page_title: I Ching
section_title: Early European
hierarchical_section_title: I Ching / Interpretation and influence / Early European
caption_attribution_description: English: A diagram of I Ching hexagrams owned by German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It was sent to Leibniz from the French Jesuit Joachim Bouvet. The Arabic numerals written on the diagram were added by Leibniz. The grid in the center presents the hexagrams in Fuxi or binary sequence, reading across and down. The same order is used on the outside, reading up from the bottom around on the right, then up again on the left to the top.
context_page_description: The I Ching or Yi Jing, usually translated as Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and among the oldest of the Chinese classics. With more than two and a half millennia's worth of commentary and interpretation, the I Ching is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, philosophy, literature, and art. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period, over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the "Ten Wings". After becoming part of the Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the subject of scholarly commentary and the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East, and eventually took on an influential role in Western understanding of Eastern thought.
  The I Ching is used in a type of divination called cleromancy, which uses apparently random numbers. Six numbers between 6 and 9 are turned into a hexagram, which can then be looked up in the text, in which hexagrams arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence.
context_section_description: Leibniz, who was corresponding with Jesuits in China, wrote the first European commentary on the I Ching in 1703, arguing that it proved the universality of binary numbers and theism, since the broken lines, the "0" or "nothingness", cannot become solid lines, the "1" or "oneness", without the intervention of God. This was criticized by Hegel, who proclaimed that binary system and Chinese characters were "empty forms" that could not articulate spoken words with the clarity of the Western alphabet. In their discussion, I Ching hexagrams and Chinese characters were conflated into a single foreign idea, sparking a dialogue on Western philosophical questions such as universality and the nature of communication. In the 20th century, Jacques Derrida identified Hegel's argument as logocentric, but accepted without question Hegel's premise that the Chinese language cannot express philosophical ideas.
caption: A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet. The Arabic numerals were added by Leibniz.
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