Far Eastern College is the academic setting in which Joseph Knecht studies Chinese language and classics before his pursuit of the I Ching leads him beyond the institution’s teaching. The College gives him a foundation in reading, writing, and Chinese poetry, but cannot offer the sustained instruction he seeks; that gap sends him to Elder Brother’s hermitage and marks a turning point in his years of free study.

Academic Setting and Studies

Knecht begins his Chinese studies at Far Eastern College, affiliated for generations with St. Urban’s, an academic complex devoted to classical philology. He makes rapid progress in reading and writing, befriends several Chinese scholars working there, and learns a number of the odes of the Shih Ching by heart. The College thus provides both formal academic grounding and direct contact with people whose expertise helps shape his studies.

In his second year, Knecht turns with growing intensity to the I Ching, or Book of Changes. The shift takes him beyond the areas in which the College can readily guide him: although its Chinese scholars provide various kinds of information, no introductory course or suitable teacher is available. Knecht repeatedly asks for an instructor who can teach the text thoroughly, but the institution cannot meet that request.

The Limits of Instruction

The difficulty is not simply a shortage of teaching. Knecht comes to sense that his interest in the Book of Changes is taking him into a field the College’s teachers would rather avoid. He therefore becomes more cautious in his inquiries. The episode contrasts the College’s academic resources with the limits that emerge when his curiosity reaches a subject treated warily by its instructors.

Seeking information about Elder Brother, Knecht learns that the hermit is respected and somewhat famous, but regarded more as an eccentric loner than as a scholar. With no suitable teacher forthcoming, Knecht finishes a seminar paper he has already begun, takes his leave, and sets out on foot toward the region where Elder Brother established the Bamboo Grove. The College’s inability to provide the instruction he wants therefore becomes the immediate cause of his departure and of a new kind of apprenticeship.

Connection to the Glass Bead Game

The College’s scholarly setting also belongs to the wider intellectual world from which the Glass Bead Game draws its materials. The Game’s language combines arts and sciences, especially mathematics and music, to establish relations among disciplines; its symbols and formulas are controlled by commissions that guard their accepted vocabulary and development. Against this institutional model of organized, cross-disciplinary knowledge, Knecht’s encounter with the I Ching introduces a pursuit that does not fit comfortably within his College’s existing instruction.

Far Eastern College is therefore more than a backdrop to Knecht’s studies. It supplies the learning and connections that make his interest possible, while its inability—and reluctance—to guide that interest fully directs him toward Elder Brother. The movement from College to hermitage gives his education a consequential change of setting: from academic inquiry into the Book of Changes to study under a practitioner of its traditional divinatory method.