I Ching

The I Ching or Yijing (Chinese: 易經 Mandarin pronunciation:[î tɕíŋ] ^ⓘ), usually translated Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. The I Ching was originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BCE). Over the course of the Warring States and early imperial periods (500–200 BCE), it transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings. After becoming part of the Chinese Five Classics in the 2nd century BCE, the I Ching was the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East and was the subject of scholarly commentary. Between the 18th and 20th centuries, it took on an influential role in Western understanding of East Asian philosophical thought.

As a divination text, the I Ching is used for a Chinese form of cleromancy known as I Ching divination in which bundles of yarrow stalks are manipulated to produce sets of six apparently random numbers ranging from 6 to 9. Each of the 64 possible sets corresponds to a hexagram, which can be looked up in the I Ching. The hexagrams are arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching has been discussed and debated over the centuries. Many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision-making, as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wuxing.

The core of the I Ching is a divination text from the Western Zhou dynasty called the Changes of Zhou (Chinese: 周易; pinyin: Zhōu yì). Modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries BCE for the assembly of the text in approximately its current form. Based on a comparison of the language of the Zhou yi with dated bronze inscriptions, the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy dated its compilation in its current form to the last quarter of the 9th century BCE, during the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou (r. c. 827 – 782 BCE). A copy of the text in the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo and wooden slips discovered in 1994 shows that the Zhou yi was used throughout all levels of Chinese society in its current form by 300 BCE, but still contained small variations as late as the Warring States period (c. 475 – 221 BCE). It is possible that other divination systems existed at this time; the Rites of Zhou name two other such systems, the Lianshan [zh] and the Guicang.

The name Zhou yi literally means the 'changes' (易; yì) of the Zhou dynasty. The 'changes' involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination. Feng Youlan proposed that the word for 'changes' originally meant 'easy', as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, but there is little evidence for this. There is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for 'changes' as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. Modern sinologists believe the character to be derived either from an image of the sun emerging from clouds, or from the content of a vessel being changed into another.

The Zhou yi was traditionally ascribed to the Zhou cultural heroes King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou, and was also associated with the legendary world ruler Fuxi. Another tradition about the I Ching was that most of it was written by Tang of Shang. According to the canonical Great Commentary, Fuxi observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams (八卦; bāguà), "in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things". The Zhou yi itself does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its own origins. The Rites of Zhou, however, also claims that the hexagrams of the Zhou yi were derived from an initial set of eight trigrams. During the Han dynasty there were various opinions about the historical relationship between the trigrams and the hexagrams. Eventually, a consensus formed around 2nd-century AD scholar Ma Rong's attribution of the text to the joint work of Fuxi, King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius, but this traditional attribution is no longer generally accepted.

The basic unit of the Zhou yi is the hexagram (卦 guà), a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines (爻 yáo). Each line is either broken or unbroken. The received text of the Zhou yi contains all 64 possible hexagrams, along with the hexagram's name (卦名 guàmíng), a short hexagram statement (彖 tuàn), and six line statements (爻辭 yáocí). The statements were used to determine the results of divination, but the reasons for having two different methods of reading the hexagram are not known, and it is not known why hexagram statements would be read over line statements or vice versa.

The book opens with the first hexagram statement, yuán hēng lì zhēn (元亨利貞). These four words are often repeated in the hexagram statements and were already considered an important part of I Ching interpretation in the 6th century BCE. Edward Shaughnessy describes this statement as affirming an "initial receipt" of an offering, "beneficial" for further "divining". The word zhēn (貞, ancient form ) was also used for the verb 'to divine' in the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, which preceded the Zhou. It also carried meanings of being or making upright or correct, and was defined by the Eastern Han scholar Zheng Xuan as "to enquire into the correctness" of a proposed activity.

The names of the hexagrams are usually words that appear in their respective line statements, but in five cases (2, 9, 26, 61, and 63) an unrelated character of unclear purpose appears. The hexagram names could have been chosen arbitrarily from the line statements, but it is also possible that the line statements were derived from the hexagram names. The line statements, which make up most of the book, are exceedingly cryptic. Each line begins with a word indicating the line number, "base, 2, 3, 4, 5, top", and either the number 6 for a broken line, or the number 9 for a whole line. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have an extra line statement, named yong. Following the line number, the line statements may make oracular or prognostic statements. Some line statements also contain poetry or references to historical events.