Famous I Ching Users in History: Confucius, Jung & More

Three thousand years of users have left a cast of characters no novel would dare invent: a captive king arranging hexagrams in his cell, a wandering teacher who allegedly edited the commentaries in old age, a German mathematician who saw binary code in Chinese antiquity, a missionary-translator who carried the book across the world’s widest cultural gap, a Swiss psychologist who bet a scientific concept on it, and a science-fiction novelist who let it plot his books. Meet the people who made the I Ching’s history — and what each one did with it.

King Wen and the Duke of Zhou: The Founders (Legendary, c. 1100 BCE)

Tradition’s origin story is political drama: King Wen of Zhou, lord of a western vassal state, imprisoned by the last Shang king — and in his cell, arranging the sixty-four hexagrams into their canonical order and writing the Judgments. Released, his family conquered the Shang; his son, the Duke of Zhou, regent of the new dynasty, composed the line statements. Historians see instead a text accreting among Zhou court diviners — but the legend encodes something true: the Zhouyi is a state text, born of counselors who had to tell power the truth, and its voice retains that gravity. The founding pair also set the book’s deepest tone: wisdom composed in confinement, for use in crisis.

Confucius: The Commentator (551–479 BCE)

The Analects preserve a curious confession from the Master’s later years: “Give me a few more years, and I would spend fifty studying the Changes, and I might come to be free of great errors.” Tradition went much further — crediting Confucius with the Ten Wings, the commentaries that made the book a classic. Modern scholarship dissolves that attribution into unnamed Confucian school writers of the following centuries. Either way, the effect was identical: the Changes entered the Confucian curriculum, and through it, the examination system that ran China’s government for two millennia. No single person did more to make a diviner’s manual required reading for civilization.

Wang Bi: The Prodigy Who Rationalized the Oracle (226–249 CE)

He died at twenty-three, having written the commentary that dominated the next thousand years. Wang Bi stripped Han-era numerology — the cosmic calendars, the hexagram-chronology machinery — and returned the book to first principles: meaning derived from structure, images read as principles in pictorial form. His reading made the Changes philosophically respectable for the literati and laid the groundwork for every later “principle” school. The lesson he fixed in the tradition: the hexagram’s structure is the argument — a method you can see operating in any modern structural guide, including ours.

Zhu Xi: The Systematizer (1130–1200)

The great synthesizer of Song Neo-Confucianism touched everything — metaphysics, education, the classics — but for practitioners his most consequential act was the smallest: his Introduction to the Study of the Changes standardized the casting procedure, including the three-coin method’s rules and the changing-line logic, in a manual whose authority made it the practice standard across East Asia. When you consult with three coins today, you are following Zhu Xi. He also insisted — against the scholarly purists — that divination is the book’s proper use: the Changes without casting is, he said, like a ladder leaned against nothing.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: The Mathematician (1646–1716)

In 1701, the co-inventor of binary arithmetic received — through Jesuit missionary correspondence — a diagram of the 64 hexagrams. His reaction is one of intellectual history’s great moments of recognition: six positions, two values — each hexagram is a binary number, and the full set runs 0 to 63. Leibniz, who had developed binary as metaphysics-as-mathematics (creation from unity and nothing), took the Chinese figures as confirmation that his calculus of 0 and 1 mirrored an ancient wisdom. Historians note the sequence correspondence was imperfect and the encounter said more about Europe than China — but the connection stuck, and “binary” has been part of the I Ching’s Western biography ever since. (The structural fact behind his excitement is explained in The 64 Hexagrams: A Complete Overview.)

Richard Wilhelm: The Bridge-Builder (1873–1930)

A German Protestant missionary sent to China in 1899, Wilhelm did the opposite of missionary work: he went native intellectually, studied with the Confucian master Lao Nai-hsüan, and spent a decade producing a translation of the Changes that renders it as living wisdom — the 1924 I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen. Cary Baynes’s English version (1950) made it the Western standard. What Wilhelm achieved is hard to overstate: before him, the book arrived in Europe as curiosities and fragments; after him, an English or German reader could hold the whole thing — core text, Wings, trigram cosmology — in coherent, dignified prose. Jung’s foreword completed the crossing. Every English-language I Ching practice today stands on Wilhelm’s, or consciously departs from it.

Carl Jung: The Psychologist Who Staked a Concept (1875–1961)

Jung cast the oracle for thirty years, taught it in seminars, and wrote the 1950 foreword — including his famous experiment casting for the book’s own reception. He gave the I Ching its Western theoretical home: synchronicity, the acausal connecting principle, with the oracle as its most repeatable laboratory. The full account — what Jung claimed, the 1950 experiment, the criticism, what survives without the metaphysics — is in I Ching and Carl Jung: Synchronicity and the Collective Unconscious. His larger legacy: he made it intellectually respectable to take the oracle seriously without requiring belief in spirits.

Modern Hands: Cage, Hesse, Dick, and the Counterculture

• Hermann Hesse wove Changes-thinking into The Glass Bead Game (1943), his novel of a culture built on symbolic synthesis.
• John Cage, the avant-garde composer, used coin tosses from the 1950s onward to determine musical parameters — the I Ching as chance-operation instrument, reshaping experimental music. For Cage the point was explicitly Zen-tinged: let go of preference.
• Philip K. Dick cast the I Ching to plot The Man in the High Castle (1962) — the novel’s own characters consult it, and Dick claimed the oracle shaped the book’s ending. The I Ching as co-author is perhaps its strangest modern role.
• Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Terence McKenna, Steve Jobs-era Silicon Valley — the counterculture absorbed the oracle as decision-ritual and symbol, and its imagery threads through six decades of art and tech culture. The psychological frame that made this possible is covered in I Ching in Modern Psychology.

The Pattern in the People

Look across the list and a design emerges: every major contributor met the I Ching at a threshold — imprisonment, a late-life turn, a career crossroads, a culture crossing — and used the book to think about timing and conduct under uncertainty. That is the book’s actual user community: not people seeking certainty, but people learning to act well without it. The practice tradition they handed down is learnable in weeks — How to Read the I Ching is the doorway — and the deeper history behind it all is traced in I Ching Through History.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Confucius really write the commentaries?

Modern scholarship says no — the Ten Wings are later Confucian school work. The tradition’s attribution captured a real continuity of spirit, though. Detail in The Ten Wings of the I Ching.

Who is the most important figure for modern practice?

Arguably Zhu Xi (the casting procedure), then Wilhelm (the translation), then Jung (the Western legitimacy). A modern practitioner uses all three’s work in a single reading without noticing.

Was Leibniz’s binary connection genuine?

The mapping is real — hexagrams are binary strings — but the I Ching’s sequence is not binary counting, and the contact was coincidental. It remains a bridge story, not a history of computation. Structure in The 64 Hexagrams.

Did any Chinese emperors actually use it?

Yes — the Changes was statecraft equipment. Tang and Song court policy debates cite hexagram readings; the Kangxi Emperor sponsored the great Qing compilation of the book. Divination at court was institutional, not fringe.

Is the book’s authorship known at all?

Not in the modern sense. It is an anonymous, accretive work — court diviners, editors, commentators over centuries. The named “authors” are tradition’s way of honoring the stages of its growth.

Context for the people: I Ching Through History; the practice they built: The Three-Coin Method and the 30-Day Study Plan.