>>16074650 The I Ching (Yi Ching) or Book of Changes also began as a divination tool in ancient China. But it evolved under its Confucian curators, beginning in the 6th century BCE, into something else; a decision-making tool and guide to becoming a “superior man”.
The I Ching, which never had much mass appeal in China, fell into disfavor and obscurity when the communists came to power in China, eschewing the elitism and hierarchies of Confucianism.
Yet even as that was happening, the I Ching was finding new devotees in the West. Carl Jung, who was vying with Sigmund Freud to be the prime mover in the new field of psychiatry in the early 20th century, saw the I Ching as aligned with his theory of synchronicity. Coincidences are unrelated events briefly intersecting in time and space. Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance; it is the intertwining of objective events with the subjective or psychic state of the observer, according to Jung. This was also his theory behind how the I Ching works: the toss of the coins (or yarrow sticks) mystically connects the observer with the world or tableau that their question evokes.
Jung wrote the foreword to the most authoritative translation of the Book of Changes by the German Richard Wilhelm, later translated into English in 1951 by an American, Carey Baynes. The two translations brought the I Ching to Western audiences curious about Asian spirituality, first through beatnik writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and then more widely in the 1960s counter-culture movement.