I Ching

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese classic that enters Joseph Knecht’s life as both a demanding field of study and a practical oracle. Through the ritual handling of yarrow stalks and the interpretation of signs, it directs Knecht toward apprenticeship at the Bamboo Grove and later accompanies him at a point of departure. Its importance is not simply that it supplies predictions: learning the book draws Knecht into a different discipline of attention, while its role in his story marks the beginning of an awakening that makes inherited hierarchies seem less absolute.

The Book and Its Practice

Knecht’s interest in the I Ching took shape during his studies at the Far Eastern College. He had already made rapid progress in Chinese reading and writing, befriended Chinese scholars, and learned several odes from the Shih Ching by heart. In his second year, his attention turned with increasing intensity to the Book of Changes. The college could offer information about it but no introductory course or teacher; his repeated requests for instruction eventually led him to hear of Elder Brother and the hermitage called the Bamboo Grove.

The book was not approached there as a text alone. Elder Brother had developed great skill in consulting it with the traditional yarrow stalks, and Knecht arrived seeking a sustained study that the college’s teachers preferred to keep at a distance. Elder Brother’s own formation joined the ancient commentaries to the philosophical writings of Chuang Tzu. His departure from the college had followed a conflict with its rationalistic, declaredly Confucian atmosphere; at the Bamboo Grove he lived according to ancient Chinese principles, meditating, copying scrolls, and tending a carefully arranged miniature garden.

The Oracle at the Bamboo Grove

Before accepting Knecht as a pupil, Elder Brother asked whether he could remain obedient and still, “as a goldfish.” Knecht agreed. Elder Brother then brought out the yarrow stalks from a wooden container and began the careful sequence of dividing, counting, setting aside, and regrouping them. His movements were economical and practiced; the stalks shifted with soft, dry clicks until their numbers yielded an ideograph. He repeated the procedure, writing a second sign, and continued until six positive or negative lines formed a hexagram.

The resulting sign was Mong, “youthful folly.” Elder Brother read its image as water below a mountain and a spring bubbling at the foot of a fountain, then gave its verdict: “Youthful folly wins success.” Knecht sat through the consultation in suspense, holding his breath. When he understood that the “young fool” had appeared and that the result meant he might stay, he sighed with relief. The oracle had decided in his favor: the possibility of study became an apprenticeship.

A Discipline of Study and Daily Life

Knecht remained at the Bamboo Grove for months. Elder Brother spent an hour each day teaching him to handle the stalks, explaining the grammar and symbolism of the oracular language, and drilling him in writing and memorizing all sixty-four signs. He also read ancient commentaries aloud and sometimes told Knecht stories by Chuang Tzu. The training extended beyond interpretation: Knecht learned to tend the garden, wash brushes, prepare Chinese ink, make soup and tea, gather firewood, observe the weather, and use the Chinese calendar.

The apprenticeship did not turn the I Ching into an accessory of Knecht’s existing interests. His attempts to introduce the Glass Bead Game and music into their spare conversations met with silence, a patient smile, or a proverb. When Knecht admitted that he hoped to incorporate the I Ching’s system into the Glass Bead Game, Elder Brother challenged the ambition through the image of the garden: a person might create a small bamboo garden in the world, he said, but the gardener would not thereby succeed in incorporating the world into that garden. Knecht could play music on a small clavichord sent from Monteport, but the book’s intellectual and ritual world remained distinct from his Castalian project of synthesis.

Signs at Moments of Departure

The I Ching accompanied Knecht beyond his apprenticeship. Before setting out for Mariafels, he consulted it with the yarrow stalks and obtained Lü, “The Wanderer.” The judgment promised success through smallness and good fortune through persistence; a changing line produced the image “The wanderer comes to the inn,” followed by the statement that he carried his possessions with him. The reading gave a pattern to a journey whose purpose Knecht did not yet fully understand. At the monastery he was initially preoccupied with his ostensible task of teaching amateur Glass Bead Game players, but gradually realized that he had probably been sent less to teach than to learn. His knowledge of the I Ching also opened a warmer intellectual exchange with Abbot Gervasius, who shared an interest in the book and asked Knecht to instruct him twice a week.

The novel places this use of an inherited system alongside experiences that cannot be made universally transferable. Knecht recalls how the fragrance of a cut elder twig became joined in his memory to the opening chords of Schubert’s spring song: the association was meaningful and reliable for him, but could be explained to another person without becoming that person’s own fixed response. The I Ching, by contrast, offers a learned grammar of signs and a ritual method by which a reading can be produced and interpreted. The distinction does not reduce either experience to the other: shared symbolic practice and private association remain different forms of meaning.

Awakening and the Book’s Wider Resonance

Knecht later described his months at the Bamboo Grove as unusually happy and repeatedly called them the beginning of his awakening. From that period, awakening increasingly became a word for his growing self-knowledge: not only an understanding of his place in Castalia and the wider human order, but also an emerging sense of his distinctive position and destiny. In parallel, the customary categories of the world’s hierarchy, including Castalia’s own, became more relative to him. The I Ching therefore belongs to the formation of a change in perspective, not merely to an episode of exotic study or a collection of successful forecasts.

Its influence is also connected to Knecht’s continuing study of ancient Chinese music. In older Chinese writings he encountered praise of music as a primal source of order, morality, beauty, and health, an ethical conception that echoed the example of the Music Master. Across the novel, the I Ching thus stands at an intersection of text, ritual, interpretation, and daily practice. Its oracle supplies signs at moments of choice; its study asks Knecht to learn patiently rather than merely absorb information; and the Bamboo Grove places that learning within a way of life that resists being folded neatly into the systems he already knows.