Knecht Studies the I Ching with Elder Brother in the Bamboo Grove marks a decisive turn in Joseph Knecht’s free studies. Seeking a serious teacher of the Book of Changes after his work at the Far Eastern College reaches its limits, Knecht finds not a conventional course but an apprenticeship shaped by divination, classical texts, garden labor, and disciplined attention. He later remembers his months with Elder Brother as the beginning of his awakening: a period of happiness that also makes the categories of both Castalia and the wider human order seem less absolute.

From the Far Eastern College to the hermitage

Knecht had begun studying Chinese language and classics at the Far Eastern College, where he made quick progress in reading and writing, befriended Chinese scholars, and memorized several odes from the Shih Ching. In his second year, his attention turned increasingly to the I Ching. The college could provide information about the text, but no introductory course or suitable teacher; after Knecht repeatedly requested an instructor, he was directed to Elder Brother.

The recommendation came with uncertainty. Knecht learned that Elder Brother was respected and somewhat famous, but regarded more as an eccentric solitary than as a scholar. He also recognized that his interest in the I Ching was taking him into a field the college’s teachers preferred to keep at a distance. Rather than press his inquiries there, he completed a seminar paper and set out on foot to find the hermit, accepting that he would have to help himself.

Elder Brother’s history made him an unconventional guide. About twenty-five years earlier, he had been the Chinese Department’s most promising student, distinguished in brush writing and the deciphering of ancient texts. He had also adopted Chinese customs so insistently that he refused to address superiors by their titles, calling them “My Elder Brother” instead; the phrase eventually became his own nickname. His interests included the I Ching, practiced with traditional yarrow stalks, and the writings of Chuang Tzu. He left the Institute, despite its wish to retain him as a teacher, and eventually established the Bamboo Grove after securing permission from the authorities and the Order to settle and cultivate the site.

The oracle and the terms of admission

When Knecht reached the hermitage, he introduced himself in Chinese as a young disciple paying his respects. Elder Brother welcomed him, offered tea and a place to sleep, and received him into the pavilion. They spent the evening exchanging courtesies, verses, and classical sayings before Knecht explained in German that he wanted to stay as long as Elder Brother allowed and become his disciple. Elder Brother asked whether he was prepared to obey and remain as still as a goldfish. Knecht agreed.

Elder Brother then consulted the oracle. Using a handful of yarrow stalks from a wooden vessel, he separated, counted, and recombined the stalks through a repeated procedure. The resulting figures were drawn as ideographs and arranged in six lines. The sign was Mong, or youthful folly, whose verdict included the line “Youthful folly wins success.” Knecht waited without asking for an explanation. He understood the result as permission to stay, and the narrator relates that the oracle had decided in his favor. The moment establishes the pattern of the apprenticeship: admission comes not through an institutional examination but through a ritual reading whose authority Knecht accepts.

A practical and textual apprenticeship

Knecht remained in the Bamboo Grove for months. For an hour each day, Elder Brother taught him to handle the yarrow stalks, explained the grammar and symbolism of the oracular language, and drilled him in writing and memorizing the sixty-four signs. He read ancient commentaries with Knecht and, on particularly good days, told him stories from Chuang Tzu. The instruction combined textual study with repeated practice rather than offering a single formal introduction to the Book of Changes.

The rest of Knecht’s education was deliberately ordinary. He learned to tend the garden, wash brushes, prepare Chinese ink, make soup and tea, gather brushwood, observe the weather, and use the Chinese calendar. These duties placed scholarship within a daily routine of service and attention. Elder Brother’s teaching did not separate knowledge from practical life, and the apprentice’s work included caring for the setting in which his studies took place.

Knecht made occasional attempts to bring the Glass Bead Game and music into their conversations, but Elder Brother either let the proposals fall away or answered with a proverb. Knecht was nevertheless allowed to have a small clavichord sent from Monteport and to play for an hour each day. When he said he hoped to learn enough to incorporate the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game, Elder Brother laughed and challenged the premise: “Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.” The exchange does not end Knecht’s intellectual ambition, but it exposes a limit in the idea that a system of knowledge can absorb the whole of reality. Years later, when Knecht had become a respected figure in Waldzell and invited Elder Brother to teach a course there, he received no answer.

Awakening and the wider pattern of the “Lives”

Knecht later described his months with Elder Brother as an unusually happy time and repeatedly called them the beginning of his awakening. In his later remarks, awakening increasingly meant more than the sense of vocation he had previously associated with the word. It suggested growing self-knowledge: an apprehension of his own distinctive position and destiny, accompanied by a sense that the established hierarchies of the world and of Castalia were relative rather than final. The episode therefore matters both as a course of study and as a change in how Knecht understands himself in relation to the orders that have shaped him.

The narrator sets this formative episode within Knecht’s broader years of free study, when students could explore different disciplines before choosing a field, subject to moral rules and an annual account of their studies. They also composed a “Life,” a fictitious autobiography set in a historical period of the writer’s choice. Knecht’s three Lives belonged to this official educational custom, not to the unofficial poetic activity he had pursued at Waldzell. The exercise drew on an imaginative idea of transmigration without requiring literal belief: students temporarily regarded their present selves as masks and tried to enter the circumstances of other times and cultures. Like the I Ching apprenticeship, the Lives trained students to approach experience through forms beyond their immediate identity, though the two practices did so in different ways.

The Bamboo Grove thus stands among the places of study to which Knecht retained a lasting attachment, alongside Monteport and the periods of meditation at Hirsland. Its particular importance lies in the way it joins a specific teacher and discipline to a more consequential inward shift. Elder Brother offers Knecht patient practice rather than an institutional curriculum; the oracle admits him as a novice, daily work grounds his learning, and the failed prospect of incorporating the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game leaves the limits of synthesis in view. Knecht’s later description of the stay as the beginning of awakening gives the episode its lasting significance: it is where study becomes a route toward knowledge of his own place, even as the hierarchies that once seemed settled begin to loosen.