I CHING ("BOOK OF CHANGES").

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Y-King antiquissimus sinarum liber quem ex latina interpretatione, edidit Julius Mohl. First edition of the first full European-language translation of the influential Book of Changes, also known as the I-ching. Following its arrival in Europe, the Changes shaped Leibniz's theories of binary arithmetic and the underlying principles of computing; more recently, it has influenced Jungian psychology and scientific conceptions of genetic sequences. The book is exceptionally scarce at auction, only two other complete copies having appeared in the past four decades.Europeans first became aware of the Book of Changes in the 17th century via the reports of Jesuit missionaries and the landmark book Confucius sinarum philosophus (1687), and it quickly captured the interest of leading Enlightenment scholars. Foremost among these was Leibniz: learning of the text in letters and diagrams of its hexagrams sent to him by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, Leibniz saw in Changes's Yin-Yang principle further support for his binary theories subsequently outlined in his Explication de l'arithmétique binaire (1703). Since Leibniz, the Changes has continued to shape mathematical, scientific, and philosophical thought. In the 20th century, the text's emphasis on self-understanding and self-reflection - ideas cited by Carl Jung in 1949 in his foreword to Richard Wilhem's translation - "proved appealing not only to laypersons but also clinical practitioners, leading in time to a branch of Jungian psychology

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