In the preface to this book, I quoted Li Xueqin 李學勤, the leading contemporary authority on all aspects of the cultural history of early China, as stating that he finds the Changes to be a “dangerous” book, one susceptible to manifold individual interpretations, and that if we are to have any hope of determining what the book meant in its earliest contexts it will almost certainly come from archaeological discoveries. We have been fortunate over the past several decades that China has produced archaeological discovery after archaeological discovery, some of them bearing directly on the Changes, and many others either tangentially related or providing evidence of the life and language of the time. It is this evidence that I have sought to introduce in this book. In chapter 1, I provided an overview of the sorts of discoveries that have been made, from oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1200–1045 B.C.) down to the daybooks (rishu 日書) of the Qin (221–207 B.C.) and Western Han (202 B.C.–A.D. 8) periods. I also briefly mentioned the three manuscripts that would become the focus of the next six chapters: the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, dating to about 300 B.C.; the Wangjiatai 王家台 Gui cang 歸藏, or Returning to Be Stored, dating to the mid-third century B.C.; and the Fuyang 阜陽 Zhou Yi with divination statements, buried in 165 B.C. Having provided detailed introductions to and also complete translations of each of these three manuscripts, it is now worth asking what we may have learned about the early history of the Changes and whether Li Xueqin’s confidence in the value of archaeology is warranted or not.
It seems to me that each of the three manuscripts has something different to teach us about the development of the Changes and its tradition. The Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi reveals, at the very least, that the text of the Changes had achieved virtually its definitive shape by no later than 300 B.C.1 Of course, the manuscript reveals nothing about how much earlier than this the text may have been written, or anything about the process by which it may have been written. But 300 B.C. is already quite significant. It takes us back well into the Warring States period of the classical philosophers, more than a century earlier than the previously earliest manuscript, the Mawangdui 馬王堆 manuscript discovered in 1973. Perhaps even more important, even though this is but a single manuscript and, as described in chapter 2, one unfortunately brought to light not by archaeologists but by tomb robbers, that it is written in the script of the southern state of Chu 楚 might suggest that the Changes was widely available throughout the various kingdoms of China’s Warring States period. Although some evidence in the traditional historical record has been understood to suggest that the Changes was available only in the northern state of Lu 魯, the home of Kongzi 孔子, or Confucius (551–479 B.C.), this impression is surely due just to the sample of literary evidence; the Chunqiu 春秋, or Springs and Autumns of Lu and its commentary, Zuo zhuan 左傳, the primary historical source for the Spring and Autumn period, cause Lu to loom larger in the history of this period than would otherwise be warranted.2 There is good reason to conclude that the Changes was not the exclusive preserve of any single state or even social class.
Unfortunately, the manuscript reveals little or nothing about just how widespread the text’s circulation may have been in Chu itself, or indeed how it may have been used.3 Clear evidence that at least two hands were responsible for the copying of the manuscript is susceptible to two radically different hypotheses in this regard. On the one hand, the more or less random inclusion of some 20 percent of the bamboo strips with different handwriting from that of the bulk of the manuscript (forty-five of the fifty-eight strips are in one consistent hand, and thirteen are in another) might suggest that the manuscript had become defective over time and required repair. It would perhaps be possible to interpret this as evidence of a relative paucity of copies of the text at the time, akin to the darning of old socks in times of scarcity. On the other hand, the very same evidence might suggest that the manuscript was copied in a scriptorium of some sort, with multiple scribes working on the same text, almost as on an assembly line. Such a view might lead one to conclude that copies could be produced in relatively great number. That all of the surviving bamboo strips or fragments share a uniform physical appearance, without any obvious difference in wear, perhaps favors the latter of these two hypotheses. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the evidence is far from conclusive, and both hypotheses are weak in any event.
Whether the Shanghai Museum manuscript suggests that the Changes was in relatively widespread circulation by 300 B.C. or not, the Wangjiatai Gui cang manuscripts do show conclusively that the Changes was by no means the only divination text in existence at the time. Classical sources had provided mention of not only the Gui cang but also other alternative divination texts, but it would seem that these texts had all been lost by the Han period. To be sure, the Gui cang was quoted in a number of medieval sources, but I have suggested that these quotations may have derived from yet another discovery of texts in a tomb: China’s first such recorded discovery, the tomb in Jijun 汲郡, present-day Henan province, opened by tomb robbers in A.D. 279. Unfortunately, virtually all the manuscripts from this tomb—including still another copy of the Changes—were lost soon after their discovery. Although some portion of the Gui cang must have survived and been available for quotation, it attracted little popular interest, and many scholars eventually came to regard the text as a late forgery. The Wangjiatai manuscripts, which, as we have seen, are strikingly consistent with the medieval quotations, in some cases matching them almost word for word, show that those suspicions of the text’s authenticity were entirely unfounded. True, the manuscripts show that the Gui cang does not date to the Shang dynasty, as the classical sources affirmed, but instead includes material from as late as the Spring and Autumn period. Nevertheless, the Wangjiatai manuscripts are proof positive that the Changes was not the only divination text in use during this crucial period.
The Fuyang manuscript of the Changes, probably copied in the very first years of the Han dynasty and put into its tomb in 165 B.C., is the latest of the three manuscripts studied in this book, and yet ironically enough it may reveal the most about how the Changes came to be produced. The portion of the manuscript that contains the hexagram and line statements of the Changes shows once again not only that the Changes was widely available in early China but also that its text was remarkably stable. However, it is the divination statements, attached to each line of the canonical text, that have properly attracted the greatest attention. In the preface to this book, I suggested that perhaps the crucial divergence in the understanding of how the Changes came to be produced and how it should now be read concerns the role played by the technical divination terms found in most line statements: ji 吉, “auspicious,” xiong 凶, “ominous,” li jian da ren 利見大人, “beneficial to see the great man,” li she da chuan 利涉大川, “beneficial to cross the great river,” and so forth. Are these necessary and intrinsic judgments on the omens of the text, as most traditional commentators would hold, or were they added to the text randomly over time in the course of divinations, as some contemporary scholars have argued? That many of the Fuyang manuscript’s divination statements are virtually indistinguishable from the divinatory terms seen in the Zhou Yi line statements themselves would seem to support the modern historical understanding of the text’s development. Of course, this manuscript was produced at a time when the text of the Changes was already in a final form, which the appended divination statements did nothing to alter. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that at an earlier time (how much earlier is still impossible to say), when the text of the Changes was still in the process of composition, similar divination statements could have been incorporated directly into the hexagram and line statements.
Regardless of when the hexagram and line statements of the Changes were written or when the text achieved its final form, the Fuyang manuscript—as, indeed, the other archaeologically discovered materials described in chapter 1—confirms the traditional view that the Changes originated and developed in the context of divination. In early China, the various methods that we subsume under the general rubric of divination were more than simply the narrow attempt to foretell future events, though they certainly included that purpose as well. In the broadest sense, they were attempts to communicate with the spirits, and especially with the ancestral spirits, apprising the spirits of the diviner’s intentions, enlisting their aid in the realization of these intentions, and interpreting the spirits’ response. As far as we can tell, people of all walks of life in early China, from kings down to the lowest-level scribes in whose tombs daybooks have been found, engaged in some version of these practices on a regular basis.4 Over time, the Changes came to have pride of place among these divination methods, being used by even one such as Confucius. If we can believe our traditional literary sources, Confucius and his followers provided a humanistic rationale for this essentially spiritual practice and succeeded in transforming the Changes into an explanation of the cosmos and a guide for human behavior. However, aside from the Mawangdui manuscript, discovered forty years ago, archaeology has not yet provided much evidence of these later developments,5 which are, in any event, the topic for another book. For now, it suffices that in at least one sense of the word, we have held in our hands the hands of the ancients, and thereby come to a better understanding of the role they played in crafting the Changes.