I Ching
The Book of Changes (Yijing), an ancient Chinese divinatory text and the oldest of the Confucian Five Classics, of composite and anonymous authorship traditionally and legendarily attributed to King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou (eleventh century BCE), with later commentarial layers —the 'Ten Wings'— traditionally attributed to Confucius himself, although modern scholars date its composition across several centuries, from the late Western Zhou dynasty to the Warring States period. The core of the text consists of sixty-four hexagrams, figures made of six unbroken (yang) or broken (yin) lines representing all possible combinations of the interplay between these two complementary cosmic principles, each accompanied by an oracular judgement and commentaries on the individual lines describing the evolution of a situation over time. Traditionally consulted by casting yarrow stalks or coins to generate a hexagram at random —representing the energetic configuration of the present moment and, often, its transformation into another hexagram as certain lines change value— the book is not merely a divination manual but a complete worldview centred on constant change as the fundamental structure of reality, built around concepts such as the dao, the dynamic balance of opposites, and the correlation between cosmic order and human conduct, and it has profoundly influenced Taoism, Confucianism, traditional Chinese medicine and the martial arts. It also fascinated Western thinkers such as Leibniz, who saw in it a remarkable anticipation of modern binary arithmetic in its system of unbroken and broken lines, and Carl Jung, who wrote the foreword to Richard Wilhelm's influential translation and connected it to his own theory of synchronicity, understanding the oracle not as causality but as meaningful coincidence.