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Yijing Research

Archaeology and the Early Yi

A book is usually something we imagine sitting on a shelf. The earliest surviving evidence for the Yi is rarely so convenient. It may be a few characters on a bronze weapon, strips of bamboo tied together into a roll, a fragment of silk or numbers written on the objects placed beside someone in a tomb. Each survival has a history of its own.

A hexagram on a dagger-axe

One of the most intriguing finds associated with hexagram 50 is a bronze ge 戈, a dagger-axe, introduced by Dong Shan in 2011. The inscription includes two arrangements of six numbers and words that closely resemble passages connected with 鼎, the cauldron. In his study of the early Zhou Changes, Edward Shaughnessy discusses the sequences 六一一一六一 and 八五一一六五, both of which can be converted into the received figure for hexagram 50 by treating odd numbers as whole lines and even numbers as broken lines.

The words make the object particularly exciting. They refer to features of a ding—its legs and ears—and echo material in the received line texts. Suddenly we are looking at a possible meeting of a numerical figure and written phrases in one inscription. That is exactly the sort of connection a historian of the Yi hopes to find.

The weapon does not have a securely recorded archaeological excavation context. Dong Shan discussed its corrosion and form in support of its antiquity; other researchers have considered what it would mean if the inscription is authentic and ancient. The find is worth presenting because the object, the proposed readings and the questions about it can all be examined. A photograph or accurate rubbing belongs beside any serious discussion of it, once reproduction permission has been obtained.

Bamboo manuscripts: books you could unroll

During the Warring States period, writers often used narrow strips of bamboo. Characters were written vertically, one strip after another; the strips could be tied together and rolled up. A single work might occupy dozens of them. When the cords decay, the order of the slips can become part of the scholar’s puzzle. A manuscript is therefore not merely a text in another handwriting. Its physical construction can tell us how it was made and used.

The Shanghai Museum Zhouyi, written on bamboo and generally assigned palaeographically to the Warring States, preserves portions of the Zhouyi. These strips offer alternatives in graphs, wording and layout to the received text. Some slips preserve features of the organization of the work that cannot be recovered by reading a modern printed edition alone. They show us a stage of textual transmission at which familiar passages were already being copied and read, but had not necessarily acquired the exact graphic form we expect today.

The Qinghua manuscripts, acquired by Tsinghua University, give us another kind of excitement. Among them are texts relating to Yi divination, including 《筮法》 Shifa, often rendered “Divination Methods”, and 《別卦》 Biegua. The Shifa is particularly valuable because it does not simply supply another version of our received hexagram statements. It preserves a different handbook of interpretation, with numerical trigrams, tables and short cases. We shall examine its rules in Part II. For the moment the important discovery is that an early Yi-related manuscript can show us an actual method, not just a version of the Zhouyi.

Records of people consulting the oracle

Some of the most human documents are the Chu divination records from Baoshan 包山 and Geling 葛陵. They survive on bamboo slips from tomb contexts and record consultations concerning particular people and affairs. Their formulae mention what was divined, the methods used, the results and, in many cases, ritual responses.

In the Baoshan material we meet the concerns of Shao Tuo 邵佗: his health, official responsibilities and the means by which divine or ancestral support might be sought. These are not theoretical examples invented by a later commentator. They belong to the world of a named person for whom divination was part of ordinary decision-making and ritual life. They also preserve numerical results that can be compared with those in other Yi-related evidence.

The Geling materials invite a similar approach. Their value lies not simply in the words or numbers but in how the whole consultation was recorded. For a reader interested in the history of divination, the slips bring the participants, questions and proceedings into view. In Part II we will return to them to see how an oracle operated in practice.

Other branches of the Yi family

At Wangjiatai 王家台, excavators found Qin-period bamboo materials widely studied in connection with the Guicang 歸藏 tradition. The preserved text shares with the Zhouyi a system of hexagram-associated material but offers different narratives and statements. It reminds us that “the Yi” was never merely one set of familiar sentences travelling unchanged through time.

Not every text from this early world was used in exactly the same way. Some preserve lists of divinatory outcomes; some preserve accounts of consultations; some offer explanations of figures. Together they allow us to look sideways from the received Zhouyi and see neighbouring traditions. That wider view is one of the most rewarding results of archaeological research.

We have now encountered texts on bronze, bamboo and other materials. But how did the Zhouyi itself travel from the Warring States into the Han? The next chapter follows manuscripts that let us compare recognizable versions of the book, before meeting an extraordinary Han divination manual from the tomb of the Marquis of Haihun.

Sources and further reading