The I Ching (Wade-Giles), or “Yì Jing” (Pinyin); also called “Book of Changes” or “Classic of Changes” is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts.[1] The book is a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. The text describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is intrinsic to ancient Chinese cultural beliefs. The cosmology centres on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change (see Philosophy, below). In Western cultures and modern East Asia, the I Ching is sometimes regarded as a system of divination. The classic consists of a series of symbols, rules for manipulating these symbols, poems, and commentary.
Traditionally it was believed that the principles of the I Ching originated with the mythical Fu Xi (?? Fú Xi). In this respect he is seen as an early culture hero, one of the earliest legendary rulers of China (traditional dates 2800 BCE-2737 BCE), reputed to have had the 8 trigrams (?? ba gùa) revealed to him supernaturally. By the time of the legendary Yu (? Yu) 2194 BCE–2149 BCE, the trigrams had supposedly been developed into 64 hexagrams (???? lìu shí sì gùa), which were recorded in the scripture Lian Shan («??» Lián Shan; also called Lian Shan Yi). Lian Shan, meaning “continuous mountains” in Chinese, begins with the hexagram Bound (? gèn), which depicts a mountain (¦¦|) mounting on another and is believed to be the origin of the scripture's name.
After the traditionally recorded Xia Dynasty was overthrown by the Shang Dynasty, the hexagrams are said to have been re-deduced to form Gui Cang («??» Gui Cáng; also called Gui Cang Yi), and the hexagram Field (? kun) became the first hexagram. Gui Cang may be literally translated into “return and be contained”, which refers to earth as the first hexagram itself indicates. At the time of Shang's last king, Zhou Wang, King Wen of Zhou is said to have deduced the hexagram and discovered that the hexagrams beginning with Force (? qián) revealed the rise of Zhou. He then gave each hexagram a description regarding its own nature, thus Gua Ci (?? guà cí, “Explanation of Hexagrams”).
When King Wu of Zhou, son of King Wen, toppled the Shang Dynasty, his brother Zhou Gong Dan is said to have created Yao Ci (?? yáo cí, “Explanation of Horizontal Lines”) to clarify the significance of each horizontal line in each hexagram. It was not until then that the whole context of I Ching was understood. Its philosophy heavily influenced the literature and government administration of the Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE).
Later, during the time of Spring and Autumn (722 BCE - 481 BCE), Confucius is traditionally said to have written the Shi Yi (?? shí yì, “Ten Wings”), a group of commentaries on the I Ching. By the time of Han Wu Di (??? Hàn Wu Dì) of the Western Han Dynasty (circa 200 BCE), Shi Yi was often called Yi Zhuan (?? yì zhùan, “Commentary on the I Ching”), and together with the I Ching they composed Zhou Yi (?? zhou yì, “Changes of Zhou”). All later texts about Zhou Yi were explanations only, due to the classic's deep meaning.
In the past 50 years a “Modernist” history of the I Ching has been emerging, based on context criticism and research into Shang and Zhou dynasty oracle bones, as well as Zhou bronze inscriptions and other sources (see below). These reconstructions are dealt with in a growing number of books, such as The Mandate of Heaven: Hidden History in the I Ching, by S. J. Marshall, and Richard Rutt's Zhouyi: The Book of Changes, (see References, below).
Scholarly works dealing with the new view of the Book of Changes include doctoral dissertations by Richard Kunst and Edward Shaughnessy and a 2008 study by Richard J. Smith. These and other scholars have been helped immensely by the discovery, in the 1970s, by Chinese archaeologists, of intact Han dynasty era tombs in Mawangdui near Changsha, Hunan province. One of the tombs contained more or less complete 2nd century BC texts of the I Ching, the Dao De Jing and other works, which are mostly similar yet in some ways diverge significantly from the “received”, or traditional, texts preserved historically.
The tomb texts include additional commentaries on the I Ching, previously unknown, and apparently attributed to Confucius. All of the Mawangdui texts are many centuries older than the earliest known attestations of the texts in question. When talking about the evolution of the Book of Changes, therefore, the Modernists contend that it is important to distinguish between the traditional history assigned to texts such as the I Ching (felt to be anachronistic by the Modernists), assignations in commentaries which have themselves been canonized over the centuries along with their subjects, and the more recent scholarly history aided by modern linguistic textual criticism and archaeology.
Many hold that these perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but, for instance, many Modernist scholars doubt the actual existence of Fuxi, or think Confucius had nothing to do with the Book of Changes, and contend that the hexagrams came before the trigrams. Modern scholarship comparing poetic usage and formulaic phrasing in this book with that in ancient bronze inscriptions has shown that the text cannot be attributed to King Wen or Zhou Gong, and that it likely was not compiled until the late Western Zhou, perhaps ca. the late 9th century BC.
Rather than being the work of one or several legendary or historical figures, the core divinatory text is now thought to be an accretion of Western Zhou divinatory concepts. As for the Shi Yi commentaries traditionally attributed to Confucius, scholars from the time of the 11th century A.D. scholar Ouyang Xiu onward have doubted this, based on textual analysis, and modern scholars date most of them to the late Warring States period (403/475 BC-256/221 BC), with some sections perhaps being as late as the Western Han period (206 BC-220 AD).
The text of the I Ching is a set of predictions represented by a set of 64 abstract line arrangements called hexagrams (? guà). Each hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines (? yáo), where each line is either Yang (an unbroken, or solid line), or Yin (broken, an open line with a gap in the center). With six such lines stacked from bottom to top there are 26 or 64 possible combinations, and thus 64 hexagrams represented.
The hexagram diagram is conceptually subdivided into two three-line arrangements called trigrams (? guà). There are 23, hence 8, possible trigrams. The traditional view was that the hexagrams were a later development and resulted from combining the two trigrams. However, in the earliest relevant archaeological evidence, groups of numerical symbols on many Western Zhou bronzes and a very few Shang oracle bones, such groups already usually appear in sets of six. A few have been found in sets of three numbers, but these are somewhat later. Note also that these numerical sets greatly predate the groups of broken and unbroken lines, leading modern scholars to doubt the mythical early attributions of the hexagram system (see, e.g., Shaugnessy 1993).
Each hexagram represents a description of a state or process. When a hexagram is cast using one of the traditional processes of divination with I Ching, each of the yin or yang lines will be indicated as either moving (that is, changing), or fixed (that is, unchanging). Moving (also sometimes called “old”, or “unstable”) lines will change to their opposites, that is “young” lines of the other type -- old yang becoming young yin, and old yin becoming young yang.
The oldest method for casting the hexagrams, using yarrow stalks, is a biased random number generator, so the possible answers are not equiprobable. While the probability of getting either yin or yang is equal, the probability of getting old yang is three times greater than old yin. The yarrow stalk method was gradually replaced during the Han Dynasty by the three coins method.
Some people thing that using this method, the imbalance in generating old yin and old yang was eliminated. That is not true, as the three coins are different, which gives eight possible results; only one of them is all coins facing up and one of them is all coins facing down (old yang, old yin). The other six possible results are equally divided into new yang and new yin. Anyhow, there is no theoretical basis for indicating what should be the optimal probability basis of the old lines versus the young lines. Of course, the whole idea behind this system of divination is that the oracle will select the appropriate answer anyway, regardless of the probabilities.
There have been several arrangements of the trigrams and hexagrams over the ages. The ba gùa is a circular arrangement of the trigrams, traditionally printed on a mirror, or disk. According to legend, Fu Hsi found the ba gùa on the scales of a tortoise's back. They function rather like a magic square, with the four axes summing to the same value (e.g., using 0 and 1 to represent yin and yang, 000 + 111 = 111, 101 + 010 = 111, etc.).
The King Wen sequence is the traditional (i.e. “classical”) sequence of the hexagrams used in most contemporary editions of the book. The King Wen sequence was explained for the first time in STEDT Monograph #5, where it is shown to contain within it a demonstration of advanced mathematical knowledge.
The solid line represents yang, the creative principle. The open line represents yin, the receptive principle. These principles are also represented in a common circular symbol (?), known as taijitu (???), but more commonly known in the west as the yin-yang (??) diagram, expressing the idea of complementarity of changes: when Yang is at top, Yin is increasing, and the reverse.
In the following lists, the trigrams and hexagrams are represented using a common textual convention, horizontally from left-to-right, using '|' for yang and '¦' for yin, rather than the traditional bottom-to-top. In a more modern usage, the numbers 0 and 1 can also be used to represent yin and yang, being read left-to-right.
There are eight possible trigrams (?? baguà): Trigram Figure Binary Value Name Translation: