The I Ching, the Book of Changes: history of a divinatory classic
From the Zhou dynasty Zhouyi to the Ten Wings attributed to Confucius, from the Mawangdui manuscript to Leibniz: the I Ching and its sixty-four hexagrams.
Few texts have crossed three thousand years of history like the I Ching, or Yijing, the «Classic of Changes». Born as a manual for interpreting the responses of a divinatory practice, it became one of the five classics of Confucianism, a philosophical text commented on by generations of scholars and, in the modern age, a book read all over the world. Its history is a long layering of texts, interpretations and uses, which should be carefully distinguished.
The Zhouyi and the sixty-four hexagrams
The oldest core of the book is the Zhouyi, the «Changes of Zhou», probably composed during the Western Zhou dynasty, around the ninth century BC, although the exact date remains debated. It consists of sixty-four hexagrams, figures of six stacked lines, each either solid or broken. Every hexagram has a name, a brief judgement and a phrase for each of its six lines.
Tradition attributed the creation of the eight trigrams to the mythical ruler Fuxi and their combination into sixty-four hexagrams to King Wen of Zhou. These are legendary attributions that express the prestige of the text more than its actual history. The judgements, short and often enigmatic, speak of journeys, sacrifices, wars, marriages and harvests.
The Ten Wings and the philosophical turn
Between the Warring States period and the beginning of the Han dynasty, a series of commentaries known as the Ten Wings was added to the Zhouyi. Tradition attributed them to Confucius, but modern scholars regard them as the work of several later authors. With the Ten Wings, and especially the Great Commentary, the book became a reflection on change, on yin and yang and on the order of the cosmos.
In 136 BC, under Emperor Wu of Han, the Book of Changes was included among the official classics. In the third century AD the young philosopher Wang Bi wrote a commentary that favoured its moral and philosophical meaning over numerical calculation, shaping how it was read for many centuries. In the Song period, the philosopher Zhu Xi instead stressed the divinatory function of the book again, recalling that it had been created for consultation.
Manuscripts, stalks and Western readers
Divination with the Zhouyi was traditionally performed with fifty yarrow stalks, handled according to a procedure described in the Great Commentary; later the use of coins also spread. The archaeological discovery of a silk manuscript at Mawangdui, in a tomb sealed in 168 BC, revealed an order of hexagrams different from the traditional one.
In Europe the text became known thanks to the Jesuits. The missionary Joachim Bouvet sent a diagram of it to Leibniz, who in 1703 recognised in it a resemblance to his binary system. In 1924 the sinologist Richard Wilhelm published a German translation that was to be widely read in the twentieth century and was in turn translated into English and other European languages.
The Book of Changes is therefore many things at once: a Bronze Age divination manual, a classic of Chinese philosophy and an object of curiosity for the modern West. To read its history is to follow the way each age has found in those sixty-four figures a key for thinking about change.