Historical Layers and Interpretations of the Yijing Tradition

Hello, and welcome to the course. We begin with a deceptively simple question: what, historically, is “the I Ching”? Before asking how an artist might use it, we need to know whether a claim concerns an early divination text, a later commentary, or a still later interpretation. Those are related objects, but they are not interchangeable.

This opening module establishes the Yijing’s textual and practical foundations. In this lesson, you will distinguish the Zhouyi core, the received Yijing, the Ten Wings, and later commentarial traditions by their contents, functions, and supporting evidence. Later lessons will examine consultation methods and probabilities; for now, the aim is to learn what sort of source you are looking at when someone says, “The I Ching teaches…”

Central question: How did an early divination text become a classic that readers could also treat as a work of philosophy?

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One name, several textual objects

Yijing means “Classic of Changes”; I Ching is an older romanization of the same name. Zhouyi, roughly “Changes of the Zhou,” ordinarily names the older textual core, although historical writers have not always used these titles with perfect consistency. The distinction is therefore a research tool, not a claim that every edition labels its contents identically.

The Zhouyi core contains 64 six-line figures, or hexagrams, together with a name and statement for each hexagram and statements associated with its individual lines. A line may be solid or broken, giving $2^6=64$ possible six-line configurations. The statements include images, prognoses, and language relevant to deciding how to act. Their older role was bound up with divination: a procedure selected a figure or lines, and a reader related the associated text to a particular situation. A procedure selects a passage; it does not, by itself, settle what that passage means.

Bryan Van Norden’s lecture provides a compact visual introduction. Watch for a particularly important distinction: a line statement belonging to the older core is not the same thing as a later commentary about that line.

The Ten Wings, also called the Yizhuan or “Commentaries on the Changes,” are a collection of later interpretive texts. Some discuss hexagram judgments and images; others address the sequence of hexagrams, trigrams, or broader questions about change and the world. “Ten” refers to the conventional division into ten parts, not to ten works demonstrably written together by one person. Where the core presents an image or prognosis, a Wing may ask what that material reveals about conduct, order, or transformation.

Read W. Li’s short introduction to put names to these parts. This is secondary scholarship describing textual components, not an excerpt from the ancient text itself.

A received Yijing is the classic as transmitted through an established textual tradition, rather than a newly excavated manuscript copy. In many presentations, it brings the Zhouyi core together with the Ten Wings. “Received” does not mean “original,” nor does it mean that every reader encountered one identical layout: commentaries may be printed alongside the passages they explain or presented separately. That editorial choice matters. A philosophical explanation printed immediately below an older line statement can easily look like part of that line’s original meaning.

Finally, later commentarial traditions comprise subsequent readers’ sustained interpretations of the classic. Wang Bi, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi, whom we will study later, did not write the Zhouyi core or the Ten Wings. They inherited and interpreted a text that already had a history. Nor do they represent one unchanging “Chinese view”: different commentators asked different questions of the same passages.

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A layer is a function and an evidence claim

A useful first map is chronological, but chronology alone is insufficient. Ask what each layer does and what could support a claim about its origin.

Object	Principal function	What can establish its history?
Zhouyi core	Supplies hexagram figures, names, hexagram statements, and line statements used in divination	Early manuscript witnesses, comparison of wording, linguistic study, and records of use
Ten Wings / Yizhuan	Interpret and extend the core, including philosophical readings	Differences of language and ideas among commentaries; manuscript witnesses; evidence of circulation and citation
Received Yijing	Transmits a canonical form of core and commentaries to later readers	Comparison of transmitted editions with excavated versions and their arrangements
Later commentaries	Argue for particular ways of understanding the inherited classic	Datable authors, editions, quotations, and documented interpretive debates

This is not a story in which a “pure oracle” was abruptly replaced by “pure philosophy.” Divinatory use continued, while philosophical readings developed. The distinction is between textual layers and interpretive functions, not mutually exclusive boxes into which every reader must fit.

Tradition credits Fuxi with discovering the figures, King Wen with hexagram material, the Duke of Zhou with line texts, and Confucius with the Ten Wings. That account is historically important because it helped authorize the classic. Yet the existence of an attribution is evidence of what later people believed about authorship, not proof that the attributed person wrote the passage. Modern scholars instead compare manuscripts, language, and intellectual contexts. Even then, they may disagree on how early a commentary arose or how its parts were assembled.

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What manuscripts can—and cannot—tell us

Archaeological finds make the distinction between a received text and an early witness concrete. Excavated copies show substantial continuities with familiar Zhouyi wording, but also differences of characters, ordering, and associated commentary. A manuscript can demonstrate that some material circulated by the time that copy was made. It cannot, on its own, identify the first author or prove that all related passages were originally conceived as one book.

Sutong Hao’s review of Edward L. Shaughnessy’s research is useful here because it identifies both a major scholarly shift and the evidence behind it. Read it as a reviewer’s account of Shaughnessy’s arguments, not as though you were reading Shaughnessy’s book directly.

Notice the calibrated claim: Shaughnessy argues that the core’s hexagram and line statements had a largely recognizable form by around 300 BCE. That is not a date for the creation of every statement. Hao also reports Shaughnessy’s account of commentaries that re-read the divination text as a system of associations encompassing the world. Van Norden emphasizes a late Warring States or early Han setting for the Ten Wings; the review reports a different argument about how early some commentarial materials may have arisen. The safe conclusion for this lesson is their historical and interpretive distinction from the older core, not an artificially precise single composition date for the entire collection.

For a closer look at manuscript evidence, W. Li discusses the Mawangdui silk manuscript and other excavated materials. The Mawangdui hexagram sequence differs from the received sequence; differences in associated commentarial texts further complicate the idea of one timeless, uniformly transmitted book.

Here is the evidentiary discipline we will use throughout the course: a textual resemblance is evidence of continuity; a variant is evidence that transmission involved choices; neither automatically reveals a single original meaning. That principle will later matter when we ask which edition an artist actually consulted.

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Worked example: reading without collapsing the layers

In Van Norden’s lecture, the all-solid hexagram Qian appears with a hexagram statement and individual line statements. His rendering of the second line includes the image of a dragon appearing in the fields and an indication that encountering a great person would be advantageous. That line statement belongs to the Zhouyi core. Its image does not yet require us to assume a single, fully articulated ethical or cosmological theory.

Now suppose a reader encounters, next to it, a commentary explaining what the hexagram or its imagery means for an exemplary person’s conduct. That explanatory move belongs to a commentarial layer, even if a modern edition places it on the same page. A later commentator might then dispute how to apply that explanation. We have three distinguishable claims:

1. Core-text claim: a particular image and prognosis occur in a line statement.
2. Commentarial claim: a later text draws a broader lesson from such material.
3. Historical claim: a named reader or school understood that lesson in a particular way.

The first claim can be checked against witnesses of the core text; the second against the relevant commentary; the third against evidence for that reader’s interpretation. No amount of enthusiasm for the third claim turns it into the original wording of the first.

This distinction also prevents a tempting anachronism. Six figures made from two line types can be represented as binary strings—a useful observation for your later computational work. It does not follow that the early Zhouyi authors conceived of a digital code, or that every later cosmological reading was built into the earliest line statements. A formal representation we devise today, a historically documented reading, and an artist’s productive reinterpretation are different kinds of claim.

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Conclusion

The Zhouyi core supplies the older figures and statements associated with divination. The Ten Wings are later interpretive texts that substantially enlarge what readers can do with that material. The received Yijing is a historically transmitted classic, not an untouched original; later commentators continue its interpretation rather than constituting one timeless voice. Manuscripts and textual comparison let us investigate these distinctions, while leaving some questions of dating and authorship open.

That layered view gives this course its first safeguard. When an artist says they used “the I Ching,” our next question is not merely how they used it, but which text, translation, commentary, or procedure supplied the material they used. In the next lesson, we will turn from textual layers to the hexagram itself: how its lines, trigrams, and changing lines are identified.