ching is steeped in myth and legend. The book is certainly one of the oldest in the world, dating back to about 1000 BCE. It is based on an even older shamanistic oral tradition. The book was used for divinatory purposes for hundreds of years before it was finally codified during the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). At the same time, various commentaries were added to the basic text.

The I Ching has been in continuous use up to the present day. Its intelligent, profound, sophisticated and often uncannily accurate readings have recommended this system of divination to many westerners, including the psychologist C.G. Jung, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and the writer Hermann Hesse.

The central idea behind the I Ching is that of flux or change. All things, including human affairs, are understood to change through time - they are born, develop, decay, die and are reborn in some new form.

By studying these changes, we can recognise significant patterns of change (e.g, night and day, the phases of the moon, the seasons of the year, the ages of man).

Change also involves relationships between opposites. The two most basic opposites are the principles of Yang and Yin:

Yang - corresponds to active, creative, expansive force.
Yin - corresponds to receptive, mutable, contracting form.

All change can be understood in terms of the relationship between Yang and Yin. When Yin and Yang are in balanced relationship, then life is harmonious. When we follow a harmonious and connected path through life, then we are said to live in accordance with the Tao.

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