Here’s a short piece (hat tip Western Confucian) about a Korean intellectual, Mun Yong-jik, who denigrates the I Ching:

He has now
turned his passion toward the Book of Changes,” or the I Ching, an
ancient Chinese divination manual and book of wisdom. He concluded
after studying it for seven years that “it is not a great philosophy
book but a mere fortune-telling book.” That would cause a great
backlash against classical scholars of the book, but he said, “Scholars
have attached significance to a mere fortune-telling book.”

    This reminds me of the dismissive attitude of many Western philosophers toward Chinese philosophy in general: if it is not expressed in the form of the ancient Greeks, then it is not really philosophy (notice how few departments of philosophy in US colleges and universities take Chinese philosophy seriously).  You know, rather like a "mere fortune-telling book."

     But the I Ching is more than that: it captures the cosmology of ancient China as well, and perhaps better than, any other text.  People will disagree about the efficacy of the divinations, but as a source for the fundamental assumptions of pre-Qin Chinese thinking, it is superb.  Here’s Frederick Mote (p. 12):

We must therefore take the Book of Changes quite seriously as one of the earliest crystallizations of the Chinese mind (or of the human mind in its universal characteristics).  We should try to understand what about it has so unfailingly fascinated thinking Chinese from ancient times onward, and on that score regard it as one touchstone of what is peculiarly Chinese.  As a historical document its greatest significance to us is perhaps that it conveys the earliest awareness of a world view that was later to become much more complete and explicit.  The Chinese conception of the world has scarcely ever been recognized by Westerners and still is not properly noted, much less borne in mind, in most of the writings on China.

     And its divinations can be very enlightening!