How Ancient China Came to America:
The I Ching as Bible

America and China are as different as two cultures can be. America is young, just over 200 years old; China reaches directly into its 5,000-year past. Their languages are startlingly alien to each other, the currents of their philosophies flow in nearly opposite directions, and their principal religious traditions could not be more distinct.

And yet, an esteemed friend of mine recently remarked: "The I Ching is my bible."

This statement is surprising, not only because the I Ching, or Book of Changes, developed millennia ago in the staggeringly foreign traditions of China, but also because the it is not a religious text at all, at least not in any conventional Western sense. It's not scripture, and there's nothing like it in Western religion or literature.

In fact there's another surprising thing about his statement: It's not the first time I've heard it. Several highly intelligent Americans have said this same thing to me in the past few decades. The friend who introduced me to the I Ching in 1974 said it to me. A few years later a woman said it to me in exactly the same words. Another friend, one of the most acutely intelligent people I've ever known, said it to me in the mid-1980s, and later, so did my wife.

The I Ching is utterly unlike the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. It tells no stories per se, and its text is oracular, a highly metaphorical kind of poetry which is decipherable to Westerners and most Chinese only through the detailed commentaries of both Chinese sages and scholars, and Western translators and interpreters. The most extraordinary translation and commentary on the I Ching by a Westerner is the one made by Richard Wilhelm, a German scholar who lived in China during the first part of the twentieth century, and it's his translation that my friends referred to, and that I am most familiar with.

The I Ching is neither scripture nor a literary work, nor even a work of rationally coherent philosophy. It is, in fact, a 3,000-year-old book of divination - a fact even more difficult for scientifically minded Westerners to square with traditional ideas about religious texts. In our context, even Hindu myths are apt to seem more categorically religious than self-described oracles.

When my friends say, "The I Ching is my bible," however, they are indicating that the I Ching provides them not with predictions of the future, but with religious ideas or sensibilities in a way that replaces the Bible. How does a well-educated American come to the conclusion, at the age of 52, that an ancient Chinese book can function in the way the Bible functions for Jews and Christians, or as the Koran functions for Muslims? I'd like to give a picture of Western history which answers this question.
In a nutshell, it was cultural conditions that compelled my friends to cut their ties to traditional Western religion and seek the new in the very, very old.

The story begins 2,000 years ago when Christ questioned the authority of Roman law and Middle Eastern religious leaders. But let's skip ahead about 1,600 years and mention that during that time most people remained convinced that some sort of divine authority actually existed, and they felt compelled to one extent or another to recognize it. Then around the year 1600 AD, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Francis Bacon and other Europeans began - often without intending to - setting religious authority on its ear. That is, the methods of objective science emerged and began to reveal that when you look closely at the physical world, it's different from what traditional religions described. Galileo encountered serious problems with the Catholic church when he argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun, instead of the Sun around the Earth, as the Bible indicates.

The new science, or New Philosophy as it came to be known, "call'd all in doubt" to quote the English poet John Donne, and questioned the Bible's reliability and therefore the church's authority. This triggered a centuries-long moral crisis for Western culture because religious leaders were the traditional teachers of moral values. To oversimplify the situation, because of the success of science, people's confidence in religious authority diminished.

This did not happen overnight, but gradually over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the mid-1800s, most Europeans and non-native American people were hanging onto their family and community habits of attending church and reading the Bible, but their attention was turning more and more to the material world and the ways science and technology could make them more healthy and comfortable. In the nineteenth century, traditional moral values taught by the church and Bible began to seem old-fashioned and brittle to some people. Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and influential writers like Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert in their own ways mounted sharp attacks on the hollowness of European morality. In America, philosophers like Emerson, Thoreau and William James asked the same questions in gentler ways. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear to many people that the Western world had a serious moral crisis on its hands.

The church was losing its credibility and authority in the face of science's findings. There was also the serious problem that the church upheld social, political and economic values that enabled relatively small numbers of wealthy, greedy people to exploit and make profoundly miserable millions upon millions of lower-class people. Slavery was a moral problem all through the Western world and Russia; peasants were herded in from their farms through laws tacitly or explicitly endorsed by the church, and forced into nightmarish working conditions in factories; upstanding, churchgoing American businessmen imported Chinese laborers to work for almost nothing under terrible conditions building the transcontinental railroad.

People recognized these profound injustices, but despite general confidence that science could be used to solve social problems, the situation did not seem changeable by anything short of Marxist revolution. The church came to be seen as "the opiate of the masses" - a tool of the powerful to keep poor people enslaved.

Just after the turn of the century, World War I (1914-1918) devastated Europe and other parts of the world in every conceivable way. At that moment it became clear to many educated Westerners that a moral system which could result in a disaster like that was bankrupt. The Christian church was seen as part of the bankrupt system, and its congregations and influence declined as the twentieth century wore on. Religion in general was condemned as superstition put to political use by businessmen, landowners, politicians and scientists.

At the same time, some people realized that human beings' inner lives needed attention. In the nineteenth century, organizations like the Theosophical Society and the Unitarian Church sought to create new, fresh forums for the nurture of religious feeling. In the 1920s and '30s there was a popular notion that art could replace religion. But more powerful than art in people's consciousness by this time was science itself - science began to be seen as the savior of humanity, and this view continues today. But the trouble is - and many scientists tried to warn of this -science treats the material world, not the inner life, and cannot by its nature offer any moral guidance.

A morality of economics and of politics - which manifested itself as nationalism -grew up from scientific, materialist views of human activity in order to provide a system of community values that would bind people together. - Note that I have just given a definition of "morality": a system of community values that binds people together. But after World War I came an even greater catastrophe - World War II. Although the notion that economics and politics are the binding forces in people's lives persist today, the fact is that a morality of politics and economics does not work either. This is because economics and politics are not moral systems, even though people try to make them so. Moral systems underpin economics and politics.

Moral systems do not grow out of material necessity. On the contrary, they shape material reality. A moral system is not a set of rules to live by blindly - that is what sunk the religious authorities - but a moral system is a shared disposition toward reality. It was people's disposition toward reality that enraged Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Flaubert and also Karl Marx.

Interestingly, the moral crisis was not confined to the Western world. In the nineteenth century, China itself, despite its enormous life independent of the West, had grown very brittle morally as well, and it has wrestled valiantly, successfully and unsuccessfully, with the same general problems as the Western world has wrestled with. The twentieth century was a shockingly painful time in human history because virtually every civilized country was engaged in a, so to speak, life and death struggle to rip down old moral systems. Things came apart virtually everywhere.

But while moral systems have been torn down everywhere, the world has floundered in replacing them. No culture, country or civilization can hold up for long without a system of shared values. People in the twentieth century have been thinking about how to replace the old value systems, but have not succeeded so far, either because they still mistake economic and political systems for moral systems, or because they simply want to bring back the old morality, or because they are so convinced of the power of science that they truly believe science can solve all important human problems - when in fact science has almost nothing meaningful to say about the inner lives of human beings.

So since World War I, the whole world has been in a state of marvelous material possibility, but simultaneously in a state of moral chaos.

In the 1950s and '60s, many Americans, especially Americans born after World War II, realized that old moral dicta by and large no longer applied in the modern world, and they rebelled against it. Young people of my generation refused to go to church. They became cynical about politicians. They did not trust the police, either, who often upheld old, sometimes brutal notions of law and order. All this became crystal clear during the American civil rights movement, when police gassed, jailed, attacked and in some cases murdered people who were clearly working for justice. By the late 1960s, the U.S. government was conscripting thousands of middle-class American boys and sending them off to be killed in Vietnam at the rate of 500 a week. Few people understood exactly why the boys were dying - the only reasons offered concerned political necessities, duty, loyalty to country, which were values of the corrupt morality that had sent 9 million men to useless deaths in World War I, and that led directly to World War II, a war that was morally "necessary" in several shocking ways.

So what does the I Ching have to do with all this? If you are following what I've just said about the breakdown of the old moral order and the necessity for a new order to replace it, the I Ching's relation to American cultural history is really not so obscure.

In the 1960s, many well-educated young Americans realized that something extremely important was missing from the materialist way of life we were taught to live. Some of the most influential statements of this feeling came from the Beat writers of the time - Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder. They and others were searching for meaningful lives. In some ways they botched the job, but the important thing was that they were aware that their physical well-being did not mean they were living a "good life"; they were keenly aware that their inner lives - the lives of their minds, emotions, psyches, spirits - were as real as their bodies, in some ways more real. They realized that part of the bankruptcy of traditional Western morality was that it had given all its attention to the well-being of the body and to scientific rational intelligence, and had essentially crossed out the emotions and other aspects of consciousness and the inner life.

They did not trust the church, so they set out to find a life of the mind and spirit in traditions that might be trusted, traditions that did not participate in generating world wars. They looked energetically at Buddhism, Hinduism and other Middle Eastern and East Indian religions and philosophies. Young black people became Muslims. White kids from suburban families became Zen Buddhists and Hindus, or at least they tried to. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made famous trips to America and the Beatles followed him back to India. Alan Watts wrote enormously popular books for Americans about Buddhism. I remember being influenced by a popularization of Hindu philosophy called Be Here Now by a Westerner who had copped the name Baba Ram Dass.

Another important strand of this seeking for a meaningful life involved experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, which in the 1950s and '60s were being synthesized in the West. Aldous Huxley wrote an influential book called The Doors of Perception about the spiritual insights he gained from taking mescaline. William Burroughs, a cohort of Kerouac and Ginsberg, traveled to South America to smoke yage, a powerful hallucinogen. Ken Kesey founded a mini-cult around the use of LSD in California, and so did Timothy Leary back East. A hugely popular book in the 1960s and '70s was Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, about a Native American shaman who used peyote, a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

It was a search for some kind of spiritual reality, a reality which science denied existed, which religion could no longer be trusted to guide you into, but which millions of people felt was real and felt starved for.

The 1960s passed. By the late 1970s, people thought of the whole endeavor as a misguided waste of energy and a joke, because the interest in drugs had quickly flown out of control, ceasing to be a form of spiritual seeking and becoming merely escapism and hedonism, fairly destructive. But what really happened was that most of the young spiritual rebels of the 1960s got sick of living in uncomfortable surroundings - which the spiritual life normally demands - and returned to the comforts of middle-class food, transportation and money. Those who continued to seek the spiritual life, whether in books or drugs or traditional religions, came to be seen by Americans in general as cranks or misfits. Softened methods of spiritual seeking became novelties and toys for the wealthy. In America, we greatly prize our devotion to money and comfort.

Along the way, the search for a meaningful inner life involved not only drugs and religion, but also all things mystical. In the '60s and '70s, social and religious authorities were alarmed by a "resurgence" of interest in contacting dead spirits and belief in the power of crystals and mental telepathy. In 1972 I took a college course in the anthropology of magic and religion, and we read books by popular mystics like P.D. Ouspensky and so-called black magicians like Aleister Crowley. They were disturbing books. The UFO phenomenon, which is probably a manifestation of an inner condition, emerged full-blown during the 1960s. People seeking inner meaning tried different kinds of divination, including astrology, tarot cards and, as it happened, the I Ching. I was introduced to the I Ching in this context. A friend showed me how to throw the coins to obtain the hexagrams, and we read the oracles with fascination.

Superstition, purely, dictates the dominant scientific-rational view of reality. Most well-meaning middle-class Americans believed science had long since debunked and disproved all superstitious nonsense about supernatural realities; even the Catholic church was the butt of jokes for many Americans because of its weird rituals with incense and chanting and drinking wine believed to be blood.

I admit I don't know exactly what to think of all this. I do know that, contrary to the jokes now told about "peace, love and understanding" and deluded spaced-out hippies, and contrary to hard-core scientific cynicism about religion and the existence of an inner life, a spiritual life, a moral life - the impulse during those years to find some kind of spiritual reality was intense and real. It's just that many people failed to find any evidence of it.

Many people, but not all. For those who told me the I Ching is their bible, there is evidence of things unseen. Tarot cards and ouija boards mainly dropped out of their lives as either unreliable or dangerous or simply fake. Some of them keep a skeptical eye on astrology. Drugs have long since left their lives as dangerous, short-lived and largely illusory.

But the I Ching remained and actually grew in importance to them. Why? Well, the initial attraction to it involved its use as a contact with the spiritual world. You throw the coins, they symbolize lines, and you look up the arrangement of lines in the book, then read the commentary, which supposedly answers your question. Pure superstition. Except that people discovered two things were happening in the I Ching that were not happening, or happening far less satisfactorily, in other kinds of divination.

One thing was, amazingly, that the answers were right. Let me tell you some examples of this that still startle me, even years later.

The friend who originally introduced me to it decided to make a scientific test of the I Ching's objective reliability - the question being, of course: Is some ordering force actually at work, or is this merely total random chance? For his test, he threw the coins randomly, sort of challenging the I Ching to make sense. On the first throw, he ended up with the oracle Wilhelm translates as "Youthful Folly"; the original text is translated as: "It is not I who seek the young fool;/The young fool seeks me … If he importunes, I give him no information." This was startling because it would be just the sort of reply you might expect a real oracle to make in response to a frivolous test of its authenticity.

But a stranger thing happened. My friend continued his test, throwing the coins three more times. Three more times he drew the oracle of "Youthful Folly." Speaking synchronistically, this can mean only one of two things: Either an extremely improbable and truly fantastic coincidence occurred, or the oracle actually (generously) answered a question that should not have been asked, by warning of its foolhardiness. Four times in a row.

Another time, a friend asked the I Ching, "What is god?" The response was the hexagram of "The Creative," which is the image of heaven. Another question was posed: "What does it mean to be a Christian?" and the hexagram Wilhelm translates as "Modesty" arose - a central component of authentic Christian belief concerns humility and modesty. The oracle spoke directly to the questions.

I have never known anyone who has used the I Ching to say it was wrong or misguided them. In my experience, it has never been wrong, by which I mean that while sometimes the response is very hard to understand or seems ambiguous, I have never seen a clearly unfavorable response occur in a clearly favorable situation, or vice versa. And I have frequently seen responses clearly borne out. The oracle has been exact and lucid about favorable and unfavorable periods of my own life, including a troubling period that began soon after a decision to forgo a long-term visit to China.

So my friends' religious confidence in the I Ching began in their experiments in occult and mystical activities, what we now call in America the "New Age" movement -- the interest in occultism and mysticism which grew out of the 1960s into whole ranges of popularizations of Eastern religion and philosophy, Native American mysticism, shamanism, channeling, paganism, myth enactment, psychic healing, meditation practice, past-life hypnosis and many other occult-like offshoots including the alien abduction phenomenon which is quite bizarre.

The I Ching was different, though. Not only does it seem to reply meaningfully to questions, but it provides two other important things: first, clear, reasonable instructions about living a good life; and second, a coherent picture of the cosmos that integrates my friends' deep sense that the outer, material world and the inner, psychic world are equally real, and intimately related. This was critical. The reason my friends say "the I Ching is my bible" is because it provides exactly what religion, apart from church politics, traditionally provided - guidelines for living a good life, and contact with the inner, or spiritual world.

A point of moral orientation is available in the I Ching which many people believe is not available in traditional Western religions or most of the shallow New Age efforts to formulate a working spiritual life.

What's really interesting is that this point of orientation is available in a text from ancient China. It strongly suggests that the moral values we sense deep inside us are common to widely diverse people. It implies that human beings share a common sense of moral value. Wisdom, justice, temperance, patience, endurance, perseverance, honesty, courage, piety - virtues taught by Plato, not to mention Jesus, are present not only in Western culture, but also in Chinese culture. And they are identifiable in South Asian cultures, Middle Eastern cultures, and Native American cultures, as well.

If I'm right about even part of this, it means that religion is not an evil political tool. Instead, it means that religious institutions were used as political tools by people who did not mean well, and some who did. Further, it means that the religious feeling that is attached to moral values and to the various kinds of "health" that are possible for human beings, is not an illusion. It's a natural experience and need of human beings. And this implies we share a common consciousness, and a common source.

The upshot of all this, finally, would be that after a terrible couple of centuries - especially after what might be described as a collapse, or dismantling of morality during the twentieth century - there is now a powerful impulse on the part of people to rebuild a coherent system of moral values. A system that will not result in world wars. To rebuild, now, we collect moral value wherever we recognize it. The task requires great personal clarity, and cultural clarity, and powerful, unflinching honesty.

But there it is. China is building itself, a giant country of giant possibilities which will come to ruin if no meaningful system of moral values underpins it. America is transforming itself too, a powerful, inventive country of enormous resources in materials and energy, but it has to rebuild a moral system that abandons the hollowness and destructiveness of the old morality and creates - doing what Americans are good at: using whatever materials are at hand - a workable, meaningful moral life.

There is something to be said for the effort to contact the divine world.

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