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Yijing Research

The Zhouyi Through the Centuries

The received Zhouyi is so familiar that it is easy to forget how remarkable its survival is. Over many centuries people copied it on bamboo, silk and eventually paper. Scribes made choices about characters and spellings, editors arranged texts, and commentators added their own explanations. Archaeology now lets us open several windows onto that long journey.

A silk book from Mawangdui

The tombs at Mawangdui 馬王堆 near Changsha yielded a rich collection of early Han silk manuscripts. Among them was a version of the Zhouyi, recovered from tomb 3, sealed in 168 BCE. Silk is a very different writing surface from bamboo. The manuscript also preserves a strikingly different order of the hexagrams, organized according to trigram groupings rather than the familiar received sequence.

That discovery makes a simple point very tangible: the same sixty-four figures did not always have to appear in the same order. The names and individual passages also show interesting variations. In hexagram 10, for example, the Mawangdui version writes 禮 where the received text gives 履. This is not merely a different font. The alternative offers a different word to consider, and my translation notes on hexagram 10 follow the consequences through the sentence.

Mawangdui also preserves commentarial material that belongs to the development of Yi interpretation. In other words, the tomb gives us both a witness to the older text and evidence of the ways people were already thinking about it. That makes it exceptionally valuable.

The Fuyang manuscript

At Fuyang 阜陽, the Shuanggu Dui tomb yielded Han bamboo slips containing parts of the Zhouyi and additional divinatory matter. The text is fragmentary, but its surviving passages provide another witness against which to compare the received and Mawangdui versions. The Fuyang wording of hexagram 10, for instance, contributes the graph 實 to the passage about the tiger’s tail. A tiny difference like this can keep a translator occupied for days—and happily so, because it brings another piece of the linguistic puzzle into reach.

The juxtaposition of Zhouyi passages and consultation-related material at Fuyang is also important for the book’s history. A manuscript could be useful in practical divination as well as in study. We should imagine readers handling these texts, not simply scribes preserving them for future libraries.

The Marquis of Haihun and 《易占》

A particularly exciting addition to the story comes from the tomb of Liu He 劉賀, the Marquis of Haihun 海昏侯, who died in 59 BCE. Among the extensive manuscripts recovered from his tomb is a text conventionally called 《易占》 Yizhan, “Yi Divination”.

It has a familiar feature: the received sequence of sixty-four hexagrams. Yet its contents are not simply the standard hexagram and line statements. The manuscript associates hexagrams with other kinds of divinatory information, including time, directional and calendrical correspondences. Wang Ning’s study points out the absence of the usual Zhouyi line texts and compares this with the different arrangement found at Fuyang. Studies by Zhang Kebin explore the manuscript’s seasonal indications and stem–branch correspondences.

For me, this is one of the finds that most clearly joins the two histories in our guide. As a manuscript it belongs in the story of how the Yi’s figures and names were transmitted. As a divination handbook it belongs in the story of how people made those figures useful. We shall come back to the Yizhan in the second part, alongside other systems that connect hexagrams with the calendar and the natural world.

Your Google Drive repository contains a particularly useful collection for further work: 海昏簡牘初論, Wang Ning’s preliminary examination, articles by Yi Xiao and Zhang Kebin, and additional studies of the Yizhan materials. Keeping those studies together will make this chapter easy to revise as new editions and interpretations appear.

From transmitted text to classic

The word 經 jing tells us something about a later stage in the book’s life. The Zhouyi came to be treated as a classic—a text that educated people read not merely to seek an oracle’s answer but to understand change, governance, moral conduct and the order of the world. The commentaries known as the Ten Wings became part of the received Yijing as generations of readers studied the older material through them.

The ancient oracle and the later classic enrich one another. We can read the old statements in their own setting and then enjoy seeing what later thinkers discovered in them. Wang Bi, Zhu Xi and countless other scholars approached the Yi with interests and methods that differed from one another. Their interpretations belong to the continuing history of a book that has never stopped attracting attention.

We have followed the Zhouyi as a text, from the traces of early figures to surviving manuscripts and the developing tradition of commentary. Now we can turn the question around. Instead of asking what the book says, let us ask what people did with the Yi. The answers take us from ancient consultations to the remarkable systems developed in the Han and later periods.

Sources and further reading