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I Ching Oracle Guide Silk from Mawangdui: the I Ching before there was one sequence

Silk from Mawangdui: the I Ching before there was one sequence

In December 1973, tomb number 3 at Mawangdui (马王堆), near Changsha in Hunan province, was excavated. The tomb had been closed in 168 BCE and belonged to a member of the family of the Marquis of Dai. Inside a lacquered chest lay texts on silk (帛, bó). Among them was what was then the oldest known manuscript of the Zhouyi (周易), the core of what later became the I Ching.

According to the Biroco overview of the manuscript, the copy was written in ink on silk and dates to about 175-180 BCE, a few years before the tomb was closed. The same source puts the manuscript some 350 years earlier than any previously known copy of the text. The silk texts from tomb 3 have been classed as a first-grade national cultural relic (国家一级文物). The Hunan Museum (湖南博物院) records that the silk Zhouyi lay in a lacquered box, and that the bundle was placed in 2013 on the third Chinese list of cultural objects barred from leaving the country for exhibition (第三批禁止出境展览文物目录).

That sounds like a definitive text. It is not.

Eight groups of eight

The 64 hexagrams in the Mawangdui text stand in a wholly different order from the received King Wen sequence. The arrangement is built from eight groups of eight. Inside each group, an octet, every hexagram has the same upper trigram.

The eight groups carry their own names, not the familiar trigram names: 鍵 (Jiàn), 川 (Chuān), 根 (Gēn), 奪 (Duó), 贛 (Gàn), 羅 (Luó), 辰 (Chén) and 筭 (Suàn). They correspond to Qián 乾, Kūn 坤, Gèn 艮, Duì 兌, Kǎn 坎, Lí 離, Zhèn 震 and Xùn 巽.

The first hexagram of the manuscript is the doubling of the Qian trigram. At Mawangdui it is called Jiàn (鍵/键), roughly "the key" or "the pivot". In the received book the same figure is Qián 乾, "the heavenly": hexagram 1. Kun 坤, "the earthly", also has another name according to a Chinese summary of the technical literature: Chuān 川, "river" or "flowing water".

Which hexagram is the 64th and last of the full Mawangdui series cannot be established from the available sources with a single, reliable answer. Secondary accounts of the octet structure disagree on that detail.

There is no consensus on the logic behind the sequence. The Chinese scholar Liu Dajun (刘大钧) has argued that it is related to the later "Eight Palaces" sequence (八宫) of Jing Fang (京房, 77-37 BCE). The sinologist Richard Rutt suggested that the Mawangdui order may have been mainly a practical finding-order: look the figure up by its upper trigram, without a deeper philosophical message. A Chinese blog post that summarises the technical literature calls the grid "a kind of regular beauty" (一種規則之美) that needs no explanatory commentary, unlike the later Xugua wing. In the King Wen sequence, hexagrams form pairs by inversion or mirroring of the lines. That logic is absent at Mawangdui, where the upper trigram governs the grouping.

Our reading: the two accounts need not cancel each other. A practical finding-order can at the same time have had a visible regularity that needed no explanation. The King Wen sequence lacks such a visible grid and later did receive a commentary of its own, the Xugua. It follows, we think, that the deeper meaning of a sequence sometimes appears only after the sequence itself has stopped being obvious on the page.

Different names, largely the same text

It is not true that the Mawangdui text is "the original, true I Ching" that later tradition would have distorted. It is one of several, mutually different manuscript traditions from the Han and pre-Han period, not by definition the oldest or the most authoritative.

Nor does the manuscript contain an entirely different content or philosophy. The core hexagram texts follow largely the same wording. The differences lie mainly in the use of characters, in the names, and in the order. The number of variants is still not small. According to the Biroco overview of the manuscript, about 560 characters, some 12 percent of the readable material, differ between Mawangdui and the received text. No single pattern has been found that explains all of those variants. They are a mix of loan characters, dialect differences and copying errors.

Set this beside the names Jiàn and Chuān, and what stands out is that the cosmic pair heaven and earth does not yet supply the self-evident titles of the two hexagrams with which the received book opens. The Mawangdui names sound more concrete: a key, a river. They may be loan characters, like many of the 560 variants, in which case the name says nothing about meaning. If the names do carry meaning, that points, we think, to the metaphysical reading of those figures as heaven and earth being a later layer, or at least not the only one.

The commentaries in the chest

With the Zhouyi manuscript lay six accompanying texts, previously unknown or known only in part, the bóshū Yìzhuàn (帛书易传): Ersanzi wen (二三子問, conversations with Confucius), Xìcí (系辞, a variant of the received Great Treatise), Yì zhī yì (易之义), Yào (要, "the essential"), Mù Hé (缪和) and Zhāo Lì (昭力).

The Xici at Mawangdui is not the received Xici. According to the survey literature on the silk texts, some passages are missing, and the order of blocks of text differs. That points, we think, to the Ten Wings not yet being a fixed wreath around the oracle.

The text Yào contains, according to Shaughnessy's first reading, a dialogue in which Confucius defends his late interest in the Yi against a student who holds that a gentleman should not involve himself with divination. That is not evidence that Confucius was the historical author of the commentaries. Our reading: it is an early argument, preserved on silk, that the oracle and the gentleman belonged together. That it lay in a tomb closed in 168 BCE suggests the pairing already had to be defended.

What Chinese scholars have done since

Zhang Zhenglang (张政烺, 1912-2005), born in Rongcheng in Shandong, professor at Peking University from 1946 and from 1966 a researcher at the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was himself involved in the 1970s in arranging the Mawangdui bamboo and silk texts.

The full Chinese scholarly publication of the manuscript, still incomplete according to the survey literature, appeared only in 1993, twenty years after the excavation. Edward L. Shaughnessy of the University of Chicago published a first article in 1994, "A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript", in Early China 19. In 1996/1997 the first complete English translation followed: I Ching: The Classic of Changes, the First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century B.C. Mawangdui Texts (Ballantine Books, 350 pages).

In 2014, forty years after the excavation, the first edition of the 长沙马王堆汉墓简帛集成 (Collected bamboo and silk texts from the Han tombs at Mawangdui, Changsha) appeared. In August 2024 a thoroughly revised, seven-volume reissue was published, organised by Prof. Liu Zhao (刘钊) of the Center for Research on Excavated Texts and Paleography at Fudan University (复旦大学出土文献与古文字研究中心). The revised edition contains nearly a thousand corrections relative to 2014 and completely rewrote several texts, including the two Laozi versions, on the basis of more than 230 newly identified fragments.

According to Renmin Ribao (人民日报), 948 Mawangdui objects had already been digitised at high resolution by 2024: 7779 photographs and 285 3D models, with the aim of eventually covering 100 percent of the find, fragments included. In August 2024, on the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of the excavation, the Hunan Museum established the Mawangdui Yanjiuyuan (马王堆研究院) as an open platform, with cooperation agreements with six institutions, including the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Dunhuang Academy. Baidu Baike notes that the quality of the surviving silk differs from roll to roll: some pieces are severely fragmented.

It follows, we think, that the Western picture of the Mawangdui I Ching long rested on a translation from 1996/1997, made shortly after the Chinese scholarly edition finally appeared, while Chinese textual criticism of the Mawangdui texts as a whole has since worked in nearly a thousand corrections and more than two hundred new fragments. How many of these touch the Zhouyi, and whether the translation has since been revised, we could not establish. Our reading: a reader of the 1996/1997 edition is reading an important first bridge, not necessarily the state of the text in 2024.

Other tombs, other books

Mawangdui does not stand alone. The finds that followed show how little the book was a single thing in the Han and pre-Han period.

In 1977, at Fuyang (阜阳) in Anhui, in the Han tomb of the second Marquis of Ruyin (汝阴侯), who died in the fifteenth year of Emperor Wen (165 BCE), more than 9000 bamboo fragments were found. Among them were remains of a Zhouyi copy with a divergent notation for yin lines. The excavation report appeared in 1978 in the journal Wenwu (文物), number 8.

From May 1994 the Shanghai Museum (上海博物馆) bought, on the Hong Kong antique market, more than 1700 bamboo strips from the Chu region in total. Carbon dating points to the late Warring States period, with the tomb of origin around 300 BCE. Among the texts is a Zhouyi copy published in December 2003, in volume 3 of the series 上海博物馆藏战国楚竹书. At the time that fragment was regarded as the oldest known Zhouyi text fragment.

In 1993, at Wangjiatai (王家台) in Hubei, Qin bamboo strips were found during the digging of a fish pond, bearing the Guicang (归藏, 归藏易): another divinatory text, until then known only from quotations, with its own hexagram sequence and names. The find comprises 164 numbered and some 230 unnumbered strips, together about 4000 characters, with 53 or 54 different hexagram names. In the Guicang version of hexagram Guimei (歸妹), according to Chinese summaries of those strips, there stands an early version of the later moon myth of Chang'e. The text tells that Heng'e (恒我/姮娥, later Chang'e 嫦娥) stole the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West, had You Huang divine about it, received a favourable sign, fled to the moon and there turned into a toad.

After 2008 Tsinghua University (清华大学) acquired the Tsinghua bamboo slips (清华简), likewise through the art market, from a looted Chu tomb. They include the text Shìfǎ (筮法, a method of divination): 63 slips, published in 2013, with 114 recorded numeric hexagrams built from the six figures 一, 四, 五, 六, 八 and 九. There is also a text Biégùa (别卦) with a sequence of hexagrams that is different again.

Anyone following the line from oracle bones to hexagrams meets here not a closing chapter but a fork. Zhouyi, Guicang and the Tsinghua sequence existed side by side. There is no single answer to which sequence (King Wen, Mawangdui, or that of the Tsinghua slips) reflects the oldest underlying arrangement. The finds show instead that several sequences existed at the same time.

Set the Chang'e myth in the Guicang beside the Confucius dialogue in Yào, and what stands out is that myth and moral argument both had a home in divination texts in the same centuries, though in different books. Our reading: the later split between philosophical classic and folk tale is a habit of reading that these finds do not yet know.

Sources

The old ritual Cast the yarrow stalks Ask your question and build your hexagram line by line, with the classical odds.

Further reading

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