Ancient China by John S. Major & Constance A. Cook

Author:John S. Major & Constance A. Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Focus: The Book of Changes

Just as oracle bones are indelibly associated with the Shang dynasty, the Book of Changes (Yijing or Zhouyi) system of divination is firmly associated with the Zhou. The system involved a manipulation of stalks to derive a series of numbers that were transcribed into one of eight trigrams (three lines), which are then combined into sixty-four hexagrams (six lines). By Han times the numbers had evolved into a system of broken and unbroken lines representing cosmic forces. Once the hexagram (called a gua) was obtained it was necessary to find the figure in the divination manual, the Yijing. There one would find a mantic “statement” associated uniquely with that hexagram, which provided an overall reading of the six-line figure and a supplementary reading of each of its six lines. The texts are frequently enigmatic or obscure, and require further expert interpretation. They may have been drawn from now-lost fragments of song, liturgy, or mythological tales.

Mythology firmly associates the Changes with the Zhou people. The precursors of the hexagrams, three-line figures of solid or divided lines (trigrams, also called gua), were said to have been invented by Fu Xi (“Tamer of Beasts”), one of the mythical “sage-emperors” who were supposed to have ruled the Sinitic world in high antiquity. Mathematically, there are eight (23) possible arrangements of three lines that can be either solid or divided, ranging from three solid lines to three divided lines, with six possibilities in between. As the myths have it, the trigrams were found to be insufficiently specific to yield accurate divination, so King Wen, the founder of the Zhou dynasty, invented the hexagrams, each of which may be thought of as two trigrams piled on top of one another. There are sixty-four (26 or 8 × 8 trigrams) possible arrangements of six lines that can be either solid or divided. The sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing can thus be thought of as exhausting all possible interpretations of all possible phenomena in the world: they are complete and comprehensive.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the original gua were not sets of solid or divided lines, however, but series of numbers. Such series, often of six numbers and usually different combinations of 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, have appeared on oracle bones, ceramics, bronzes, and other objects since the Shang Period, possibly indicating the use of “stalk divination” to verify bone divination results. At some point, probably around the beginning of the Han dynasty, the numbers began to be replaced by solid lines (for odd numbers) and divided lines (for even ones); these figures were taken as representations of the cosmic forces of yin and yang. Fourth-century BCE numerical gua (referring to trigrams or hexagrams) seem to represent a stage in between the old Shang and Western Zhou stalk divination rules and the Han simplification into yin and yang (Figure 7.3).

The Yijing divination system is definitely associated with the Zhou dynasty (as the alternate name of the system, Zhouyi, indicates), but it is highly unlikely that it was invented by King Wen personally.

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