Richard Wilhelm

Indolence and Distraction The Secret of the Golden Flower

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The awakening of the spirit is accomplished because the heart has first died. When a man can let his heart die, then the primal spirit wakes to life. To kill the heart does not mean to let it dry and wither away, but it means that it has become undivided and gathered into one.

Master Lü-tsu said, The decision must be carried out with a collected heart, and not seeking success; success will then come of itself. In the first period of release there are chiefly two mistakes: indolence and distraction. But that can be remedied…

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Meditation, Stage 2: Origin of a new being in the place of power

The two mistakes of indolence and distraction must be combated by quiet work that is carried on daily without interruption; then success will certainly be achieved. If one is not seated in meditation, one will often be distracted without noticing it. To become conscious of the distraction is the mechanism by which to do away with distraction. Indolence of which a man is conscious, and indolence of which he is unconscious, are a thousand miles apart. Unconscious indolence is real indolence; conscious indolence is not complete indolence, because there is still some clarity in it. Distraction comes from letting the mind wander about; indolence comes from the mind’s not yet being pure. Distraction is much easier to correct than indolence. It is as in sickness: if one feels pains and irritations, one can help them with remedies, but indolence is like a disease that is attended by lack of realization. Distraction can be counteracted, confusion can be straightened out, but indolence and lethargy are heavy and dark. Distraction and confusion at least have a place, but in indolence and lethargy the anima alone is active. In distraction the animus is still present, but in indolence pure darkness rules. If one becomes sleepy during meditation, that is an effect of indolence. Only breathing serves to overcome indolence. Although the breath that flows in and out through the nose is not the true breath, the flowing in and out of the true breath takes place in connection with it.
 The Secret of the Golden Flower

circulation of the light The Secret of the Golden Flower

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If one practises the circulation of the light, one must forget both body and heart. The heart must die, the spirit live. When the spirit lives, the breath will begin to circulate in a wonderful way.

Children, take heed! If for a day you do not practise meditation, this light streams out, who knows whither? If you only meditate for a quarter of an hour, by it you can do away with the ten thousand aeons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness. This marvellous magic cannot be fathomed.

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Meditation, Stage 1: Gathering the light

But when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine. Everything depends on there being no interruption. The beginning and the end of the practice must be one. In between there are cooler and warmer moments, that goes without saying. But the goal must be to reach the vastness of heaven and the depths of the sea, so that all methods seem quite easy and taken for granted. Only then have we mastered it.
 All holy men have bequeathed this to one another: nothing is possible without contemplation (fan-chao, reflection). When Confucius says: ‘Perceiving brings one to the goal’; or when the Buddha calls it: ‘The vision of the heart’; or Lao-tse says: ‘Inner vision’, it is all the same.
 The Secret of the Golden Flower

The Secret of the Golden Flower Richard Wilhelm & C. G. Jung

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The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life (Chin-tan; literally, golden ball, golden pill). All changes of spiritual consciousness depend upon the heart. There is a secret charm which, although it works very accurately, is yet so fluid that it needs extreme intelligence and clarity, and the most complete absorption and tranquillity. People without this highest degree of intelligence and understanding do not find the way to apply the charm; people without this utmost capacity for absorption and tranquillity cannot keep fast hold of it.
 The Secret of the Golden Flower

The Tai I Chin Hua Tsung Chih 1)↓ can be traced back to the seventeenth century as having been printed from wooden tablets. The editor describes having found an incomplete copy dating from that time in the Liu-li-ch’ang, the old street of dealers in books and antiquities in Peking, and tells how he filled it out later from a friend’s book. But the oral tradition goes back even further than that, to the Religion of the Golden Elixir of Life (Chin-tan-chiao), which developed in the T’ang period in the eighth century. The founder is said to have been the well-known Taoist adept, Lü Yen 2)↓ (Lü Tung-pin), counted later by folklore as one of the eight immortals, about whom in the course of time a rich store of myths has gathered…

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This sect 3)↓, like all religions, native and foreign, met with tolerance and favour in the T’ang period and spread widely, but, as it was always an esoteric and secret religion, in the course of time it began to suffer persecution because of members being suspected of political intrigues. Again and again its adherents were persecuted by a hostile government, lastly, in an extremely cruel way by the Manchus, just before their own fall 4)↓. Many members have turned to the Christian religion, and all, even if they have not actually entered the church, are very friendly towards it.
 Our book gives the best available account of the religion of the Golden Elixir of Life. The sayings are attributed to Lü Yen, whose other name was Lü Tung-pin, or Lü, the Guest of the Cavern. In the book he is introduced as the patriarch Lü, Lü-tsu. He lived at the end of the eighth and at the beginning of the ninth century. A later commentary on his sayings has been added, but it springs from the same tradition.
 Whence did Lü get his esoteric, secret lore? He himself attributes its origin to Kuan Yin-hsi, the Master Yin-hsi of the Pass (Kuan, i.e. Han-ku Pass), for whom, according to tradition, Lao-tse wrote down his Tao Te Ching…
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1. ↑ The Secret of the Golden Flower (Tai I Chin Hua Tsung Chih), the title of which was changed to Cttang Sheng Shu (The Art of Prolonging Human Life) by the Chinese publisher of the edition used here.
2. ↑ Born circa A.D. 796. [H. W.]
3. ↑ Chin-tan-chiao, The Golden Elixir of Life
4. ↑ In the year 1891, 15,000 members were killed by Manchu hirelings.

yarrow stalks I Ching

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The hexagrams and lines in their movements and changes mysteriously reproduced the movements and changes of the macrocosm. By the use of yarrow stalks 1)↓, one could attain a point of vantage from which it was possible to survey the condition of things. Given this perspective, the words of the oracle would indicate what should be done to meet the need of the time.

the yarrow stalks makes it possible for the unconscious in man to become active

The only thing about all this that seems strange to our modern sense is the method of learning the nature of a situation through the manipulation of yarrow stalks. This procedure was regarded as mysterious, however, simply in the sense that the manipulation of the yarrow stalks makes it possible for the unconscious in man to become active. All individuals are not equally fitted to consult the oracle. It requires a clear and tranquil mind, receptive to the cosmic influences hidden in the humble divining stalks. As products of the vegetable kingdom, these were considered to be related to the sources of life. The stalks were derived from sacred plants.
 Richard Wilhelm

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1. ↑ The stalks come from the plant known to us as common yarrow, or milfoil (Achillea millefolium).

I Ching trigrams chart

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The eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change.

trigrams

These eight trigrams were conceived as images of all that happens in heaven and on earth. At the same time, they were held to be in a state of continual transition, one changing into another, just as transition from one phenomenon to another is continually taking place in the physical world. Here we have the fundamental concept of the Book of Changes. The eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change. Attention centers not on things in their state of being—as is chiefly the case in the Occident—but upon their movements in change. The eight trigrams therefore are not representations of things as such but of their tendencies in movement.
 These eight images came to have manifold meanings. They represented certain processes in nature corresponding with their inherent character. Further, they represented a family consisting of father, mother, three sons, and three daughters, not in the mythological sense in which the Greek gods peopled Olympus, but in what might be called an abstract sense, that is, they represented not objective entities but functions.
 The sons represent the principle of movement in its various stages—beginning of movement, danger in movement, rest and completion of movement. The daughters represent devotion in its various stages—gentle penetration, clarity and adaptability, and joyous tranquility.
 Richard Wilhelm from Introduction to The Book of Changes

The Book of Changes Foreword by C. G. Jung (excerpts)

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Even to the most biased eye it is obvious that this book represents one long admonition to careful scrutiny of one’s own character, attitude, and motives.

Since I am not a sinologue, a foreword to the Book of Changes from my hand must be a testimonial of my individual experience with this great and singular book. It also affords me a welcome opportunity to pay tribute again to the memory of my late friend, Richard Wilhelm. He himself was profoundly aware of the cultural significance of his translation of the I Ching, a version unrivaled in the West. […]
 Wilhelm has made every effort to open the way to an understanding of the symbolism of the text. He was in a position to do this because he himself was taught the philosophy and the use of the I Ching by the venerable sage Lao Nai-hsüan; moreover, he had over a period of many years put the peculiar technique of the oracle into practice. His grasp of the living meaning of the text gives his version of the I Ching a depth of perspective that an exclusively academic knowledge of Chinese philosophy could never provide. […]

One cannot easily disregard such great minds as Confucius and Lao-tse, if one is at all able to appreciate the quality of the thoughts they represent; much less can one overlook the fact that the I Ching was their main source of inspiration.

I do not know Chinese and have never been in China. I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of thinking. In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind. It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese has never developed what we call science. Our science, however, is based upon the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth. But a great change in our standpoint is setting in. What Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics. The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance 1)↓, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.

ichingThe Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with.
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1. ↑ Epicurus’s clinamen – przyp Amin

I Ching or the Book of Changes by Richard Wilhelm

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May the same joy in pure wisdom be the part of those who read the translation as was mine while I worked upon it.
 RICHARD WILHELM, Peking, in the summer of 1923

The Book of Changes—I Ching in Chinese—is unquestionably one of the most important books in the world’s literature. Its origin goes back to mythical antiquity, and it has occupied the attention of the most eminent scholars of China down to the present day. Nearly all that is greatest and most significant in the three thousand years of Chinese cultural history has either taken its inspiration from this book, or has exerted an influence on the interpretation of its text. Therefore it may safely be said that the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years has gone into the making of the I Ching. Small wonder then that both of the two branches of Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism, have their common roots here. The book sheds new light on many a secret hidden in the often puzzling modes of thought of that mysterious sage, Lao-tse, and of his pupils, as well as on many ideas that appear in the Confucian tradition as axioms, accepted without further examination.iching
 Indeed, not only the philosophy of China but its science and statecraft as well have never ceased to draw from the spring of wisdom in the I Ching, and it is not surprising that this alone, among all the Confucian classics, escaped the great burning of the books under Ch’in Shih Huang Ti 1)↓. Even the commonplaces of everyday life in China are saturated with its influence. In going through the streets of a Chinese city, one will find, here and there at a street corner, a fortune teller sitting behind a neatly covered table, brush and tablet at hand, ready to draw from the ancient book of wisdom pertinent counsel and information on life’s minor perplexities. […]

Yet we must not overlook the fact that apart from this mechanistic number mysticism, a living stream of deep human wisdom was constantly flowing through the channel of this book into everyday life, giving to China’s great civilization that ripeness of wisdom, distilled through the ages, which we wistfully admire in the remnants of this last truly autochthonous culture.
 What is the Book of Changes actually? In order to arrive at an understanding of the book and its teachings, we must first of all boldly strip away the dense overgrowth of interpretations that have read into it all sorts of extraneous ideas. […]

We must hold here to the fundamental principle that the Book of Changes is to be explained in the light of its own content and of the era to which it belongs. With this the darkness lightens perceptibly and we realize that this book, though a very profound work, does not offer greater difficulties to our understanding than any other book that has come down through a long history from antiquity to our time.

Richard Wilhelm

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1. ↑ 213 B.C.