I Ching Oracle Nederlands

I Ching Oracle Guide The Zhouyi without a single author

The Zhouyi without a single author

The I Ching, in the traditional account, has three authors and a mythical predecessor. King Wen of Zhou, whose reign is traditionally placed around the eleventh century BCE, composed the hexagram statements, the guaci (卦辞), while imprisoned at Youli. His son, the Duke of Zhou, added the line statements, the yaoci (爻辞). Confucius, in the sixth to fifth century BCE, is said to have written the Ten Wings. The trigrams themselves are attributed to Fu Xi. A less common tradition credited parts of the work to Tang of Shang.

Modern scholarship no longer generally accepts them. The prevailing view today is that the Zhouyi, the oldest core of the book, is a layered work that grew collectively, without a single individual author. On that sentence there is agreement. On much of what follows, there is not: how original the moral reading is, when the text was compiled, and what the first four characters of the first hexagram mean.

Gu Jiegang and the doubting of antiquity

Gu Jiegang (顾颉刚), born 8 May 1893, died 25 December 1980, founded the Yigupai (疑古派, the school of doubting antiquity, also called the Doubting Antiquity School) through a series of letters published from 1923. He argued that received knowledge of Chinese antiquity had been built in successive layers, in the reverse order of their actual origin: the later the source, the further back in time, and the more elaborate, the antiquity it described. His essays on the theme appeared as the multi-volume Gushi Bian (古史辨, Debates on Ancient History), seven volumes published between 1926 and 1944.

In 1929 he published in the Yanjing Journal 周易卦爻辞中的故事 (Stories in the hexagram and line texts of the Zhouyi), dating the core texts from the historical references inside them. The article drew wide attention. In 1931 he collected sixteen Zhouyi essays written between December 1926 and December 1929 as volume three of the Gushi Bian. His thesis was that the Zhouyi was at heart a diviner's book, and that later writers fabricated a continuous transmission from Fu Xi through King Wen in order to raise the text's authority. Yang Qingzhong (杨庆中), writing on 中国社会科学网 (Chinese Social Sciences Net), makes explicit that Gu meant to undermine the sacred standing of Fu Xi and Shennong and to restore the Zhouyi as a divinatory text in origin, apart from the later Ten Wings. Gu dated those Wings, especially the Xici, as products of the Warring States period through the Han dynasty, naturalistic and Taoist in colouring, rather than as the work of Confucius.

His student Li Jingchi (李镜池) sharpened the case with a linguistic argument. He compared the graph zhen (貞, to consult by divination) in oracle-bone inscriptions with its use in the Zhouyi, and concluded that the Zhouyi was at core a divination book. He dated the Tuan and Xiang commentaries to the Qin-Han transition, and the Xici to the time of Sima Qian or slightly later. The Gushibian school rejected the older harmonizing reading that treated classic and commentary as one whole. It saw the core texts as loose, originally non-symbolic divination notes, on which later commentators laid a philosophical sense. Liu Dajun (刘大钧), himself head of a research centre in Shandong, describes how this school opened a transition period from the 1900s to the 1940s: from reverent study to, in his words, "objective, impartial, unemotional" Zhouyi scholarship, inside a four-phase model of twentieth-century Yixue. In the same philological line, and before the communist period, the poet and scholar Wen Yiduo (闻一多) wrote in Kunming in April 1941 his Zhouyi Yizheng Leizuan (周易义证类纂). He explained the text from historical events, avoided numerology and abstract philosophy, and claimed more than a hundred improvements on traditional commentaries, ninety of which were kept after selection. According to Chinese book discussions, Li Jingchi praised the work as richer in subtle insight than the comparable work of Guo Moruo, because of Wen's skill in philological exegesis.

The English-language modern school

Arthur Waley (1889-1966) published The Book of Changes in 1933 in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, volume 5, pages 121-142, his first strictly scholarly publication on the subject. Influenced by the French sinologist Marcel Granet, he argued that the cryptic Zhouyi text preserved remnants of folk oracles, with parallels in England, Europe, Africa, China and Japan.

Fifty years later two English-language dissertations recast the field. Edward L. Shaughnessy, born 29 July 1952, took his doctorate at Stanford University in 1983 with The Composition of the Zhouyi. He had studied theology at Notre Dame (BA 1974), Chinese in Taiwan and Japanese in Kyoto, and is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor of Early Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago. Comparing the text with bronze inscriptions (jinwen), he dates the compilation of the Zhouyi to the last quarter of the ninth century BCE, in the early reign of King Xuan of Zhou (r. ca. 827-782 BCE). Richard Alan Kunst took his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 with The Original Yijing: A Text, Phonetic Transcription, Translation, and Indexes, with Sample Glosses. According to a discussion on the Online Clarity site, he offered the dissertation itself as "a kit of tools for the future analysis of the original Yijing", and pointed among other things to the fact that the hexagrams occur in pairs, and in some cases their lines as well.

Richard Rutt (1925-2011), British bishop and sinologist, published The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document in 1996, a translation that places the Zhouyi explicitly as a royal divination document of the Zhou state, apart from later philosophical reading, and the first English version to try to render the original Chinese rhyme patterns in rhymed English. According to a discussion of the Mawangdui text, Rutt criticised some of Shaughnessy's translation choices and thought alternative, linguistically stronger readings were possible at points. Shaughnessy, for his part, defended unusual readings in that silk text not as copyists' errors but as possibly descending from an otherwise unknown, independently sound variant. The same discussion notes that Shaughnessy's thesis of a divination practice developing in stages, inferred from the Zhouyi text itself, is not generally accepted by other specialists, even though popular accounts sometimes present it as settled.

Set this series beside Gu Jiegang's 1929 article, and what stands out is that the English-language modern school arrives at the same core position: the Zhouyi is in origin a divination book, and the philosophy comes later. Waley published four years after Gu; the two dissertations, half a century after that. Our reading: the core position of the English-language modern school had already been formulated in Chinese by 1929. What the dissertations added was method and dating, not the thesis itself. Liu Dajun's periodization, which already places the turn from reverence to critique in the 1900s to 1940s, points the same way. Both Kunst and Shaughnessy wrote their dissertations before usable transcriptions of the Mawangdui silk Zhouyi were available; those came only around 1993, nearly twenty years after the 1973 excavation.

Early Western Zhou or King Xuan

On the dating of the core text, the positions of major specialists diverge, and none of them is a communis opinio. Chinese scholars in the line of Gu Jiegang place the hexagram and line texts in the early Western Zhou, roughly the eleventh to tenth century BCE. In Chinese academic articles, Li Xueqin (李学勤), a leading historian of early Chinese antiquity and director of the Center for Research and Preservation of Excavated Texts at Tsinghua University, endorses that conclusion. He called the dating trusted by colleagues, and in essence the established timeframe for the Zhouyi core. According to those articles, the majority of contemporary Chinese scholars hold that the hexagram and line texts took shape in the early Western Zhou, while most parts of the Yizhuan, the Ten Wings, took their form during the Warring States period. Details remain under discussion.

Shaughnessy dates more narrowly, and by a different method: not internal textual comparison in the manner of Gu and Li Jingchi, but comparison with bronze inscriptions, arriving at the last quarter of the ninth century BCE. Other Western scholars keep a wider margin, somewhere between the tenth and the fourth century BCE.

It follows, we think, that the field agrees on one thing and not on the next. Agreed: the Zhouyi is not the work of King Wen, the Duke of Zhou and Confucius as three successive individuals. Not agreed: when exactly the core was compiled, and in what stages. The myth that scholarship has reached consensus on who wrote the Zhouyi and precisely when only holds if consensus is confused with the rejection of the traditional attributions.

Four characters at the opening of Qian

The characters yuan heng li zhen (元亨利贞) open the hexagram statement of the first hexagram, Qian. Already in the sixth century BCE they were a major focus in the interpretation of the Zhouyi. The classic reading as four virtues goes back to the Wenyan commentary, one of the Ten Wings, from before the Han dynasty: yuan as the first and foremost aspect of goodness, heng as the gathering of excellences, li as the harmony of all that is right, and zhen as the capacity to act. Zhu Xi, in the twelfth century, according to a study of the translation and interpretation of the four characters, read li zhen (利貞) as "the advantageous lies in the correct". He split the four characters into two pairs: yuan-heng and li-zhen.

Gao Heng (高亨), born 29 July 1900, died 2 February 1986, philologist and paleographer, professor at Shandong University from 1953 and from 1957 attached to the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, broke with that moral reading. He read zhen primarily as suitable to consult by divination (筮问), not as correctness in a moral sense. The interpretation is set out in the chapter 元亨利贞解 (Explanation of yuan heng li zhen) in his book 周易古经今注 (Modern annotations to the ancient Zhouyi classic), one of the most influential twentieth-century Chinese Yijing studies.

In this philological, non-moral reading, shared by Li Jingchi among others and in English by Shaughnessy, yuan and heng together mean an initial receipt of an offering, and li and zhen express what is favorable for further consulting. Zhen here keeps both the sense of consulting by divination and that of setting right or correcting. The exact English wording of Shaughnessy's claim is available in the sources used here only through an encyclopedic summary, not from his own book; the core of the interpretation is independently carried by Gao Heng's line. There is no consensus on the exact punctuation: four virtues as one set, or two pairs. The scholarly literature stresses that the translation remains open and versatile, and that translators should let the original meaning and the later layered interpretations stand side by side.

Our reading: the large debate over the whole Zhouyi is already present in the first four characters of the first hexagram. If Gao Heng, Li Jingchi and Shaughnessy are right that the phrase is a divinatory formula, then the Wenyan reading as four virtues is itself the philosophical layer that the modern school later describes across the entire text. The reverse remains possible: whoever follows the Wenyan reads those four characters as evidence that a moral sense was in the core from the start. The characters do not settle the fight. They are the fight in miniature.

What the silk Zhouyi changed

In 1973, tomb 3 at Mawangdui, closed in 168 BCE, near Changsha, yielded a silk Zhouyi manuscript of more than twenty thousand characters: core text and commentaries, in a different hexagram order and with partly different graphs from the received text. The find was treated as the most important textual discovery since the wall find in the house of Confucius in the Han dynasty, the Jizhong bamboo strips in the Jin dynasty, and the Dunhuang scrolls in the late Qing.

Liao Mingchun (廖名春), professor of history at the Center for Research and Preservation of Excavated Texts at Tsinghua University, was among the first scholars to decipher and publish the commentary portion, the Yizhuan, of Mawangdui. From that work he pursued questions of authorship of the received Zhouyi text and commentaries, the origin of the hexagrams, hexagram order, hexagram names and textual variants. His collected studies appeared as 帛书《周易》论集 (Collected essays on the silk Zhouyi) from Shanghai Guji Chubanshe in 2008. His field also includes the Guodian texts and the Shanghai Museum bamboo strips. Beside Mawangdui, later finds matter for the wider debate: bamboo strips in the Shanghai Museum, acquired in 1994, and the Guicang-like bamboo texts from Wangjiatai. These finds are used in the scholarly literature to confirm that the Zhouyi already existed in more or less its present form around 300 BCE, even though textual variants were still in circulation in the Warring States period.

Set the date of the usable transcriptions, around 1993, beside the dissertations of 1983 and 1985, and what stands out is that the two dissertations that recast the English-language field were made without the most important excavated witness. Chinese scholars such as Liao Mingchun could then rebuild the debate on authorship, sequence and variants from a manuscript. It follows, we think, that anyone who lets the Western line stop at 1983 and 1985 misses a philological layer that became central after the silk find.

Oracle handbook or book of wisdom

The core question in the field is whether the Zhouyi was originally a practical diviner's handbook that only later, through the Ten Wings, received a philosophical wisdom layer, or whether a deeper moral or cosmological intention was there from the start. The prevailing modern consensus, in Gu Jiegang, Li Jingchi, Waley, Kunst, Shaughnessy and Rutt, is the first position: the core texts were originally divination notes; the philosophical layer is a later addition, from the Warring States to the Han, through the Ten Wings.

That tension is older than the twentieth century. Inside the Chinese exegetical tradition itself, the Xiang-Shu school (images and numbers, 象数), which approached the text through symbolism and numerology, stood against the Yi-Li school (meaning and principle, 义理), which read the text as a moral-philosophical guide. Wang Bi, in the third century, set numerology aside and integrated the Ten Wings into the core text. Cheng Yi, in the eleventh century, read the text as a guide to moral perfection and good government. Zhu Xi, in the twelfth century, synthesized the Han schools and restored, or reconstructed, a yarrow-stalk oracle procedure that is still used today.

The myth that the Ten Wings were written by Confucius himself, and that the Zhouyi is therefore in essence a Confucian book, does not hold. Both the Gushibian school in the 1920s and 1930s and later Western philology place the Wings largely in the Warring States to Han period, centuries after Confucius, with, in the Xici for example, a Taoist-naturalistic rather than a purely Confucian colouring. The attribution to Confucius is no longer one equal academic side of a dispute; it is a rejected position that lives on in popular and some neo-Confucian circles. Our reading: Wang Bi made the philosophical reading feel native by folding the Wings into the core, and Zhu Xi kept the oracle alive by reconstructing the counting method. The Chinese tradition did not wait for Gu Jiegang in order to live with both uses. The modern claim oracle first and Zhu Xi's restored procedure are not opposites. Both take divination seriously. They differ on whether the moral reading was original. Anyone who opens a translation today usually reads both layers at once. That is not a lack of purity. It is the history of the text, in a single view.

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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