Tao

Tao — "the Way" — is the single law running through all the transformations the Book of Changes describes. Wilhelm names it explicitly in the commentary on THE CREATIVE, where success lies in

apprehending and giving actuality to the way of the universe [Tao], which, as a law running through end and beginning, brings about all phenomena in time.

In his Introduction Wilhelm sums up the whole book's premise in the same term: "Change is subject to the universal law, the tao — the course of things, the principle of the one in the many." The sixty-four hexagrams are so many faces of this one Way: the ceaseless interplay of the firm and the yielding, of the Creative and the Receptive, unfolding through time. To live well, in this view, is to align oneself with the Tao — to read where the current of things is moving and to move with it.