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I Ching Oracle Guide What Cage and Dick let the I Ching do

What Cage and Dick let the I Ching do

In 1951 John Cage finished a piano work in which he did not want to choose the sounds himself. Eleven years later The Man in the High Castle appeared, a novel whose turns Philip K. Dick did not want to invent either. Both men reached for the same book: the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching, issued in 1950 in the Bollingen series. What they did with it diverged.

That is not a story about two eccentrics. In the years that followed, the I Ching turns up with George Harrison, the same translation with Bob Dylan, and Wilhelm's German text a generation earlier with Hermann Hesse. In the West the I Ching became a tool. What that tool did, and did not do, is easier to see once Chinese sources sit next to the usual Western account.

Music of Changes, 1951

Christian Wolff was sixteen when, in the early 1950s, he gave Cage a two-volume English copy as a gift. Wolff was born on 8 March 1934, a student of Cage, the son of Kurt and Helen Wolff. They were German emigré publishers who, after fleeing fascism, helped found Pantheon Books in the United States. Pantheon issued the Bollingen series in which that translation appeared. So the book did not arrive through a Chinese teacher, but through the family whose publishing house had issued it.

Cage had known the pianist David Tudor since 1950, through the composer Morton Feldman. Music of Changes is dedicated to Tudor. For the work Cage made tables of 8 by 8 cells with sounds, durations, dynamics and tempo. According to the Chinese music platform 新芭网 (Xīnbā Wǎng, sin80.com), he tossed three coins to obtain one of the 64 hexagrams, and that hexagram pointed to a position in the tables. That is coins, not yarrow stalks.

A nuance that the English Wikipedia does record: Cage composed the sound materials himself in advance. Chance did not invent the notes from nothing. It decided which of the prepared building blocks would sound at which moment. The myth that the I Ching wrote the music does not hold.

The four books were finished in sequence: Book I on 16 May, Book II on 2 August, Book III on 18 October and Book IV on 13 December 1951. According to Wikipedia, Book I had a first, private performance on 5 July 1951. The complete work was first heard on 1 January 1952, played by Tudor. It counts as Cage's first instrumental work in which chance governs the whole compositional process. From 1951, biroco.com writes, the I Ching became a standing part of his method.

According to the Seattle Artist League, Cage saw chance operations as a way to set aside his own taste and will as a composer, so that sounds could be themselves rather than an expression of the composer.

What Chinese sources tell differently

新芭网 explains that in 变化的音乐 (Music of Changes, 1951) pitch, duration and timbre did not come from the composer, but from repeated coin tosses guided by the 64 hexagrams, in Chinese 卦象 (guàxiàng), of the 易经 (Yìjīng). In that wording, the composer's subjective intention did not count.

The same source sets Cage's fascination beside Daoist thought, in particular Laozi's 大音希声 (dà yīn xī shēng), the great sound is scarcely audible, as a philosophical background for works such as 4'33". The popular-science platform 这就是历史 (Zhè jiù shì lìshǐ, allhistory.com) calls the piece Cage's first aleatoric composition and describes how he translated the 64 hexagrams into 64 musical patterns of sound, duration and timbre, after which coin tosses decided which pattern came next.

A Chinese art encyclopedia at artda.cn places the encounter with Asian philosophy in the 1940s, when Cage attended lectures by the Japanese Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki at Black Mountain College, and links that to both the Yijing and the Zen notion 空 (kōng, emptiness) in later works.

Those Chinese popular sources say, with striking consistency, that Cage was influenced by traditional Chinese culture, and they present the Yijing as a Chinese achievement set against the Western avant-garde. That frame rarely appears so explicitly in English musicological writing. In our reading it has a lightly promotional character and is not a neutral scholarly verdict.

Set this beside the Western account, and what stands out is that each side leaves something out. In what we have from the Chinese pieces, Wolff, Pantheon and the emigré publishers do not appear; in what we have from the Western pieces, Laozi is missing. What he held was an American English edition of a German translation, offered by the publishers' son.

The I Ching as a plot machine

The Man in the High Castle appeared in 1962 from Putnam and won the 1963 Hugo Award for best novel. Dick used the same Wilhelm/Baynes translation of 1950 as a plot machine. In the Vertex interview of February 1974, with Arthur Byron Cover, he puts it this way: when a character asked a question, Dick himself threw the coins, wrote down the hexagram he received, and that decided the turn of the story.

His own example: Juliana Frink considers warning the writer Hawthorne Abendsen of an assassination. The oracle indicated that she should, and so that is what happens in the book. Inside the book, Abendsen in turn uses the I Ching to write his novel-within-the-novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. At the close Juliana consults the book again and receives hexagram 61, 中孚 (Zhong Fu), Inner Truth. Characters read that as a sign that the world of the novel itself is not the true reality.

The Chinese Wikipedia page on 高堡奇人 (Gāobǎo qírén) confirms that closing hexagram by name, independently of the English-language sources, and names Frink, Tagomi and Juliana as characters who consult the 易经 for important decisions.

According to a close reading in Science Fiction Studies of July 2016, the novel contains twelve such consultations, woven into the plot. That analysis holds that the I Ching holds the work together stylistically and philosophically. Academic writers also note that Dick's own stories of how literally he proceeded may have become, in part, a self-mythologizing account that he told more colorfully in later interviews. How the practice ran during the writing itself cannot be verified independently outside Dick's testimony.

In March 2025 the portal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 中国社会科学网 (Zhōngguó Shèhuì Kēxué Wǎng), published an article titled 古典何以科幻：《易经》与菲利普·迪克的《高堡奇人》. The existence of that title is confirmed; the page itself could not be opened.

From fascination to aversion

In 1974, in the same Vertex interview, Dick still called the I Ching a source of advice that transcends the immediate situation, and he used it as a kind of moral compass. He also said then that he would never again use it so intensively to plot a whole book.

Two years later the tone had turned. In a radio interview for Hour 25, in 1976, host Mike Hodel, Dick called the I Ching the oracle that had told him more lies than anyone he had ever known, and said it has a treacherous and deceitful character. In an interview with Science Fiction Review no. 19, August 1976, interviewer Daniel DePerez, he called it a malicious spirit and an evil book, and said he no longer used it. That aversion, he explained, came because the I Ching failed him at the end of The Man in the High Castle: it did not help him round off the plot, which according to him is why the book's ending is so open.

This is not a contradiction among sources. It is a documented change of course by Dick himself, two years apart. Our reading: set this beside Cage. Cage wanted the book to refuse his will. Dick wanted it to answer. When the ending stayed open, Dick heard a lie. Cage would have heard the method working.

What they did and did not do with the book

George Harrison wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps, recorded in 1968 for the White Album, after his return from India, inspired by the I Ching idea that nothing is coincidence. He said he opened a book at random, saw the words gently weeps, and began the song from there. This is the best documented I Ching connection among the Beatles. No reliable documentation has been found of a band-wide habit of consulting the oracle for decisions.

Bob Dylan said in 1965, in an interview with the Chicago Daily News, that there is a book I-Ching, the only thing amazingly true, not just for me. Photographs from the same session for the cover of Bringing It All Back Home (1965) show a copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching. A frequently cited line about an I Ching consultation in Idiot Wind appears only on a bootleg. On the official release Dylan later replaced that line with fortune-teller.

Hermann Hesse's novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) turns on a game that is in part inspired by the I Ching, through Hesse's contact with Richard Wilhelm's translation and the circle around the Schule der Weisheit, together with C.G. Jung among others. The English translation appeared first as Magister Ludi (1949) and later, revised, as The Glass Bead Game (1969). According to an article on Wiley Online Library, Hesse had a third wave of popularity in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the counterculture; figures such as Timothy Leary and Andy Warhol helped that rediscovery. It is attributed to Hesse's themes of self-realisation and Eastern spirituality across his work, not to a statement by Hesse himself about the I Ching.

It follows, we think, that the I Ching in those decades was not one practice. Harrison opened a page at random, inspired by an idea about chance, not necessarily in the I Ching itself. Cage pointed to cells in tables. Dick threw coins for characters who themselves consulted the oracle. Cage and Dick held the same English translation. They did not do the same thing with it.

Cage set his taste aside. Dick asked for a turn of plot and later blamed the oracle for the open ending. Harrison read a chance page as a sign that nothing is chance. Dylan called the book amazingly true, and a copy shows up in photographs from the cover session; on the official record he did not sing about it. What Cage, Dick and Dylan shared was, in our reading, not a Chinese line of teaching but one book: the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, issued in the United States. Hesse had already worked with Wilhelm's German translation a generation earlier, in the circle of the Schule der Weisheit.

Sources

The old ritual Cast the yarrow stalks Ask your question and build your hexagram line by line, with the classical odds.

Further reading

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