The I Ching

What it is

The Yijing or Book of Changes: a system of 64 hexagrams, each a stack of six lines that are either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang), with a text attached to each hexagram and to each of its individual lines.

The hexagrams are built from eight trigrams of three lines each — heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire, lake — combined in pairs. Sixty-four is simply eight squared, and also every possible arrangement of six binary lines.

Consultation produces a hexagram, and often one or more changing lines, which transform into their opposites to yield a second hexagram. The reading is therefore not a static answer but a movement from one situation to another — which is what the title means.

Where it came from

Unlike almost everything else in this section, its antiquity is real and its divinatory purpose is original.

Chinese divination by heating bones and shells to read the cracks is attested from the Shang dynasty, with inscribed oracle bones surviving from around 1200 BCE. The hexagram system belongs to a related but distinct practice using milfoil (yarrow) stalks.

The core text — the Zhou Yi, the Changes of Zhou — dates to roughly the early first millennium BCE. It is terse, concrete and frequently obscure: judgements on hexagrams and short statements on individual lines, full of references to sacrifices, military campaigns, marriages and omens.

Layers of commentary known as the Ten Wings were added between roughly the fourth and second centuries BCE. These transformed it from a divination manual into a work of cosmology and moral philosophy, and their traditional attribution to Confucius is rejected by modern scholarship. With the Wings attached, the Yijing became one of the Confucian classics, studied by every educated person for two thousand years and commented on by major philosophers including Wang Bi and Zhu Xi.

A manuscript recovered at Mawangdui in 1973, dating to the second century BCE, has a different hexagram order and textual variants, and has substantially changed scholarly understanding of the early text.

How it is practised

The traditional method uses fifty yarrow stalks in a division procedure repeated eighteen times, which is slow and produces a subtly uneven probability distribution across the four possible line types. The simpler three-coin method, which became widespread later, gives a different and even distribution — so the two methods are not equivalent, a point traditionalists care about.

The querent frames a question, generates the hexagram line by line from bottom to top, reads the hexagram judgement, then any changing lines, then the resulting second hexagram.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the antiquity is genuine and the divinatory intent original. Where tarot's esoteric tradition is eighteenth-century and rune divination is twentieth-century, this really is a three-thousand-year-old oracle, continuously used.

We can say the version most Westerners read is a translation with a strong interpretive character, and this is not widely understood. Richard Wilhelm's German translation (1924), rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes in 1950 with a foreword by Carl Jung, is the standard Western text and an enormously influential book. Wilhelm was a missionary turned sinologist who worked with a Chinese scholar, Lao Naixuan, and translated through the lens of the Neo-Confucian commentarial tradition — and, in his English reception, through Jung.

The result is elevated, wisdom-literature prose. Scholarly translations of the early text — James Legge's earlier version, and modern work by Richard Rutt and Edward Shaughnessy — read very differently: sparser, stranger, more concerned with sacrifices and captives and livestock, and much less like philosophy. Neither is wrong; they are translating different layers. But a reader who thinks they are consulting the ancient text is generally consulting a twentieth-century German reading of a medieval Chinese reading of it.

We can say there is no evidence of predictive validity, and no test has been done — which would be straightforward to arrange given how specific some judgements are.

We can say the design has a genuinely interesting property. A system that always returns a situation and its transformation, rather than a verdict, resists the yes-or-no framing that makes most divination trivially checkable and trivially disappointing. Whether that is depth or unfalsifiability is a fair question, and both readings are available.

Further reading

• Wilhelm/Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes (1950) — the standard Western edition, read knowing what it is.
• Richard Rutt, The Book of Changes (Zhouyi) (1996) — a scholarly translation of the early text, and startling if you know only Wilhelm.
• Edward Shaughnessy, I Ching: The Classic of Changes (1996) — the Mawangdui manuscript.