Heaven, earth, and man in The book of changes: seven Eranos lectures

Hellmut Wilhelm, son of the great I Ching translator Richard, inherited a love and fascination for this Chinese text. In Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes, Wilhelm the younger brings together seven lectures targeted to nonspecialist audiences. Each lecture centers on the I Ching, developing a theme, and then marching off into philosophy, poetry, and history. A particularly satisfying example is lecture five, "The Interaction of Heaven, Earth, and Man." In this piece, Wilhelm examines the work of an intellectual named Yang Hsiung, who in his early years was a poet but later abandoned poetry for philosophy. Yang's major work is an imitation of the I Ching, in which he uses graphs of four lines instead of six, each of which can be divided twice, for a total of 81 possible arrangements. The work is an expression of great humanism, which Wilhelm outlines in order to segue into the humanism of the I Ching. A rather demanding study of the I Ching, Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes is rewarding for its forays into areas rarely traversed with such range and intellectual acumen. --Brian Bruya