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I Ching Oracle Guide The Ten Wings: the commentaries that turned an oracle into a philosophy

The Ten Wings: the commentaries that turned an oracle into a philosophy

The Ten Wings (十翼, Shí Yì) are not a treatise from a single hand. They are the classical commentaries on the Zhouyi, the core text of the I Ching, together also called the Yizhuan (易傳, "Commentary on the Change"). They turned an oracle book into a text on cosmology, ethics and self-cultivation. Anyone who reads the I Ching through Richard Wilhelm, on our reading, often reads those commentaries along with the hexagrams without taking them for later comment.

The name promises ten. They are traditionally counted as seven separate writings, because three of them split into an upper and a lower part: the Tuanzhuan, the Xiangzhuan and the Xici. Modern philologists date those seven texts across a period from the fifth to the second century BCE. This is not one coherent philosophical work, written at a sitting. It is a set of texts by different, unknown authors, composed over at least three centuries.

Seven writings under one name

The 彖傳 Tuàn Zhuàn, in an upper and a lower half, comments on the "Judgment" (guaci) of each hexagram. It explains, through the relation of the two trigrams, why a hexagram is favorable or unfavorable. The 象傳 Xiàng Zhuàn works at two scales. The "Great Image" (大象 Dà Xiàng) reads the hexagram as a whole through a natural image, for example water above the earth. The "Small Image" (小象 Xiǎo Xiàng) reads each line on its own.

The 繫辭傳 Xìcí Zhuàn, the "Attached Words", is also called the Great Treatise (大傳 Dàzhuàn): two essays on cosmology, the origin of the trigrams and the use of the oracle, independent of any one hexagram. According to Wikipedia, the 文言傳 Wényán Zhuàn, the "Commentary on the Words", is a detailed separate commentary, but only on the first two hexagrams, Qián (1) and Kūn (2).

The 序卦傳 Xùguà Zhuàn offers a continuous philosophical story for why each hexagram follows the one before it. The 說卦傳 Shuōguà Zhuàn ties each of the eight trigrams to a family member (father, mother, three sons, three daughters), a compass direction, a body part, an animal and a natural phenomenon. The 雜卦傳 Zágùà Zhuàn sets pairs of hexagrams against each other in short, compact statements, in an order of its own that differs from the usual King Wen sequence.

Centuries after the core text

According to the sinologist Edward Shaughnessy, the Zhouyi core text itself, without the Ten Wings, was compiled in the last quarter of the ninth century BCE, during the reign of King Xuan of Zhou (ca. 827-782 BCE). He bases that dating on bronze inscriptions. That is centuries before the commentaries.

The language points the same way. According to the encyclopedia page on the I Ching, the language of the Ten Wings belongs to a later language phase, a precursor of Middle Chinese, than the Early Old Chinese of the Zhouyi core. A bamboo-strip find from 1993 confirms, according to the same page, that by around 300 BCE the Zhouyi was already being used, in essentially its present wording, by all layers of Chinese society. Many specialists, according to that page, place the Xici around the same time, well later than the core text. The exact century of the Xici remains disputed.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, core text and Ten Wings had been joined into a single whole by around 135 BCE, when the Yi was established as an imperially recognized classic. Set these datings beside one another and what stands out is that the philosophical layer arrived while the oracle was already a finished book, in circulation through every layer of society. Our reading: the Wings are not the original frame of the Zhouyi. They are a second book that grew onto the first, first in use, then in the canon.

Confucius, Ouyang Xiu and the doubt

Tradition attributed all Ten Wings to Confucius (Kǒngzǐ, 551-479 BCE). Alongside it lives the idea that Confucius wrote or dictated the I Ching. Even the traditional view ties him only to the commentary layer, not to the core text, which is traditionally ascribed to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou (eleventh century BCE). And even that commentary layer is no longer attributed to Confucius in person by any contemporary sinologist. The text is still taken to have been strongly shaped by Confucian circles.

According to the encyclopedia page on the I Ching, that attribution probably rests on a misreading of Sima Qian's historical work, the Shiji (Historical Notes). The Xici contains in several places the formula 子曰 (zǐ yuē, "the Master said"), which traditionally counted as proof of Confucian involvement.

The first scholar to doubt the attribution explicitly was Ouyang Xiu (歐陽修 Ōuyáng Xiū, 1007-1072), a scholar under the Northern Song. His contemporary Sima Guang (司馬光, 1019-1086) shared similar doubts, according to the encyclopedia page on the Ten Wings. The Qing scholars Yao Jiheng (姚際恆, 1647-1715) and Kang Youwei (康有為, 1858-1927) gathered and sharpened those doubts further, according to the same page.

Ouyang Xiu's own argument is in 《易童子問》(Yì Tóngzǐ Wèn, "Questions of a youth about the Yi"): three juan (卷), thirty-seven chapters, cast as a dialogue between teacher and pupil. In the third juan he holds that five of the Yizhuan texts, the Xici, the Wenyan, the Shuogua, the Xugua and the Zagua, do not come from one hand and so cannot count as the words of Confucius. The Tuanzhuan and the Xiangzhuan he does treat as "words of the sage".

Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130-1200) drew a sharp distinction in his commentary between the sixty-four hexagrams as "classic text" (jīng) and the Ten Wings as later "commentarial material" (zhuàn). That is a sign that a chronological distinction was already felt. That points to this: the picture of Confucius as author piles together two operations that Chinese learning has been taking apart since the eleventh century. Ouyang Xiu split the Wings by authorship. Zhu Xi split core text and commentary by genre. The language phase confirms the gap in time.

The Great Treatise

The Xici is the philosophically most important of the Ten Wings. It contains the cosmological core formula: the Supreme Ultimate (太極 Tàijí) produces Yin and Yang, which produce the Four Images, which in turn produce the eight trigrams. It also names the oracle's core words. Encouraging are "favorable" (吉 jí) and "no blame" (無咎 wújiù). Warning are "misfortune" (凶 xiōng), "blame" (咎 jiù), "regret" (悔 huǐ) and "remorse" (吝 lìn).

A silk manuscript version of the Xici, found in 1973 in tomb 3 at Mawangdui near Changsha (the tomb was closed in 168 BCE), differs in places from the later received text. The find includes a Yizhuan bundle of several texts (《要》 Yào, 《二三子問》 Èr Sān Zǐ Wèn, 《衷》 Zhōng, 《繆和》 Miù Hé, 《昭力》 Zhāo Lì) that are not all of equal age. According to a discussion of that bundle, 《二三子問》 is probably the oldest (early to mid Warring States), and 《繆和》 and 《昭力》 are the youngest (late Warring States).

The manuscript 《要》, part of the silk Yizhuan found at Mawangdui, confirms the saying "孔子老而好《易》": Confucius only late in life developed a fondness for the Yi. And "居則在席，行則在橐": he kept it at home beside his sitting mat and took it on the road in his travel bag. That runs parallel to the later wording in the Shiji. The same manuscript has Confucius say: "《易》，我後其祝卜矣，我觀其德義耳也". As for the Yi, I put the divination in second place; I attend mainly to the moral meaning. That is the core argument later Ru scholars used to justify the Yizhuan as moral-philosophical, and so as Confucian in inspiration.

Our reading: the Mawangdui commentaries too are a stack of texts of unequal age. That makes it plausible that the Ten Wings as well repeat in miniature what the imperial canon did at large around 135 BCE: make unequal writings into one classic.

Confucian or Daoist

Whether that moral reading makes the Yizhuan a Confucian text is, on the Chinese mainland, a living dispute, not a fringe quarrel.

Chen Guying (陳鼓應 Chén Gǔyīng), in 《易傳與道家思想》 ("The Yizhuan and Daoist thought", first edition 1993, revised mainland edition 2007), argues against the received view of two thousand years. In his account the Yizhuan (Tuanzhuan, Xiangzhuan, Wenyan, Xici, Shuogua, Xugua) belongs, in cosmology, core concepts and terminology, to the Daoist tradition, not the Confucian. As evidence he points, among other things, to early Confucian bamboo texts from Guodian and the Shanghai Museum, which praise the Shijing and the Shujing but barely mention the Yi, and to the Mawangdui Xici manuscript, which he calls the oldest transmitted Daoist copy of that text. He had already published the claim in 1990 in 《哲學研究》. Chen himself stresses that the claim grows out of a broader, and itself disputed, argument: that Daoism is "the mainstream" of Chinese philosophy.

Lin Zhongjun (林忠軍), professor at the Center for Yi Studies and Classical Chinese Philosophy at Shandong University, refutes Chen Guying directly in the journal 《人文雜誌》 (2022, no. 5). On his account the Yizhuan remains fundamentally Confucian because it makes moral "virtue" (德 dé) the starting point of Yi interpretation, in line with Confucius' own "求其德" remark in the Mawangdui manuscript, even though it borrows Daoist vocabulary for its cosmology ("heaven's way"). The majority of the mainland scholarly community holds to a predominantly Confucian reading with Daoist influences. That is the state of the dispute, not a verdict.

Set Chen beside Lin, and what stands out is that they pick different material from the same find: Chen the Xici manuscript and its cosmology, Lin the virtue remark in 《要》. Our reading: the quarrel is less about who wrote the Wings than about which piece from the same Mawangdui find one takes as the center of the book.

Who did write the Wings remains open. An article in 《四川大學學報》 (Journal of Sichuan University, social sciences, 2011 no. 1, pp. 17-24, by Liu Yanggang, Pan Yuzhou and Liu Changming) places most of the Yizhuan texts between Mencius and Xunzi on one side and Sima Qian on the other, with a proposed order of composition Xici, Wenyan, Tuanzhuan, Xiangzhuan, Xugua, Shuogua, Zagua. Shuogua would belong to early Han diviners, Zagua to Han scholars after Emperor Wu, the rest mainly to late Warring States and early Han followers of the school of Zixia. That is one reconstruction. Ouyang Xiu grouped by authorship, not by chronology. The two questions do not coincide, and the sources partly contradict one another.

The field has its own mainland journal: 《周易研究》(Zhōuyì Yánjiū), the only specialized academic journal of Yi studies, founded in 1988 by Liu Dajun (劉大鈞) at Shandong University. At first a quarterly, since 2002 a bimonthly, with standing sections such as history of Yi study, commentary research and excavated Yi texts.

How Wilhelm wove the Wings

Because later commentators such as Zhu Xi based their whole philosophical reading of the Yi on the Ten Wings, the oracle book was reread, step by step, as a text on ethics, cosmology and self-cultivation. Our reading: the Western reader inherits that rereading mainly through Richard Wilhelm.

According to a guide to the Wilhelm-Baynes edition, Wilhelm's German translation of 1924 departed from earlier Western translations by weaving parts of the Ten Wings directly into the discussion of each hexagram: Judgment, Tuanzhuan and Image (Xiangzhuan) as one, instead of presenting them apart. He placed the two Xici essays, the Xugua and the Zagua separately in later parts of his book, with commentary of his own. He took advice there from his Chinese teacher Lao Naixuan (劳乃宣), a Neo-Confucian scholar.

Set Wilhelm's page layout beside Ouyang Xiu's split, and what stands out is that Wilhelm weaves into each hexagram exactly the two Wings Ouyang still called "words of the sage", and that he moves to the back at least three of the five Ouyang pulled away from Confucius, the Xici, the Xugua and the Zagua. Our source is silent on the Wenyan and the Shuogua. That is not evidence that Wilhelm followed Ouyang. Our reading: the Western reader of Wilhelm meets the Wings first as the voice of the hexagram itself. The distinction between jīng and zhuàn that Zhu Xi kept sharp is exactly what Wilhelm's hexagram texts no longer show.

In 2022 Joseph A. Adler published The Yijing: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 18 February 2022, in the series Guides to Sacred Texts), a current English introduction that summarizes the Yijing's history of interpretation, including the Ten Wings, from the first millennium BCE to now. The book was reviewed in 2023 in Religious Studies Review. The Wings remain the layer through which an oracle is read as philosophy: in China as a living dispute, in the West usually as the voice the text seems already to have.

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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