Modern Man in Search of a Soul: The Wilhelm-Jung-Baynes Partnership of the <i>I Ching</i>

Abstract First published in New York in 1950 by the Bollingen Foundation, the I Ching is commonly known as “a translation of a translation.” The phrase refers to the fact that the I Ching was an English translation of the I Ging by the German missionary-cum-sinologist Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). Yet, current scholarship shows that in addition to the idiomatic prose of Cary Baynes (1883–1977) that made the German text accessible to the Anglophone readers, the I Ching was adorned in a thought-provoking foreword by Carl Jung (1875–1961) that linked the ancient Chinese classic, Book of Changes , to analytical psychology. While this threefold collaboration — Wilhelm’s German translation, Jung’s psychological theory, and Baynes’s English prose — is widely accepted as the foundations of the I Ching , it is not clear why and how the three creative souls would come together to form a team . In this essay, I will trace the complex process through which the three creative souls jointly created the I Ching that addressed a fundamental question of the contemporary Western world: How can the modern man find a soul in an industrialized and commercialized society?