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Yijing Research

The World of the Shifa

There is something wonderful about discovering a manual that nobody has consulted for more than two thousand years. Open the Qinghua 《筮法》 Shifa and you do not find the familiar sixty-four chapters of the Zhouyi. You find a working arrangement of numerical trigrams, examples, tables and correspondences. It is an invitation to stand beside a different kind of ancient diviner.

A handbook on bamboo

The Shifa belongs to the collection of Warring States bamboo manuscripts now held by Tsinghua University. Its surviving strips, roughly sixty in number, preserve what seems to be a coherent divination handbook. Some parts present cases. Others set out rules and associations: numbers, trigrams, directions, seasons, parts of the body and matters of ritual concern. Constance Cook and Zhao Lu have translated and studied the text in Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching.

What first catches the eye is the notation. Results are written numerically. The figures are organized as four trigrams, often understood as two parallel groups of six numbers, rather than as the single received hexagram that most modern readers would expect. This arrangement opens an entirely different set of relationships for interpretation.

The Shifa gives us another way of working with the lines: read the numerical trigrams and their relationships with the help of the tables preserved in the manuscript.

Numbers and trigrams

The number 六 appears frequently, and what looks like the stroke 一 is conventionally examined as a numerical value, often discussed as seven. Other values also occur. Researchers including Chen and Cook have compared the distributions of these numbers with earlier numerical gua and with Chu divination records. That work gives us a way to investigate not only what the symbols look like but how such results might have been produced.

The tables of the Shifa associate trigrams with features of the world. A trigram can be considered in relation to a season, a direction, the body or the forces influencing a particular affair. Some of these associations will feel familiar if you already know later trigram traditions. Others will be less familiar, which is part of the appeal: we get a glimpse of how one early group organized its knowledge.

It is tempting to look only for a prediction, but the relationship between the figures is just as interesting. Two trigrams can be compared, set against one another or read together with the occasion of the consultation. The manuscript supplies a framework for doing so. This is the sort of approach I particularly enjoy teaching: once you know what to look for in a figure, the lines begin to offer information before you read a conventional hexagram statement.

A result is a scene, not a code to memorize

Imagine that a diviner has obtained two groups of numerical figures. Their values matter, but so do the trigrams they form and the associations available in the handbook. The interpreter can ask whether a particular trigram is favoured by the season, how the pair relates to the question, and what the indicated image suggests about the matter at hand.

The manuscript supplies examples and tables that let us work through such relationships. In this early tradition, the trigrams themselves carry much of the interpretation. A table of body parts or seasons is therefore a practical aid: it helps the diviner decide which aspect of the result concerns the matter under examination.

The difference is especially interesting when compared with later methods that also emphasize figures and relationships. Similarities do not automatically mean that one text descends directly from the other, but they allow us to ask how certain ways of thinking with trigrams travelled across time.

The body and the spirits

The manuscript includes correspondences relating to the body, to affliction and to spiritual influences. Constance Cook’s study of the Baoshan records uses these materials to explore a possible relationship between the Shifa’s way of interpreting figures and the divinations performed for Shao Tuo. More recent research has returned to the overlap between illnesses, ritual action and spirit-related categories in early texts.

Here the Shifa becomes much more than a collection of technical tables. The correspondences belonged to a world in which illness, obligations, divine relationships and the passage of time were interwoven. When someone was ill, divination might suggest which concern or ritual relationship needed attention. The records give us an unusually close view of how bodily illness and ritual obligations were understood together.

A different branch of the family

The discovery of the Shifa has enlarged the meaning of “early Yi divination.” There was no single, uniform way to obtain and interpret a pattern. We know of texts centred on hexagram statements, others recording numerical sequences, and still others like the Shifa preserving rules for comparing trigrams.

I would encourage anyone interested in hexagrams to spend some time with a diagram from the Shifa, even if the full system is not something they wish to practise. It is a reminder that the eight trigrams could be surprisingly versatile long before later manuals assembled the methods most familiar today.

And we have an excellent way to see such divination in action. The next chapter turns from a handbook to the records of actual people: the consultations preserved at Baoshan and Geling.

Sources and further reading