The I Ching has two histories. One is the story Chinese tradition tells, full of sages and legendary kings. The other is what historians piece together from old texts, inscriptions and archaeology. They don't clash on everything, but they aren't the same story, and it helps to keep them apart.
The story tradition tells
Tradition gives the book four authors, one for each layer:
- Fu Xi, a mythic sage from the earliest times, studied the sky, the earth, the tracks of animals and his own body, and from them drew the eight trigrams.
- King Wen, father of the first Zhou king, is said to have combined the trigrams into 64 hexagrams and written a text for each. The story goes that he did it while held prisoner by the last Shang king, around the eleventh century BCE.
- The Duke of Zhou, his son, is credited with the texts of the six lines.
- Confucius, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, is said to have written the commentaries known as the Ten Wings. A well-known anecdote says he read the book so often that the leather straps binding its bamboo strips wore through three times. His link to the book has its own entry: Confucius and the Yijing.
This account gave the I Ching enormous prestige: it was the work of the sages who founded Chinese civilization. That's why we write "tradition says" rather than "this is what happened." There's no way to know, for instance, whether Fu Xi ever existed.
What scholars say
Historians see the book as layered, the work of many hands over several centuries.
- The core, the hexagrams with their texts and the texts of each line, is the Zhouyi. Most specialists place it in the Western Zhou dynasty (roughly 1045 to 771 BCE), and many date it toward the end of that period. It began as a divination manual. Its phrases speak of sacrifices, journeys, battles, marriages and harvests: the world of a Bronze Age court.
- Before that, under the Shang, divination used fire. Diviners heated bones and turtle shells and read the cracks. The I Ching works differently, with numbers drawn from yarrow stalks (see The Yarrow Stalk Method). Strings of numbers found on bones and bronzes of the period are read by some scholars as forerunners of the hexagrams.
- The commentaries, the Ten Wings, came much later. They were written between the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) and the early Han dynasty. Few scholars today think Confucius wrote them, though they carry ideas from the school that grew up around him.
- Under the Han, in the second century BCE, the book became one of the official classics that officials studied. From then on it was called 易經, the "Classic" of Changes, and not just 周易.
Mawangdui: an I Ching on silk
In 1973, at Mawangdui near Changsha in Hunan province, archaeologists excavated the tombs of a Han noble family. One of them, sealed in 168 BCE, held texts written on silk, among them a copy of the I Ching. At the time, it was the oldest known.
The manuscript has the same 64 hexagrams, but in an order different from the King Wen sequence, with several names written in other characters and with commentaries that never made it into the version handed down to us. It showed that more than one version of the book was circulating in Han times. Later finds, such as the Warring States bamboo strips held by the Shanghai Museum, back this up: the text we read is one of the forms the book took, the one that won out.
Two thousand years of readers
Generation after generation, commentators read the book in different ways. Some looked in it for numbers and links to the cosmos. Others, like Wang Bi in the third century, saw mainly moral and political lessons. In the Song dynasty, Zhu Xi reminded readers that the book was born for divination, and he set out rules for reading changing lines that are still used today; you'll find them in Moving Lines. Shao Yong, the thinker credited with Plum Blossom numerology, lived in the same era.
The journey west
Jesuit missionaries carried word of the book to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The philosopher Leibniz, who was working on binary arithmetic, was delighted to see that solid and broken lines could be read as ones and zeros. Full translations into European languages followed in the nineteenth century, and in 1924 came Richard Wilhelm's German version, which reached English in 1950 with a foreword by the psychologist Carl Jung. Since then the I Ching has been read all over the world, both as wisdom literature and as a tool for reflection.