How the Book of Changes Arrived in the West

In several respects the transmission of the i ching (or book of changes) to the West parallels the process by which Buddhism and Daoism traveled to Europe and the Americas. In each case Western “missionaries” played a part in the process, and in each case there were varied responses over time, ranging from blind indifference to rational knowledge, romantic fantasy, and existential engagement. But in nearly every instance, as in East Asia, there was an effort, often quite self-conscious, to assimilate and domesticate the classic. As with the Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Tibetans, Westerners sent missions to China, and they brought back all kinds of useful information. But compared to their East Asian counterparts, these Western missions proceeded from very different motives and had a very different focus. Moreover, in contrast to the premodern spread of the Yijing and other texts to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, where elites were completely comfortable with the classical Chinese script, in the West the Changes required translation, raising issues of commensurability and incommensurability that are still hotly debated today.

Ironically the westward movement of the Yijing began with the eastward movement of the West. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, in a pattern replicated in many other parts of the world, Jesuit missionaries traveled to China, attempting to assimilate themselves as much as possible to the host country. They studied the Chinese language, learned Chinese customs, and sought to understand China’s philosophical and religious traditions—all with the goal of winning converts by underscoring affinities between the Bible and the Confucian classics. Naturally the Changes served as a major focus for their proselytizing scholarship.

The Jesuit missionaries labored under a double burden. Their primary duty was to bring Christianity to China (and to other parts of the world), but they also had to justify their evangelical methods to their colleagues and superiors in Europe. A kind of “double domestication” thus took place. In China the Jesuits had to make the Bible appear familiar to the Chinese, while in Europe they had to make Chinese works such as the Yijing appear familiar (or at least reasonable) to Europeans.

One of the primary agents involved in this process was the French Jesuit Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730), who tutored the great Kangxi emperor for up to two hours a day in algebra and geometry. In addition the two men regularly discussed the Yijing, which fascinated both of them. The emperor, who considered Bouvet perhaps the only Westerner who was “really conversant with Chinese literature,” showed a particular interest in the Jesuit priest’s claim to be able to predict the future, including the duration of the world, with numerological charts based on the Changes.

Bouvet and his colleague Jean-Francois Fouquet (1665–1741) represented a development in Western Christianity known as the Figurist movement. In brief, the Figurists tried to find in the Old Testament evidence of the coming and significance of Christ through an analysis of “letters, words, persons, and events.” Apart from the literal meaning of the “outer” text, in other words, there existed a hidden “inner” meaning to be discovered. In China this gave rise to a concerted effort to find reflections (that is, “figures”) of the biblical patriarchs and examples of biblical revelation in the Chinese classics themselves.

Initially the Kangxi emperor’s interest in Bouvet’s ideas was so great that he encouraged the French Jesuit to play an active role in the compilation of the huge annotated edition of the Yijing that was published in 1715 as the Balanced Compendium on the Zhou Changes—which Bouvet indeed did. But eventually the Figurist enterprise, like the broader Jesuit evangelical movement, fell victim to harsh criticisms from Chinese scholars as well as to vigorous attacks by other members of the Christian community in China and abroad. In the end Rome proscribed all Bouvet’s Figurist writings and forbade him to promulgate his Figurist ideas among the Chinese.

Yet despite the unhappy fate of the Figurists in China, their writings captured the attention of several prominent European intellectuals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries...