The First Interpretations of the Yi-jing in the West and in Russia
Authors:   Center for the Study of Russian Language, Literature and Culture, Heilongjiang University, Kobzev Artem I. ,   Institute of Oriental Studiesof the Russian Academy of Sciences,   Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology,   Russian State University for the Humanities
Published: May 2021

The Yi-jing易經(Canon of Changes), or Zhou yi周易(All-Encompassing Cyclical Changes of the Zhou [era]), is “the book of books” of Chinese culture, which is also claimed to be the primary source of binary numeration, first described in the West by Leibniz. He was always interested in China, familiar with the binary code of tri and hexagrams (gua) of the Yi-jing and acknowledged its mythical creator, the ancestor emperor Fuxi, as the discoverer of binary arithmetic, and himself – as the one who found it again after four thousand years. At present, historical data do not allow us making an accurate conclusion about the dependence or independence of this outstanding discovery in Europe from the Chinese prototype. The time of the penetration of the initial information about the Yi-jing into Europe is still hidden by a veil of secrecy. The lack of a message about it in the book of Marco Polo is one of its mysteries. At the same time in the Mediterranean area traces of acquaintance with the Yi-jing studies are visible in such cultural phenomena as astrology and alchemy, Kabbalah and the teachings of Ramon Llull, sextine and hexachord. The beginning of the European study of the Yi-jing was laid by Jesuit missionaries who arrived in China at theend of the 16th century. Among them, by the end of the 17 th century, a whole trend of “Yi-jingists” or “figuralists” was formed. They saw Yi-jing as the Chinese Bible, embodying the original Divine Revelation in the form of the kabbalistic “figures” of the gua and being an expression of the common, sacred and antediluvian “hieroglyphic science” of the ancient world, that is, “Metaphysics of numbers, or general scientific method”, “containing all other knowledge”. Apparentlythe first information in Russia about the Yi-jing was published by the first Russiansinologist, German historian and philologist-polyglot G. (Th.) S. Bayer in the two-volume Museum Sinicum (Petersburg, 1730) in Latin. In Russian the primary in -formation about Yi-jing became available to the reader half a century later owing to the coryphaeus of Russian sinology of the 18th century Aleksei L. Leontiev. In 1782 he published an illustrated and commented translation of a fragment from Yi-jing (named Convenient Base) as an appendix to his translation of the Manchu text of the Statutes of the Great Qing (大清會典Dai-Qing hui-dian). Leontiev mentioned the French abbot who visited St. Petersburg in 1769 as the initiator of his appeal to the Yi-jing, but did not indicate his name. Petr E. Skachkov (1892–1964) agreed with Vsevolod S. Kolokolov (1896–1979) that this abbot was the famous French Jesuit missionary and versatile scientist Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759). However, he died ten years earlier. Most likely the interlocutor of Leontiev was a well-known theologian and economist-physiocrat, French abbot Nicolas Baudeau (1730–1792), who held confidential negotiations with Catherine IIin 1769 in St. Petersburg in connection with the situation in Poland. The secrecy of this mission on the eve of the first partition of Poland fully explains the concealment of his name in 1782 when he was still alive and preparing the second partition of Poland. Apparently, a look at the Yi-jing of the French enlighteners184 and physiocrats, expressed by F. Quesnay (1694–1774) and reported by Baudeauto Leontiev prompted him to link the ancient canon with Statutes of the Great Qing. Vasilii P. Vasiliev (1818–1900) expressed a number of original thoughts about the Yi-jing, which may have influenced the creation of his graphic system of Chinese characters and Mendeleev periodic table. Yulian K. Shchutsky (1897–1938), the first Russian researcher who specially studied the Yi-jing and wrote an extensive monograph about it, strangely ignored the statements of his domestic predecessors, but his innovative approach anticipated the neo-mystic Jungian tendency in Western interpretations of the Canon in the 20 th century. Due to the psychologization and aestheticization of the Yi-jing sanctified by world authorities in this field, after the Second World War this neo-mysticism penetrated the mass Western culture which repeated the initial success prepared by figuralists three centuries earlier on a new level and larger scale.