Jung, synchronicity and the I Ching: what Jung actually claimed

Carl Jung wrote the foreword to the English edition of Richard Wilhelm's I Ching (1950), and that foreword is the main reason millions of Western readers first opened the book. In it Jung proposed that a cast works through synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence between an inner state and an outer event, rather than through cause and effect. It is an interpretation, not a demonstrated mechanism, and Jung himself presented it with visible caution.

Here is how the I Ching travelled west, what Jung did and did not say, and how you can use his idea sensibly.

How the I Ching reached Western readers

The first complete English translation was James Legge's, published in 1882 in the Sacred Books of the East. It was scholarly and literal, and Legge treated the book as a classic to be explained rather than an oracle to be used. For most readers it remained a curiosity.

The turn came with Richard Wilhelm, a German missionary who spent more than two decades in China and worked on the Yijing with the scholar Lao Naixuan (勞乃宣). His German translation appeared in 1924. Wilhelm translated the text together with the Ten Wings and his own commentary, and he presented the book as practical wisdom, not as an exotic relic. The English version, translated from Wilhelm's German by Cary F. Baynes, appeared in 1950 with Jung's foreword. You can read more about these translations and their differences in the history of the I Ching and its translations.

Jung and Wilhelm had known each other since the 1920s. Jung wrote a commentary for Wilhelm's translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929), and after Wilhelm's death in 1930 he gave a memorial address in which he first used the word "synchronicity" in public.

What Jung meant by synchronicity

Western science, Jung argued, looks for causes: A happens, therefore B. The Chinese way of thinking that produced the I Ching, as he understood it, looks instead at what happens together in a moment. The fall of the coins and the state of the person asking belong to the same moment, and the cast is read as a picture of that moment.

Jung developed the idea at length in the essay "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" (1952), published alongside a study by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. There he defined synchronicity roughly as the coincidence in time of two events that are not causally connected but have the same or a similar meaning. The I Ching was one of his main examples, along with astrology experiments and personal anecdotes.

Two points are easy to miss:

• Jung did not claim the coins are moved by some force. The whole point of "acausal" is that nothing pushes them.
• He did not offer synchronicity as proof that readings are correct. He offered it as a way of describing what people experience when a reading feels meaningful.

The foreword itself

The foreword is unusual. Instead of only explaining the book, Jung consulted it about the foreword. He reported receiving Hexagram 50, Ding, the Cauldron, a vessel for cooking offerings and feeding guests, with changing lines in the second and third places, changing to Hexagram 35, Jin, Progress. He read the cauldron as the book describing itself: an old vessel with spiritual nourishment in it, at risk of being misunderstood or left unused. The third line of Ding speaks of a cauldron whose handle is altered, so that the good food inside is not eaten, which Jung took as a fair picture of the book's neglected state in the West.

He was frank that a sceptic could call all this projection, and he invited readers to try the book with an open but critical mind. The foreword is less an argument than a demonstration of a way of reading: take the text seriously as a mirror and watch what it shows you.

Fair criticisms

The tradition, and modern readers, push back from several sides:

• Psychologists and scientists point out that synchronicity has never been demonstrated under controlled conditions, and that the feeling of meaning is well explained by how readily we find patterns, especially in rich, ambiguous texts.
• Sinologists note that Jung read the I Ching through Wilhelm, through German, and through his own theory of archetypes. The classical Chinese commentators, such as Wang Bi and Zhu Xi, did not talk about an "acausal principle"; they spoke of the 象 (images), the 理 (pattern of things) and, in the Xici, of the way the sage 極深而研幾, "plumbs the depths and studies the subtle beginnings".
• Practitioners sometimes object that the psychological reading tames the book into self-help, losing its moral seriousness about timing and conduct.

All three objections are reasonable. Jung's account remains valuable as one serious reader's report, not as the final explanation.

Jung's wider influence

Through the Wilhelm–Baynes edition the book reached writers and artists in the decades that followed. John Cage used it to make compositional choices by chance; Philip K. Dick consulted it while writing The Man in the High Castle, in which characters also use it. These are uses Jung's foreword made respectable, but they go well beyond anything he proposed.

Using the idea when you read a cast

You do not need to believe in synchronicity to read the I Ching well, and you do not need to reject it either. A sober, workable position:

• Treat the cast as a prompt for reflection on the situation you described, not as a forecast. Our article on whether the I Ching can predict the future goes further.
• Ask a clear question first; the picture is only as useful as the frame. See how to ask the I Ching a question.
• Read what the text says, then notice what it makes you think of. Write both down, and keep them separate.
• If a reading seems to miss, do not force it. Jung's own example shows that the meaning he found came from long familiarity with the text, not from a single striking match.

When you are ready, cast a hexagram and read it with the changing-line rules before reaching for any theory about why it fits.