The process of consultation also evolved from the tortoise shells, which required an expert to perform and interpret, to the system of coins or yarrow stalks that anyone could practice and that has been in use ever since. The book became known as the Zhou Yi (Zhou Changes). Sometime in the Zhou dynasty-the current guess is around 800 BCE-the 64 hexagrams were named, and a written text was established, based on the oral traditions. Where the hexagrams came from, or how they were interpreted, is completely unknown. Many of these “oracle bones”-hundreds of thousands of them have been unearthed-have complete hexagrams or the numbers assigned to hexagrams incised on them. In the Shang dynasty (which began circa 1600 BCE) or possibly even earlier, fortune-telling diviners would apply heat to tortoise shells or the scapulae of oxen and interpret the cracks that were produced. The archaeological and historical version of this narrative is far murkier.
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He wrote brief oracles for each that have since been known as the “Judgments.” His son, the Duke of Zhou, a poet, added gnomic interpretations for the individual lines of each hexagram, known simply as the “Lines.” It was said that, five hundred years later, Confucius himself wrote ethical commentaries explicating each hexagram, which are called the “Ten Wings” (“wing,” that is, in the architectural sense).
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Around the year 1050 BCE, according to the tradition, Emperor Wen, founder of the Zhou dynasty, doubled the trigrams to hexagrams (six-lined figures), numbered and arranged all of the possible combinations-there are 64-and gave them names. The trigrams themselves represented, respectively, heaven, a lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, a mountain, and earth (see illustration below).įrom these building blocks of the cosmos, Fu Xi devolved all aspects of civilization-kingship, marriage, writing, navigation, agriculture-all of which he taught to his human descendants. He discovered that everything could be reduced to eight trigrams, each composed of three stacked solid or broken lines, reflecting the yin and yang, the duality that drives the universe. In the mythological version, the culture hero Fu Xi, a dragon or a snake with a human face, studied the patterns of nature in the sky and on the earth: the markings on birds, rocks, and animals, the movement of clouds, the arrangement of the stars. The origin of the text is, as might be expected, obscure. It is the center of a vast whirlwind of writings and practices, but is itself a void, or perhaps a continually shifting cloud, for most of the crucial words of the I Ching have no fixed meaning. With its seeming infinitude of applications and interpretations, there has never been a book quite like it anywhere. In the West, it has been known for over three hundred years and, since the 1950s, is surely the most popularly recognized Chinese book. In China and in East Asia, it has been by far the most consulted of all books, in the belief that it can explain everything. It was an organizing principle or authoritative proof for literary and arts criticism, cartography, medicine, and many of the sciences, and it generated endless Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and, later, even Christian commentaries, and competing schools of thought within those traditions.
![the i ching the i ching](https://www.dpspbs.com/pictures/002171.jpg)
#The i ching manual#
The I Ching has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe, a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state.