The Tao and the I Ching

The I Ching is the elder: its core, the Zhouyi, dates from the 9th century BCE — a consultation manual, become a wisdom classic once the Ten Wings commented it. The Tao Te Ching is younger by at least four centuries: its oldest known fragments date from the late 4th century BCE, and its legendary author, Laozi, remains untraceable to historians.

One proceeds by images and situations (sixty-four figures, changing lines), the other by aphorisms and paradoxes (“great perfection seems incomplete”). One is consulted, the other meditated. And yet, whoever reads both hears the same voice.

Tao (dao, 道) means “the way” — the course of things, the manner in which the real advances. The word doesn't belong to Taoism alone: all of ancient Chinese thought contends for it. But it's the I Ching's Great Commentary that gives its most compact definition: “one yin, one yang, that is what is called the Way”.

The sentence is decisive because it links the two worlds. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching — unnameable, ungraspable — receives in the I Ching an operative description: the Way is alternation itself, and the sixty-four figures are its grammar. Taoism contemplates the river; the I Ching maps its currents.

Yi (易), the first character of the I Ching, means “change”. It's the shared postulate of both books: nothing lasts, everything shifts — and that isn't bad news, it's the structure of the real. Wisdom, then, doesn't consist in building the immutable, but in recognizing the phase and attuning to it.

From there flows their common ethic of action: the Tao Te Ching's wu wei — acting without forcing — and the sense of right timing that runs through all the I Ching's figures. Waiting (5), Breakthrough (43), Return (24): so many answers to one Taoist question — where does the movement stand, and what goes with it?

Even Increase (42) carries this thought: the classical commentary reads it as the moment when “it furthers one to undertake something” — not because favour falls from the sky, but because the configuration carries. The right moment isn't predicted: it's read.

The two traditions never stopped reading each other: the I Ching's commentators borrow Taoist vocabulary, and Taoists count the I Ching among their classics. For centuries, Confucian and Taoist scholars disputed — and shared — the same book of figures.

The West inherited both through the same man: Richard Wilhelm, who translated the Tao Te Ching (1911) before giving his great version of the I Ching (1924), then, with Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower. No career accident: Wilhelm had understood that the two texts light each other — the Tao gives the I Ching its depth, the I Ching gives the Tao its images.

Daoa isn't a Taoist app, and asks you to adhere to nothing. But its method descends in a straight line from this matrix: a figure as the image of the current phase, writing as the way of attuning to it, and the constant refusal of prediction — the Way is read in the present, it doesn't announce itself.

If Taoism intrigues you, the I Ching is probably its most walkable door: you don't meditate aphorisms in the abstract, you look at your own situation in a figure. The Tao Te Ching says “be like water”; the I Ching asks where your water stands, today.