Unearthing the Changes

In China, the Yi jing 易經, or Classic of Changes, also known as the Zhou Yi 周易, or Zhou Changes, or, more simply (and as I refer to it here), as the Yi 易, or Changes,¹ has traditionally been regarded as the most profound expression of human wisdom. It is supposed to have been created by four of China’s greatest sages: Fuxi 伏羲, who is credited with the establishment of marriage, among many other cultural institutions; Wen Wang 文王 (ca. 1110–1050 B.C.), the founder of the great Zhou dynasty (1056–256); Zhou Gong 周公 (ca. 1090–1032 B.C.), a son of Wen Wang and the person credited in large part with the consolidation of the Zhou founding; and Kongzi 孔子, or Confucius (551–479 B.C.), perhaps the greatest sage of all, born five hundred years after the death of Wen Wang. Early accounts of the text’s history hold that the basic text originated in the performance of divination—the attempt to determine the future—one of the predominant aspects of religious life in ancient China; both the earliest attested uses of the text and the enigmatic images contained in it do seem to reflect this origin. However, by no later than the Warring States period (5th c.–221 B.C.), the Changes was regarded as one of the Six Classics and understood as a repository of wisdom about the nature of the universe. Over the following two millennia, this understanding came to be ever more elaborated, with the great neo-Confucian scholars of the Song dynasty (960–1278), in particular, finding in it a guide to living an ethical life. In the West, on the other hand, aside from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716) supposed discovery of binary mathematics in the numerological structure of the sixty-four six-line pictures (the so-called hexagrams) upon which the text is based, the Changes has received rather less attention—especially from professional scholars.²

I often feel that studying the Zhou Changes is very “dangerous.” The text of the Zhou Changes is arcane and simple, but subtle and abstruse; you can explain it this way, but it is also not hard to explain it that way. It’s bad enough if you borrow the terminology of the Yi to express your own thoughts, but if you want to find the original meaning of the Yi, it is really too difficult. One very common result is that one constructs upon the foundation of one’s own imagination a seven-story pagoda, the soaring eaves and complex structure of which give the architect the sense that it is entirely natural.⁴

As recently as 1997, when Professor Li was writing these remarks, the only direct archaeological evidence pertaining to the Changes available to the scholarly public was the early Handynasty (202 B.C.–A.D. 220) Mawangdui 馬王堆 manuscript (the manuscript was buried in 168 B.C.), which had been discovered in 1973 in Changsha 長沙, Hunan.5 In the years since then, “the earth has not cherished its treasure,” as the Chinese saying puts it; three different ancient manuscripts of or related to the Changes have been published in China. In the year 2000 came the first comprehensive, even if still informal, reports on two very different kinds of manuscripts: another Han-dynasty manuscript of the Changes, discovered in 1977 at Shuanggudui 雙古堆 in Fuyang 阜陽, Anhui,⁶ and two third-century B.C. manuscripts thought to be of the ancient Gui cang 歸藏, or Returning to Be Stored, that had been unearthed in 1993 at Wangjiatai 王家台, Hubei.⁷ This latter text is reputed to have been an alternative divination manual to that of the Changes but one that had been lost—at least for the most part—since no later than the fourth century A.D. These two manuscripts were formally published in 2004. In the same year came the publication of a still earlier manuscript, this one of the Changes itself, that had been robbed some years earlier from a tomb and then purchased by the Shanghai Museum; physical and paleographic evidence suggests that this manuscript was copied in the late fourth century B.C.⁸ Inspired by Li Xueqin’s advice that archaeology can play a key role in understanding the historical development of the Changes, I present these three manuscripts as the focus of the present book.

Although Herrlee Creel was certainly correct in saying of the Changes that “the language of this book is very concise, even cryptic,” he was exaggerating more than a little when he went on to wonder whether “it was written at a time when the Zhous had not yet learned to write very clear Chinese.” The text is certainly open to multiple interpretations; indeed, this openness is one of the great hallmarks of the text, in some ways what makes it the unique classic that it is.⁹ Nevertheless, it is understandable—so long as one is clear about the historical context within which it is to be understood. One of the greatest problems in dealing with the Changes is that it is two (or more) different books subsumed under a single title. As most readers will know, the core of the text is organized around sixty-four graphs or “pictures” (known in Chinese as gua hua 卦畫), each of which is composed of six lines, either solid (—) or broken (- -); these have come to be known in the West as hexagrams (gua 卦).¹⁰ Each of these sixty-four hexagrams is supplied with a name and seven brief texts: a “hexagram statement” (gua ci 卦辭) understood to represent the entire hexagram, and “line statements” (yao ci 爻辭) for each of the six lines.¹¹ The hexagram statement is usually quite formulaic, often including little more than the hexagram name and one or more injunctions for (or against) certain actions.¹² The statement for Xian 咸,

, “Feeling,” the thirty-first hexagram in the traditional sequence, is more or less representative:

Whatever the word xian might originally have meant, it is easy to trace the omen’s gradual progression up the lines of the hexagram, from the “toe” in the First Six line up to the “cheek, jowls, and tongue” of the Top Six line statement. Although most other hexagram texts have a less-explicit structure than does Xian, throughout the text there is a pronounced tendency to differentiate the image according to the line’s placement within the hexagram. Thus, words that describe or can be associated with low or low-lying features tend to appear in the bottom line or lines, whereas words that describe high features tend to appear in the top lines.¹⁶ To a great extent, it is the changes that these omens go through as they progress through the lines of the hexagrams that make the Changes the unique text that it is.

Perhaps the most fundamental divergence in the reading of Changes line statements involves the divinatory prognostications; should they be read as integral to the image proper, or are they more or less ad hoc appendages or accretions to the text? If they are to be interpreted as integral to the image proper, then why does “feeling its thigh” in the Nine in the Third line statement give rise to the prognostication “going: distress,” whereas for “feeling its back” in the Nine in the Fifth statement there should be “no regrets”? And how are we to explain the seeming contradiction in the single Six in the Second line statement in which “feeling its calf” is followed by both prognostications “ominous” and “residing: auspicious”? Much of the long commentarial tradition devoted to the Changes has sought to explain how and why individual images should be either auspicious or ominous, or—as in this case—both. Many of the exegetical principles employed in these explanations are anticipated already in the earliest canonical commentaries and were then made explicit in the commentary of Wang Bi 王弼 (A.D. 226–249), which in turn became the foundation for the orthodox commentarial tradition of the Zhou Yi zheng yi 周易正義, or Correct Meaning of the Zhou Changes. Richard Lynn has provided a succinct account of these principles:

According to these principles, the Six in the Second line is correctly positioned (a yin line in a yin position) and has an appropriate relationship with the equally well positioned Nine in the Fifth line (forming what Lynn refers to as a resonate pair). In traditional Changes exegesis, the second line corresponds to the place of the minister in society, whereas the fifth line corresponds to the ruler. This might explain why in this line “residing” should be “auspicious”; within the distinctively conservative social and political worldview that produced these exegetical principles, a “soft” minister was expected to keep to his place and not make any movement toward usurping the place of the ruler. So long as this was the case, the Nine in the Fifth line should have “no regrets.” Similar explanations can be offered for the other determinations, though none of these principles explains particularly well why the Six in the Second line should first be “ominous.”

Scholars who attempt to recover the original meaning of the Changes as a divination manual are less troubled by the apparent contradictions of the determinations. They tend to regard these terms as prognostications produced at different times by different diviners, some of whom may have interpreted the text of the Changes—and even the nature of divination—differently.¹⁸ To these scholars, attempting to derive consistent principles to explain why a particular line should be either “auspicious” or “ominous” is anachronistic, owing more to later philosophical perspectives than to the early divinatory context.

A similar divergence is seen in how to understand the sequence of the sixty-four hexagrams. The text is traditionally organized around pairs of hexagrams, related either by inversion of a single hexagram picture, such that the top line of one hexagram becomes the first line of the next hexagram, the fifth line the second, the fourth the third, and so on (e.g., Ji Ji 既濟, “Already Completed,”

, and Wei Ji, 未濟, “Not Yet Completed,”

, the sixty-third and sixty-fourth hexagrams in the traditional sequence), or, in the cases where this would produce the same hexagram picture, changing all lines to their opposite (e.g., Qian 乾, “Vigorous,”

, and Kun 坤, “Compliant,”

, the first and second hexagrams). One of the canonical commentaries traditionally attributed to Confucius, the Xu gua 序卦, or “Sequencing the Hexagrams,” explains the sequence as a natural progression through time. Each hexagram necessarily results from the preceding hexagram and gives rise in turn to the hexagram following it. The sequence begins with Qian and Kun, generally thought to represent “heaven” and “earth,” respectively:

There is no need to quote this commentary at greater length. Its reasoning never becomes any more compelling. Indeed, even within the canonical commentaries there is evidence that the Changes could be arranged in a different sequence: the Za gua 雜卦, or “Mixed Hexagrams,” commentary reflects one such different sequence of hexagrams. When the Mawangdui manuscript from the early Han dynasty was discovered in 1973 and revealed yet another radically different sequence,²⁰ it called into question again the antiquity of the received sequence. Despite Li Xueqin’s suggestion that archaeology can play a key role in gaining an objective understanding of the historical development of the Changes, at least in terms of this particular question, the archaeological evidence that has surfaced to date has been more effective in raising new questions than in resolving old ones.²¹ But for those of us who appreciate new questions just as much—if not more than—new answers, archaeology can indeed play a key role in understanding the early history of the Changes.

The purpose of the present book is to introduce recently discovered archaeological evidence pertaining to the Changes, especially the three manuscripts mentioned in the preceding section: the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Gui cang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi. Each of these manuscripts is presented in two separate chapters: the first chapter provides a narrative description of the discovery of the manuscript, its nature, and its significance for the history of the Changes, and the second chapter provides a more or less complete translation of the manuscript.²² For both the Shanghai Museum and Fuyang manuscripts, I also provide translations of the corresponding portions of the received text. These translations are not intended to be definitive in any sense of the term; they are provided for comparison’s sake, to illustrate, however modestly, how the manuscripts differ from the received text and how these differences might help to understand the development of the Changes.