At Baoshan we meet a man who died more than twenty-three centuries ago. His name was Shao Tuo 邵佗, and he was an important official in the state of Chu. The tomb in which he was buried contained legal papers, inventories and records of divination and prayer. They preserve pieces of an administrative and personal life, including concerns about his service to the ruler and his declining health.
If you want to know what divination meant in early China, it is hard to imagine a better place to begin.
The official and the question
One Baoshan record describes a consultation performed on behalf of Shao Tuo about serving the king during the coming year. The hope is that he will be free from trouble. The text identifies the occasion and the diviner, Chen Yi 陳乙, and records the numerical result in two parallel groups of six: 一六六八六六 and 一六六一一六.
Pause here. We have a named person, a named diviner, a period of time, a matter under consideration and the exact figures that emerged. The document is much closer to a case file than to an oracle-book chapter. We can see what prompted the consultation and what information the people involved preserved for later reference.
The judgment is broadly favourable: 恆貞吉, a continuing or long-term divination is auspicious. Yet it adds 少有憂于宮室, a small concern involving the palace chambers. The record then mentions prayers and offerings connected with that concern. The answer has been interpreted and acted upon. This is not an isolated prediction; it is an episode in someone’s working life.
The preserved figures also invite us back to the questions raised by the Shifa: what exactly did those numbers convey, and how did the diviner turn them into a judgment? Shaughnessy prints and discusses this Baoshan record, and Constance Cook has explored how Shifa-like rules might shed light on these consultations.
When health became the central concern
Other Baoshan records follow Shao Tuo’s illnesses. People sought to identify what was affecting him and what could be done. Some explanations and rituals concerned ancestors and other spiritual powers. The written records preserve divinations, indications of concern and ritual responses.
It would be a mistake to read these as modern medical notes; their world had other ways of identifying causes and forms of assistance. Yet the humanity of the situation is immediate. Somebody is ill. People are worried. Several diviners are consulted. Different rituals are considered. What looks from a distance like “ancient divination” becomes an attempt to care for a real person.
Cook’s article A Fatal Case of Gu Poisoning in Fourth-Century BC China? takes the illness-related consultations seriously as historical evidence and compares their results with the Shifa. Her proposed interpretation opens an interesting discussion about medicine, ritual and the divinatory body. The question mark in the title is meaningful: it signals an investigation, not a diagnosis we should simply repeat as established fact.
Geling: following several consultations
The tomb materials from Geling 葛陵 at Xincai 新蔡 preserve another set of consultations concerning illness. One sequence discussed by Shaughnessy records three successive divinations directed at a continuing health problem. An initial favourable long-term judgment is qualified by an indication of slow recovery. A further consultation addresses the concern that an afflicting influence might be involved. The divination does not stand alone; it leads to another question and another judgment.
Here we can follow the logic of the people involved. They receive an answer, focus on the part that needs attention, and consult again. The numerical figures appear within a series of events that developed as the illness was experienced.
This is also an excellent illustration of why the Shifa matters. When a handbook’s tables and examples can be compared with actual records, we have an opportunity to test how an ancient interpretive system might have worked rather than merely trying to reconstruct one from later rules.
Divination and the ordinary world
The Chu manuscripts include consultations about service at court, health, ritual duties and residence. Other excavated records widen the picture still further. These documents remind us that an ancient oracle operated within relationships: between a ruler and an official, between a patient and a ritual specialist, between the living and their ancestors.
The most valuable lesson, for a reader interested in the Yijing today, may be that a consultation was never an abstract exercise. The figures acquired importance because they concerned particular people at particular moments. You can learn the mechanics of a method, but its human setting helps explain why anyone took the trouble to use it.
The next stage of the story takes us into the Han dynasty, where the Yi acquired new associations with time, natural cycles and an extraordinary collection of divinatory verses: the Yilin.
Sources and further reading
- Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Milfoil Divination”, especially the Baoshan and Geling consultations and their numerical results (2022).
- Constance A. Cook, “A Fatal Case of Gu 蠱 Poisoning in Fourth-Century BC China?”, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 44 (2016), 123–149.
- “Which Gods If Any,” in Ancient Divination and Experience (Oxford, 2019), for the ritual and personal contexts of Chu divination records.