Rethinking Tourism Through the Book of Changes: Toward an Alternative Epistemology of Change

This paper advances an alternative epistemological foundation for tourism grounded in the Book of Changes, an Eastern philosophical system centered on patterned transformation. Drawing on its core principles of change, constancy, and simplicity, the study reconceptualizes tourism not merely as mobility, consumption, or economic exchange, but as a relational process of becoming within a dynamic universe. It develops a Daoic Epistemology of Tourism structured across three interdependent levels, ontology, epistemology, and praxis, articulated through the triadic integration of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. Central constructs including pattern literacy, adaptive harmony, inner transformation, and Daoic equilibrium are introduced to extend contemporary debates on transformative tourism, sustainability, and technologically mediated travel. Rather than treating transformation as a measurable outcome, the framework positions change as the condition through which experience and knowledge emerge. By shifting tourism analysis from instrumental management to relational cognition, this study redefines tourism as a structured encounter with change in which individuals recalibrate their relationship with self, world, and time.