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I ching philosophy6/22/2023 This familiarity led to ever-increasing use of the text for rhetorical rather than religious purposes, and much of the original oracular import was forgotten. The latter technique generated random numbers that would then correspond to a particular oracle in the Zhou Yi.Īs the Zhou dynasty waned and as the power of the nobles began to eclipse that of the king, the use of yarrow stalk divination, originally a royal prerogative, permeated virtually all of literate society. When rulers were not confident of their own ability to decide issues of great import (battles, wedding dates, journeys, etc.), they resorted to divination by scapulimancy (reading cracks in heated bones), or by casting lots using the stalks of the yarrow plant. First known as the Zhou Yi, its earliest rendition was a series of sixty-four six-line omen texts and prognostications, which most likely originated in the sacred ritual of oracle bone divination-a tradition dating from Neolithic times. ![]() Historical events mentioned in the earliest layers of the I Ching depict the period just prior to and following the founding of the Zhou dynasty (1046–249 b.c.e.). In the past twenty years, catching the wave of the New Age movement, the I Ching has become the focus of various occult and pseudo-scientific thought systems. Jung, the father of modern psychotherapy, regularly consulted the Book of Changes. Only in the twentieth century have mainstream thinkers such as C. The I Ching, or Yi Jing, is one of the oldest books in the history of religious thought, but it was not until the seventeenth century that it attracted the attention of Western scholars, most notably the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the inventor of the binary number system.
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