Introduction to I-Ching by Jonathan Porter
When in early antiquity Pao Hsi ruled the world, he looked upward and contemplated the images in the heavens; he looked downward and contemplated the patterns on the earth. He contemplated the markings of birds and beasts and the adaptations to the regions. He proceeded directly from himself and indirectly from objects. Then he invented the eight trigrams in order to enter into connection with the virtues of the light of the gods and to regulate the condition of all beings. (Wilhelm 1967, 328-29
Chinese legend tells us that the primordial culture hero Fu His (Pao Hsi), upon observing the naturally occurring patterns in the heavens and on earth, invented the trigrams, the eight combinations and permutations of three divided and undivided lines, as emblems of cosmic processes. At a somewhat later time the eight trigrams were joined in the sixty-four hexagrams of six divided and undivided lines. Later still, in the eleventh century B.C.E., the architects of the new Chou order, King Wen and his son the Duke of Chou, who overthrew the ancient Shang dynasty, assembled these emblems or diagrams in a book of divination that came to be called the Chou I, the "Changes of the Chou," and added text and commentaries to the individual lines.
Finally, eight hundred years later, in the waning years of the Chou, during an era marked by vigorous philosophical, political, and social discourse among different schools of thought and their individual exponents, more extensive commentaries and explanatory texts were appended to the work. These additional commentaries were attributed to Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) and his disciples, and brought the work, now known as the I Ching, the "Classic of Change," into its present form.
The history of the I Ching, part myth and part fact, suggests two explanations for its origins, which reflect divergent interpretations of its significance. In one view, the I Ching evolved from divination practices used by the Chou people over many centuries. In this sense the text was a compilation of numerous individual records of divinations that gradually achieved coherence. This origin is still evident in the references to specific incidents and events in the explanations of the lines of the hexagrams. Another view sees the I Ching as a consciously composed work, attributed to one or more authors-- traditionally King Wen and the Duke of Chou--to which more extensive commentary was later added. In a larger sense these two views are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
Whatever truth or fantasy may lie in the legend of its origins, the I Ching is unquestionably a very ancient book in its fundamental conception. If the interpretations and commentaries date from a later time and reflect the ideological and political agenda of their composers, the constituent elements of the diagrams no doubt arose in the techniques and individual records of divinations collected together over an extended period of time.
The I Ching, then, is really two books in one, a divination manual on the one hand and a wisdom text on the other. The second seems to have evolved from the first, much earlier work. By the early imperial era of the Han (206 B.C.E. - 220 C.E.) the I Ching had acquired the status of a classic, alongside the other venerable texts of the early Chou, including the Shu Ching (Book of Documents), the Shih Ching (Book of Poetry), the Ch'un Ch'iu (Spring and Autumn Annals), and the Chou Li (Rites of Chou). In subsequent ages it assumed pride of place as the most esteemed and venerated of the classics, in spite of--or rather perhaps because of--its cryptic nature. Throughout the imperial age Confucian scholars and literati returned again and again to ponder its meaning. From this extended enterprise emerged a vast corpus of commentary and interpretation on the work, often driven by changing intellectual and scholarly movements. As late as the last imperial period of the Ch'ing (1644-1912), the I Ching was the subject of intense textual exegesis associated with the new intellectual fashion of evidential research. Yet it never lost its powerful scriptural authority.
The I Ching in each of its aspects, as divination manual and as a book of philosophy, continued to have different followings down to the present. Some have insisted on separating the two conceptually, if not physically, rejecting the importance of one or the other aspect. But Chu Hsi, the great Confucian synthesizer and founder of the neo-Confucian movement in the twelfth century, maintained that the two aspects were inseparable.
As a divination manual, the I Ching originated from a very specific historical context. The Chou people arose as vassals of the Shang, the civilization that dominated north China along the Yellow River basin from the seventeenth to the eleventh centuries B.C.E. The Shang was ruled by a powerful, centralized dynastic state, whose kings derived their legitimacy from primal ancestor deities. To communicate with their divine royal ancestors and thereby sustain the legitimacy of their dynasty, the Shang kings employed a method of divination using animal bones. Large bones of cattle, including the scapula and leg bones, and the plastron of tortoises, were flattened and dried. To consult an oracle, the shaman who conducted the ceremony made an incision on one side of the flat bone. A hot instrument was applied to the incision which produced cracks radiating from the incision. These cracks were interpreted by the shaman as a response by the ancestors to a question or problem posed by the king. Often the question and the response, and sometimes the outcome, were inscribed on the bone and kept as a record. These "oracle bones," dating as far back as the seventeenth century B.C.E., are the first written record of Chinese civilization and establish the chronology as well as a picture of much of the culture and life of the Shang ruling class.
The Chou, whose homeland was centered on the upper reaches of the Yellow River basin west of the Shang, possessed different cultural and social traditions from the Shang. The Chou method of consulting an oracle involved the complex manipulation of fifty stalks of the yarrow plant to produce a hexagram, a diagram of six divided and undivided lines. Divided lines represent yin, the female, passive principle, and earth; undivided lines represent yang, the male, active principle, and heaven. By consulting commentaries on the meaning and context of the lines in the hexagram, the order and number of the yin and yang lines was then interpreted as a response to a question posed. The significant cultural difference between the Shang and the Chou methods of divination was that the Chou method required no intermediary. Furthermore, the ultimate grounding of the meaning of the hexagrams was not the Chou (or Shang) divine ancestors, but a more universal conception of Heaven (t'ien) that was the foundation of the moral order of the cosmos. Heaven replaced the Shang divine ancestors as the source of legitimation for ruling All Under Heaven. Thus the oracle of the hexagrams was not an instrument of legitimation of the Chou kings and was accessible to all who wished to practice it. We see here the secularization of the priestly shaman function that put the cosmic order within the reach of lay interpretation. This was as revolutionary a development as the Chou conquest of the Shang and their establishment of a new world order in the eleventh century B.C.E. The I Ching has retained its function as a divination manual ever since that time.
In its very nature as a divination manual, the visual component of the I Ching is preeminent. As the legend tells us, Pao Hsi contemplated the images in the heavens and the patterns of the earth, the markings of the birds and beasts and their regional adaptations. Pao Hsi translated these observations of his surroundings into concrete symbols that come to us as the trigrams and the hexagrams.
The Chinese traditionally viewed the cosmos as well as metaphysical abstractions in concrete and highly visual terms. The Chinese language both encouraged and was itself the product of this approach. Chinese characters, as virtually immutable symbols, are visual representations of things, even when they refer to non-visual concepts or ideas. Not only common nouns, but verbs, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, and articles—to the extent that they can be differentiated at all in this way in Chinese--are concrete images of things, actions, and qualities, even if they are borrowed from other usages for these purposes. Chinese characters never lose their concrete, visual significance, however abstract their immediate application may be. The reader of a Chinese text may not be immediately conscious of the representational significance of the characters on the page. But it is there and accessible to one if one chooses it to be. Characters thus carry a powerful visual presence as organized patterns representing the surrounding world.
The hexagrams, of course, unlike Chinese written characters, do not pose as representations of things. But indirectly they nevertheless refer to the images and organized features and their constant mutations that Pao Hsi was supposed to have observed as he looked around him at the natural and human worlds. In this respect the hexagrams provide a visual foundation or code for the organismic cosmos (of which I shall say more below), from which its operation may be understood and reconstructed and--to some extent--predicted. The hexagrams may therefore be viewed as a sort of "genetic code" of the cosmos, much in the way that the genetic structure of a biological organism may be interpreted in order to understand its behavior and features. And analogously to the way that genes assume a concrete, helical structure, in which combinations constantly change, the hexagrams also assume a concrete structure in relation to each other in a state of constant change.
Of course, it is not quite that simple. After consulting the oracle, and deriving a hexagram in response to a specific question or situation, one is confronted with a brief but cryptic "decision," another brief evocation of the "image," and a series of equally cryptic statements interpreting each line of the hexagram, starting from the first line at the bottom, within the context of the other lines of that particular hexagram. The questioner must try to interpret the oracle's statements in terms of the questioner's own situation. Therein lies the immense appeal of the I Ching as a divination text and the source of the reverence in which it has been held for so long. Imbedded in the ostensibly simple patterns of the diagrams are multiple layers of complex images that must be unpacked, made intelligible, and applied to one's own situation.
The I Ching, then, is about situations. A situation is different from a fixed, determined or preordained outcome. Each situation has a context, and a potential for change in complex ways, depending on action contemplated. Hence the I Ching is not a method of divining the inexorable will of a superior intelligence or divine power in whose hands one's fate lies; it is not a way to read what is already "written." Rather it deals with the contingencies within an unfolding situation. The lines of the hexagram, read from bottom to top, describe the trajectory of a situation, where a choice among contingent actions exist at each stage. Each line may be changed from one state to the other, divided to undivided or undivided to divided, to explore the potential consequences of change at each level. Offering in this way almost endless possibilities of understanding virtually any particular situation, the systematic structure of the I Ching offers a kind of "science of situations."
At this point it is clear that we have passed beyond the boundary of a divination manual and have entered the realm of a book of cosmology or philosophy. Here, the predominant visual character of the I Ching ceases to be so important, though it is never absent from the nature of the basic diagrams. Instead, it is the more abstract moral order of Heaven that is seen to lie behind the patterns and mutations of the hexagrams and the commentaries on them that becomes a separate new focus of attention. Longer commentaries, called the "Ten Wings," attributed to Confucius and appended to the text, deepen and broaden the philosophical import of the work. And yet, in a characteristically Chinese way, this later philosophical stratum is still very much dependent on concrete images and particular contexts. How did the I Ching as a wisdom book come to be valued as such?
When the Chou conquered the Shang in the eleventh century B.C.E. they claimed moral authority derived from Heaven (t'ien) as their justification for overthrowing their former overlords. Because the line of Shang kings had declined in virtue, and the last kings had violated the moral imperatives of rulership, the Chou asserted that they had received a mandate from Heaven to replace the Shang and rule All Under Heaven. In expounding this theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the Chou conceived a new political-moral order founded not on a dynastic descent from a primordial divine ancestor but on a universal moral system transcending China itself.
*In the course of conquest they acquired an empire much larger than that previously ruled by the Shang. In order to rule such an extensive territory the Chou founders were forced to invest their relatives and supporters as vassals ruling over feudal fiefs. In the beginning there were perhaps several hundred of these vassal states, all under the hegemonic authority of the Chou kings who ruled this decentralized system from their original homeland in the northwest. In the retrospective view of later times this was an age when virtue and order prevailed under the benevolent rule of sage kings.
The early centuries of Chou rule were relatively harmonious. Lords and vassals alike observed the appropriate rituals and the empire was at peace. The I Ching, which as we have seen originated in the alternative divination practices of the Chou culture, was elaborated and refined during this period. The individual records of divination during these times, preserved in the situations and the judgments upon them attached to the hexagrams, reflected the prevailing order. In time, however, the initial stability of the Chou order inevitably engendered economic growth and political changes. The more powerful individual states absorbed their smaller neighbors, and appeals by the victims of these conquests to the authority of the Chou kings became less effective. By the eighth century B.C.E., at the beginning of what was known as the Spring and Autumn period, states were frequently at war with one another and the moral authority of the Chou was weakening. By the end of the fifth century, at the beginning of the Warring States period, warfare had become continuous, as the largest states, growing ever larger and more powerful, openly challenged the Chou for supremacy. By the end of this process in the third century B.C.E. the last surviving seven large states were locked in a brutal contest to rule All Under Heaven. Throughout these increasingly chaotic times, vast social and economic changes were underway, laying the foundations for the new imperial bureaucratic order that would later emerge from the collapse of the Chou.
Reacting to the growing disorder and the sea changes overwhelming society, a vigorous intellectual debate developed that sought to diagnose the troubled times and offer solutions.
To such men as Confucius, who lived at the end of the Spring and Autumn period in the fifth century, as well as to others such as the Taoists who espoused views that diverged from his, the I Ching and other texts passed down from the early Chou were a precious legacy that preserved the memory of better times. As such, these texts were an essential resource from which the social and political order of the early Chou founders, now venerated as sage kings and culture heroes, might be reconstructed. In such a context, then, the I Ching, mysteriously but surely embodying the harmonious moral system of antiquity, gradually became a wisdom text of virtually unchallenged scriptural authority.
According to later tradition, Confucius was supposed to have supplied the supplementary appended texts of the I Ching in order to expand on what he viewed as its relevance for the times of trouble in which he lived. It is clear that in fact much of this material owes more to the highly syncretic spirit of the Han period, which followed the abrupt collapse of the brief but violent imperial unification under the first emperor, Ch'in Shih- huang-ti. Han scholars and cosmologists of the third and second centuries B.C.E., nominally Confucian in their affiliations but deeply influenced by Taoist and Naturalist thinking from the Warring States period, created a complex metaphysical synthesis that was designed to provide ideological support for the new universal, imperial bureaucratic state. The I Ching was exploited as a well-spring of ideas and concepts cast in terms of concrete images and particular situations in the context of the early Chou.
It is difficult at this point to determine whether the I Ching, because it was already venerated as an ancient reservoir of fundamental moral and natural concepts, was expanded and interpreted by Han cosmologists at this time to encompass the new syncretic thought of the Han, or whether the I Ching was venerated because it was a primary basis for that system of thought. Whichever explanation was the case, the I Ching is a primary repository of the elaborate and distinctive Chinese cosmology that emerged in the Han but whose constituent elements are rooted in the origins of Chinese civilization itself. The Chinese saw the cosmos as uncreated, spontaneously self- generating, organic, self-contained, ordered, and perpetually in motion. It was imbued with an inherent moral order. In the Chinese cosmological view, time is not a teleological process but synchronic--change occurs within the inter-related parts of a closed hierarchical system. Thus we see in the yin (divided) and yang (undivided) lines of the I Ching the continuous mutation of components of a primal order in which the elements, while fixed in number, are in a perpetual state of flux. The world and the universe have no beginning and no end. No indigenous creation myth exists within the Chinese tradition.
Moreover, the cosmos is structured as an organic hierarchy of roles in which everything has its proper place and no part is wrongfully present. Dysfunction in the system is a consequence of parts failing to adhere to their proper roles, the maladjustment of the parts, not of the injection into the system of alien elements. Just as the hexagrams do not stand alone but relate to each other in a continuous, closed process, everything in the universe is affected by its changing context. Even here, in its most abstract, metaphysical, and often cryptic aspect, the I Ching retained its very visual quality. The diagrams themselves, and their dynamic arrangement could be viewed as a fingerprint of the cosmological order.
Although the hexagrams and the commentaries on them have been appreciated as a kind of universal language of the cosmos, one may ask to what degree the I Ching is so culturally grounded in a unique Chinese world view that it is relevant only to understanding the Chinese mind. With respect to this question, perhaps we can differentiate between the work as a wisdom book, with layers of interpretations linked to the specific historical emergence of a distinctive Chinese cosmology, on the one hand, and as a universally applicable divination text, less encumbered by the agendas of later commentators, on the other hand. Yet even in the latter sense, we must still understand that the I Ching was the product of particular historical circumstances.
Commenting on the problem of interpreting the meaning of the I Ching's symbols, Confucius observed that "writing (shu) cannot fully express the meaning of speech (yen); speech cannot fully express the meaning of ideas (i)." Can we then not apprehend the ideas of the Sages?, a student asked. Confucius responded, "The Sages established the images (hsiang) in order to fully express the meaning of their ideas. They devised the diagrams (kua) in order to fully express the distinction between true and false, and attached judgements (tz'u) to them in order to fully express their speech." This statement manifests the complex dynamic that pervaded the I Ching between verbal expression, symbolic expression, and something perhaps even more elusive that lies behind them both. In this epistemological structure, written words are approximations for spoken words, which in turn are only approximations to the ideas themselves. In order to refine the expression of the ideas, verbal images that evoke the ideas are created, visual diagrams are devised to accompany the images, and judgments, or further commentary, are used to elaborate the spoken words.
Accordingly, a symbiotic relationship exists between verbal images and visual diagrams in the I Ching. The images are universalized concepts given concrete expression in diagrams.
But while the diagrams are fixed in number, in the sense that they are mathematically derived (all the permutations and combinations of divided and undivided lines in groups of six), the images are not. Images could be anything that might illuminate the diagrams. Images could just as well be the mental images which the words evoke or visual images, such as a picture or a photograph might reveal.
In this book, Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum present the basic divination text of the I Ching, but substitute for the verbal images of the original visual photographic images, and offer additional brief verbal images of their own. If, after all, the purpose of the I Ching is to approach an understanding of human situations in the context of the natural rhythms and processes of nature, then presumably any means to this end that illuminates the hexagrams as fundamental constituents of the book is appropriate. Russek and Scheinbaum have accomplished this end with unusual intuition and insight, based on their long mutual involvement with the I Ching.