A short history of the I Ching

The earliest layer of the I Ching is the Zhouyi (周易, "Changes of Zhou"), composed during the Western Zhou dynasty — most scholars place it in the late 9th century BCE. It evolved from earlier oracle-bone and yarrow-stalk divination practices that predate the Zhou by centuries.^[?]

Tradition credits King Wen of Zhou with arranging the 64 hexagrams — supposedly while imprisoned by the last Shang king — and his son the Duke of Zhou with the line texts. Modern scholarship treats this authorship as composite and later: the names anchor the story, but the text accreted over generations.^[?]

Between the late Warring States period and the early Han, philosophers wrapped the divination text in ten commentaries known as the Shi Yi (十翼, "Ten Wings"), reading the hexagrams as patterns of nature, ethics, and change. Tradition attributes them to Confucius; modern scholarship treats them as composite, written by later scholars across several generations.^[?] Once the Wings were attached, the I Ching was no longer just a divination manual; it was a worldview.

Under Emperor Wu of Han, the I Ching was included among the Five Classics — the foundational corpus of Confucian learning. For the next roughly two thousand years it was required reading for every imperial civil servant.^[?]

The Wei-dynasty scholar Wang Bi (226–249) wrote an influential commentary that drew on Daoist as well as Confucian readings. His tradition of reading the hexagrams for ethical and existential meaning — later called yìlǐ ("meaning and principle") — set the dominant interpretive register for centuries to come.^[?]

The Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200) argued, against much of the philosophical reading of his day, that the I Ching should be understood as a divination text first. His commentary Zhouyi Benyi set out precise guidance for how to read a hexagram, including how to handle multiple changing lines.^[?] The approach this app exposes as the Chu Hsi style follows his tradition.

Jesuit missionaries in 17th- and 18th-century China translated fragments of the I Ching into Latin and exchanged them with European savants. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — who had been developing his own theory of binary arithmetic — began corresponding with the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet around 1700; Bouvet showed him the binary pattern in the trigrams and hexagrams.^[?]

The Scottish missionary-scholar James Legge published a landmark English translation of the I Ching as part of his Sacred Books of the East series.^[?]

The German missionary Richard Wilhelm produced an influential German rendering, working with Chinese scholar Lao Naixuan; it was translated into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, with a foreword by Carl Jung. The Wilhelm/Baynes translation defined 20th-century Western reception of the I Ching.^[?]

Excavations at Mawangdui in Hunan province uncovered a tomb sealed in 168 BCE containing silk manuscripts — including an early version of the I Ching.^[?] Scholars have noted differences between this text and the received version, evidence that the I Ching we know is one version among several that circulated in antiquity.

Alfred Huang's The Complete I Ching preserves and explains, among other things, the line-selection method this app exposes as the Master Yin style. His translation is one of many late-20th-century English editions — alongside Blofeld, Karcher, and Shaughnessy's Mawangdui edition — that have kept the I Ching active in the contemporary imagination.^[?]