I Ching

The I Ching (Mandarin Pinyin Yijing, 易經 — Classic of Changes) is one of the deepest layered texts in any tradition. Its base layer is bronze-age oracular: short cryptic sayings associated with diagrams of broken and unbroken lines, used for divination by the early Zhou kings (1046–256 BCE) and probably earlier. Its later layers — the Ten Wings (十翼, Shíyì), composed across several centuries from roughly the 4th c. BCE forward — turn the divinatory base into a sustained philosophical-cosmological treatise. The composite text has been continuously read, commented on, and used for divination for the past two and a half millennia.

The hexagrams

The structuring device is the hexagram (gua) — a figure of six horizontal lines, each line either solid (— yang) or broken (- - yin). With six lines and two possible values per line, there are 2⁶ = 64 hexagrams. Each is named, ordered, and associated with:

• A judgment (tuàn) — a brief gnomic statement summarizing the hexagram.
• An image (xiàng) — a one-line metaphor connecting the figure to a natural pattern.
• Line statements — six brief gnomic sayings, one per line, that activate when that specific line is drawn as a changing line in divination.

The 64 hexagrams are conventionally read as combinations of eight three-line trigrams (bagua), each named for a natural pattern: Heaven, Earth, Water, Fire, Mountain, Lake, Wind, Thunder. The trigrams in turn carry rich associations across body parts, seasons, family roles, directions, and elements.

The Ten Wings

The Ten Wings (probably composed between the 4th c. BCE and the early Han, traditionally attributed to Confucius and his school) added several layers of philosophical commentary that transformed the divinatory base into a major cosmological treatise. The most important of these:

• The Tuanzhuan (Commentary on the Judgments) — explanations of each hexagram’s basic statement.
• The Xiangzhuan (Commentary on the Images) — explanations of each hexagram’s image and of each line’s image.
• The Xicizhuan (Great Treatise or Great Commentary) — the most philosophically ambitious of the wings; develops a sustained cosmology of change, yin and yang, the patterning of nature and human life. In change there is the Great Ultimate, which generates the Two Modes [yin and yang]. The Two Modes generate the Four Forms; the Four Forms generate the Eight Trigrams.
• The Shuogua (Discussion of the Trigrams) — develops the trigram associations.

The Xicizhuan in particular has been the philosophical heart of the text in subsequent reception; its account of change as the structure of reality has shaped East Asian thought decisively.

Use in divination

The traditional divinatory method uses fifty yarrow stalks (or, in a simplified later version, three coins thrown six times). The procedure produces a six-line hexagram with possibly some changing lines — lines marked as old yin or old yang, which transform into their opposites and produce a second hexagram. The consulter reads the primary hexagram for the present situation, the changing line statements for the dynamic forces in it, and the secondary hexagram for the direction of change.

The practice is not, in the tradition’s understanding, fortune-telling in a deterministic sense. The text consistently emphasizes that the hexagrams describe the qualities and tendencies of the present moment; the agent is responsible for how to act within them. Consulting the I Ching well is itself a contemplative practice — a discipline of patient attention to the situation one is actually in.

Reception in the West

The text reached the West through several waves of translation. The most influential English-speaking reception was through the Wilhelm-Baynes translation (1950) — Richard Wilhelm’s German translation of 1923, rendered into English by Cary Baynes with a foreword by Carl Jung. Jung’s foreword and his sustained engagement with the I Ching (he developed the concept of synchronicity in part to think about it) introduced the text to a generation of Western readers and brought it into the depth-psychological conversation. Wilhelm-Baynes is now criticized for various interpretive choices but remains widely read.

Other notable translations: John Blofeld (1965); Richard John Lynn (translating the standard Wang Bi commentary, Columbia 1994); Edward Shaughnessy (the Mawangdui silk-text version, 1996); John Minford (Viking 2014, with extensive commentary); Stephen Karcher (multiple volumes, oriented to divinatory use).

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Parallels: [[traditional-chinese-medicine]]
• Member of: [[book]]
• Part of: [[daoism]] · [[confucianism]]

Sources

1. The I Ching, or Book of Changes. Trans. Richard Wilhelm & Cary F. Baynes; foreword by Carl Jung. Princeton/Bollingen, 1950 (rev. 1967). Source class: primary text / classic English translation.
2. The Classic of Changes. Trans. Richard John Lynn. Columbia, 1994. Source class: primary text / scholarly translation of the Wang Bi commentary.
3. The I Ching: A Biography. Richard J. Smith. Princeton, 2012. Source class: book / cultural history.
4. Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing. Richard J. Smith. University of Virginia Press, 2008. Source class: book / scholarly study.
5. Iulian K. Shchutskii. Researches on the I Ching. Princeton, 1979. Source class: book / classic scholarly study.

Lenses still to grow

• The Mawangdui silk text of the I Ching (1973 excavation) — the oldest extant version, with several differences from the received text.
• Wang Bi’s commentary (3rd c. CE) — the most influential Daoist-philosophical reading.
• The Song neo-Confucian reception — Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi; the commentary tradition that became the imperial-examination orthodoxy.
• The Yijing in modern Chinese intellectual history — and the question of its reform / scientization in the 20th c.
• Jung and synchronicity — the depth-psychological reception in detail.