Before we look at an ancient method of divination, imagine the people who needed it. A ruler preparing an expedition, an official worried about his standing at court, a family concerned about illness: none of them was consulting the oracle merely to learn what a hexagram “means.” They wanted to know what might happen and what they should do.
The surviving records are wonderfully practical. They tell us about rain, harvests, journeys, rituals and the health of people whose names we sometimes know. Reading those records alongside the Zhouyi brings the history of the book to life.
What happened during a consultation?
The earliest surviving oracle-bone inscriptions from the Shang court often have a recognizable sequence. A date and the diviner are named; the matter to be divined is stated; the cracks are produced and interpreted. Sometimes the resulting inscription adds what the king said, and sometimes what happened afterwards. We can almost see the gathering around the heated shell.
Stalk divination gave a different kind of result. Rather than reading cracks, the diviner manipulated or counted stalks and obtained numerical arrangements. Different Yi traditions developed different ways to handle and understand such arrangements. The familiar whole and broken lines of the received hexagrams are one way of presenting an outcome, but the numerical evidence from excavated slips reveals a more varied history.
For an ancient diviner, the result was never just a decoration on paper. It was something to interpret in relation to the particular matter that had been presented. The method, the occasion, the question and the judgment all belonged together.
A divination in the Zuo zhuan
The Zuo zhuan 左傳, the great narrative commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, includes memorable accounts of consulting the Zhouyi. Some have named diviners, named questioners and outcomes expressed as a hexagram “going to” another hexagram. Others contain discussion of a line or an image. They show that in the world described by the text, the Yi could be part of political decisions and personal affairs.
One often discussed case concerns Mu Jiang 穆姜 and hexagram 52, Gen 艮, “Keeping Still.” Rather than taking the hexagram as a simple yes-or-no answer, the account sets the received words of the text beside a person’s conduct and circumstances. That is worth reading for the human situation as much as for the historical technique. The episode also reminds us that transmitted narratives have literary purposes; they are accounts written and edited by later people, not verbatim sound recordings of an early divination.
In my video series on early Yijing divination, I examine cases like these because it is enjoyable to follow the reasoning: what did the diviner actually say, and how did an image become an answer? You learn more from one complete case than from a dozen abstract rules.
Questions, statements and intentions
People today often formulate a neat question before consulting an oracle. The ancient evidence shows other ways of proceeding. A divination charge might present a proposed event: the king will hunt; there will be rain; an official will serve the ruler throughout the year without misfortune. The wording identifies the matter under consideration. The diviner then seeks an assessment of that matter.
This is useful in practice. You can ask, “Should I accept this position?” You can also present the situation that surrounds the choice, and let the answer draw your attention to a part of it you had not considered. I have often found that the way a question is held can be as revealing as the question’s exact wording. My videos on intention and the questioning of questions explore this further.
What did people do with an unfavourable result?
Ancient consultations were not always the end of a decision. An unfavourable or worrying indication might lead to an offering, another ritual or a change of course. In the Chu records from Baoshan, divination and prayers can appear in the same written account. The result tells us not merely what was expected but what somebody was prepared to do about it.
That makes the surviving records immediately recognizable. People wanted help negotiating events that mattered to them. The ancient rituals and social world are different from ours, but the impulse to seek another perspective is familiar.
In the next chapter we will meet an excavated handbook that lets us go beyond individual reports. It sets out a whole way of reading numerical figures through trigrams, seasons, bodies and other relationships: the extraordinary Qinghua Shifa.
Sources and further reading
- Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Milfoil Divination,” chapter 4 of The Origin and Early Development of the Zhou Changes (2022).
- Harmen Mesker, “Videos” archive and the Examples of Early Yijing Divination series.
- Harmen Mesker, De I Tjing stap voor stap (2017), “Stap 1: De vraag,” for the author’s approach to framing a consultation; historical claims are checked against later research.