User:Shii/Yijing

The divination text: Zhou yi
The text of the I Ching has its origins in a Western Zhou divination text called the Changes of Zhou or Zhou yi. The Zhou yi, probably grounded in even older Shang dynasty analysis of oracle bones, contains references to events as early as 1070 BC, and had developed into something like its current form by 800 BC. Recently discovered bamboo and wooden slips show that the Zhou yi still contained variations as late as the Spring and Autumn period. It is possible that other divination systems existed at this time; the Rites of Zhou name two such systems, the Lianshan and the Guizang.

Name and origins
The name Zhou yi means a book of "changes" used during the Zhou dynasty. Medieval commentaries proposed that the word for "changes" could also mean "easy", as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, but there is no evidence for this. There is also a folk etymology that sees the character for "changes" as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. In fact, the character is derived from an image of the sun emerging from clouds.

The Zhou yi is attributed to the legendary world ruler Fu Xi. According to the canonical Great Commentary, Fu Xi, who lived around 2800 BC, observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams, "in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things." The Zhou yi does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its own origins. In later eras, the Great Commentary's story developed into a theory that attributed the text to the joint work of Fu Xi, King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius.

Structure
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, translated by James Legge as "originating and penetrating, advantageous and firm," are often repeated in the hexagram statements and were already considered an important part of I Ching interpretation in the 6th century BC.

The names of the hexagrams, which might be deemed "tags", are usually words that appears in their respective line statements, but in five cases (2, 9, 26, 61, and 63) an unrelated character of unclear purpose. The names were most likely picked out of the line statements arbitrarily. 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 fall into the categories of oracle, indication, prognostic or observation; each statement usually has two or three of these elements, and sometimes one or none.

Usage
The earliest use of the Zhuo yi was to perform divination with the stalks of the yarrow plant, but it is not known how this divination was originally carried out, or how specific lines were chosen. Some sort of numerology was involved, with 6 and 8 designating broken lines, and 7 and 9 designating solid lines. The Great Commentary contains a late classic description of a process where various numerological operations are performed on a bundle of 50 stalks, leaving remainders of 6 to 9. In the modern period, Gao Heng described how this might be accomplished in greater detail.

The Zuo Zhuan and Guoyu contain the oldest descriptions of divination using the Zhou yi. The two histories, considered generally reliable today, describe more than twenty successful divinations conducted by professional soothsayers for royal families between 671 BC and 487 BC. The method of divination is not explained, and none of the stories employ predetermined commentaries, patterns, or interpretations. Only the hexagrams and line statements are used. The authority of the Zhuo yi was also cited for rhetorical purposes, without relation to any stated divination.

In the Zuo Zhuan stories, individual lines of hexagrams are denoted by using the genitive particle zhi, followed by the name of another hexagram where that specific line had another form. In later years, the word zhi was interpreted as a verb meaning "moving to", an apparent indication that hexagrams could be transformed into other hexagrams. However, there are no instances of "changeable lines" in the Zuo Zhuan. In all 12 out of 12 line divinations quoted, the original hexagrams are used to produce the oracle.

The classic: I Ching
In 136 BC, Emperor Wu of Han named the Zhou yi "the first among the classics", dubbing it the Classic of Changes or I Ching. Emperor Wu's placement of the I Ching among the Four Books and Five Classics was informed by a broad span of cultural influences that included Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, yin-yang cosmology, and Wu Xing physical theory. The canonized I Ching became the standard text for over two thousand years, until alternate version of the Zhou yi were found by archaeologists in the 20th century.

Ten Wings
Part of the canonization of the Zhou yi bound it to a set of ten commentaries called the Ten Wings. The Ten Wings are of a much later provenance than the Zhou yi, and are the production of a different society. The Zhou yi was written in Early Old Chinese, while the Ten Wings were written in a predecessor to Middle Chinese. Regardless of their historical relation to the text, the philosophical depth of the Ten Wings made the I Ching a perfect fit to Han period Confucian scholarship.

Arguably the most important of the Ten Wings is the Great Commentary (Dazhuan), which dates to roughly 300 BC. The Great Commentary describes the I Ching as a microcosm of the universe and a symbolic description of the processes of change. By partaking in the spiritual experience of the I Ching, the Great Commentary states, the individual can understand the deeper patterns of the universe. The other Wings provide different perspectives on essentially the same viewpoint, giving ancient, cosmic authority to the I Ching.

The Ten Wings are attributed to Confucius. While there is little evidence for this, the association of the I Ching with Confucius bolstered interest in the text throughout the Han dynasty. The I Ching was not included in the burning of the Confucian classics, and textual evidence strongly suggests that Confucius did not consider the Zhou yi a "classic". An ancient commentary on the Zhou yi found at Mawangdui portrays Confucius as endorsing it as a source of wisdom first and an imperfect divination text second.

Hexagrams
In the canonical I Ching, the hexagrams are arranged in an order dubbed the King Wen sequence after King Wen of Zhou, who founded the Zhou dynasty and supposedly reformed the method of interpretation. The sequence generally pair hexagrams with their upside-down equivalents, although in eight cases hexagrams are paired with their inversion. Another order, found at Mawangdui in 1973, arranges the hexagrams into eight groups sharing the same upper trigram. Whichever of these arrangements is older, it is not evident that the order of the hexagrams was of interest to the original authors of the Zhou yi. The assignment of numbers, binary or decimal, to specific hexagrams is a modern invention.

The following table numbers the hexagrams in King Wen order.

Han and Six Dynasties
During the Han dynasty, I Ching interpretation divided into two schools, originating in a dispute over minor differences between older and newer editions of the received text. New Text criticism, more egalitarian and eclectic, sought to find symbolic and numerological parallels between the natural world and the hexagrams. Their commentaries provided the basis of the School of Images and Numbers. Old Text criticism, more scholarly and hierarchical, focused on the moral content of the text, providing the basis for the School of Meanings and Principles. The New Text scholars freely integrated non-canonical commentaries into their work, as well as propagating alternate systems of divination such as the Taixuanjing. Most of this early commentary, such as the image and number work of Jing Fang, Yu Fan and Xun Shuang, is no longer extant.

With the fall of the Han, I Ching scholarship was no longer organized into systematic schools. The most influential writer of this period was Wang Bi, who integrated the philosophy of the Ten Wings directly into the central text of the I Ching, creating such a persuasive narrative that Han commentators were no longer considered significant. A century later Han Kangbo added commentaries on the Ten Wings to Wang Bi's book, creating a text called the Zhouyi zhu. The principal rival interpretation was a practical text on divination by the soothsayer Guan Lu.

Tang and Song dynasties
At the beginning of the Tang dynasty, Kong Yingda was tasked with creating a canonical edition of the I Ching. Choosing the third-century Zhouyi zhu as the official commentary, he added to it a subcommentary drawing out the subtler levels of the Han dynasty explanations. The resulting work, the Zhouyi zhengi, became the standard edition of the I Ching through the Song dynasty. By the 11th century, the I Ching was being read as a work of intricate philosophy, as a jumping-off point for examining great metaphysical questions and ethical issues. Cheng Yi, patriarch of the Neo-Confucian Cheng-Zhu school, read the I Ching as a guide to moral perfection.

Neo-Confucian
Zhu Xi rejected both of the Han dynasty lines of commentary on the I Ching, proposing that the text was a work of divination, not philosophy. However, he still considered it useful for understanding the moral practices of the ancients, called "rectification of the mind" in the Great Learning. Zhu Xi’s reconstruction of I Ching yarrow stalk divination, based in part on the Great Commentary account, became the standard form and is still in use today.

As China entered the early modern period, the I Ching took on renewed relevance in both Confucian and Daoist study.The Kangxi Emperor was especially fond of the I Ching and ordered new interpretations of it.

Korean and Japanese
In 1557, the Korean Yi Hwang produced one of the most influential I Ching studies of the early modern era, claiming that the spirit was a principle (li) and not a material force (qi). Hwang accused the Neo-Confucian school of having misread Zhu Xi. His critique proved influential not only in Korea but also in Japan. Other than this contribution, the I Ching was not central to the development of Korean Confucianism, and by the 19th century, I Ching studies were integrated into the silhak reform movement.

In medieval Japan, secret teachings on the I Ching were publicized by Rinzai Zen master Kokan Shiren and the Shintoist Yoshida Kanetomo. I Ching studies in Japan took on new importance in the Edo period, during which over 1,000 books were published on the subject by over 400 authors. The majority of these books were serious works of philology, reconstructing ancient usages and commentaries for practical purposes. A sizable minority focused on numerology, symbolism, and divination. During this time, over 150 editions of earlier Chinese commentaries were reprinted in Japan, including several texts that had become lost in China. In the early Edo period, writers such as Itō Jinsai, Kumazawa Banzan, and Nakae Toju ranked the I Ching the greatest of the Confucian classics. Many writers attempted to use the I Ching to explain Western science in a Japanese framework. One writer, Shizuki Tadao, even attempted to employ Newtonian mechanics and the Copernican principle within an I Ching cosmology. This line of argument was later taken up in China by Zhang Zhidong.

Early European
Leibniz, who was corresponding with Jesuits in China, wrote the first commentary on the I Ching in 1703, arguing that it proved the universality of binary numbers and theism, since the broken lines, the "0" or "nothingness", cannot become solid lines, the "1" or "oneness", without the intervention of God. This was criticized by Hegel, who proclaimed that binary system and Chinese characters were "empty forms" that could not articulate spoken words with the clarity of the Western alphabet. In their discussion, I Ching hexagrams and Chinese characters were conflated into a single foreign idea, sparking a dialogue on Western philosophical questions such as universality and the nature of communication. In the 20th century, Jacques Derrida identified Hegel's argument as logocentric, but accepted without question Hegel's premise that the Chinese language cannot express philosophical ideas.

Modern
After the Xinhai Revolution, the I Ching lost its canonical status in China, but it maintained cultural influence as China's most ancient text. Borrowing back from Leibniz, Chinese writers offered parallels between the I Ching and subjects such as linear algebra and logic in computer science, aiming to demonstrate that ancient Chinese cosmology had anticipated Western discoveries. The psychologist Carl Jung took interest in the possible universal nature of the imagery of the I Ching, and he introduced an influential German translation by Richard Wilhelm by discussing his theories of archetypes and synchronicity.