Many people find that the I Ching is particularly useful in answering questions asked in times of urgency. As a wise man once said, the more trouble you have in your life, the more the I Ching can help!
In the most simple terms:
The I Ching is a book. To use it, you write down a question, from your life. Then you take three coins and toss them six times, and write down the results in a specific way. Then you look up the result in your book. This tells you the answer to your question. You write it down, figure out what it means, and use what you learned to help deal with your situation.
But it's so much more than that. Here's a very beautiful take on what the I Ching represents, from Dr. Stephen Karcher:
"The I Ching is a book, a technique for using the book, and a spiritual practice or Way that has been treasured in the East for thousands of years as a guide to navigating the voyage of life. I Ching means Change, which points at its central focus. it suggests both destabilizing change, a time of troubles when all the structures we usually rely on melt down, and a way to deal with that change through a transformation of what the old Chinese sages called our heart-mind, a transformation that dissolves fixed patterns of thought and inspires imaginative mobility..
Change is a living stream of images or symbols that unfold the Way or Dao. At a critical point in the historical evolution of this great tradition, during the early Han Dynasty (c.200 bce-200 ce), a series of Confucian scholar-bureaucrats codified and organized the symbols of Change. They turned the tradition into moral and social philosophy by redefining yin and yang, the two powers that were the basis of the old cosmology, as good and evil and making them literally gender specific: Yang became morally good and gender male, and Yin became morally evil and gender female. They then enshrined these definitions in the texts of Change, creating new interpretations of all the lines and hexagrams that became part of the great civil service examinations. It is this version of the I Ching that most of us encountered as we first began to explore the tradition."
RICHARD WILHELM
Wilhelm is, quite simply, the original. His is the first complete translation out of Chinese, designed for western readers. Wilhelm was a missionary who lived in China before World War I, and studied for many years with the best I Ching scholars he could find there. He worked in German, and his son translated his work into English over the next 30 years, after his death.
Wilhelm's translation reflects many of the Confucian values, but these are pretty easily stepped over by understanding and making allowances for his terminology. His translation holds a very true essence of the Chinese conception of each symbol and hexagram. Wilhelm's was the translation I started with, and the one I return to when I want to know what the Chinese of the 1800's were actually thinking. Wilhelm's work is beautiful and subtle and you could read it for years and still learn more. The forward to his book was written by Carl Jung, and I recommend reading that as well.
STEPHEN KARCHER
Dr. Karcher is a modern master of symbol and archetype, and he also evokes the myth and ritual world of Old China, giving us a sense of the I Ching before it was turned into moral philosophy. For example, his translation is free of the irritating Chinese habit of calling weak things female and strong things male. He also includes references to archetypal psychology, chaos and complexity theory to illuminate how the I Ching fits into the universal nature of the symbols, ideas and practices used by the ancient sages and other symbolic cultures before and since.
I find Karcher's interpretation of the change lines of the hexagrams particularly good, and I prefer these to Wilhelm's. Karcher is now my first go-to translation, and Wilhelm my second. I go to Karcher when I want to know how the I Ching fits into world symbolism and psychology and mysticism, and what the ancient chinese were most likely intending.
