Confucian period, c. 450–350 BC

The Confucian period, c. 450–350 BC is the translator’s proposed date for the composition of the I Ching’s Appendixes: a body of interpretive writing he distinguishes from the older Text and does not confidently assign to Confucius. The period matters because it marks a possible turning point in how readers understood the hexagrams, while the surviving book’s arrangement and traditional authorship claims can obscure the distance between its textual layers.

Dating the Appendixes

The translator considers it probable that the Appendixes were produced sometime between 450 and 350 BC, after Confucius’s death. He treats them as evidence for views prevailing in that later age, especially concerning the meaning of the I Ching and the relation between its statements and its lineal figures. In his account, they also supply interpretive guidance: without their hints, he argues, it would be difficult to make a consistent interpretation of the older Text.

That usefulness does not, in his view, make the Text and Appendixes a single work. The Text had already existed for centuries before the proposed period. Even on the supposition that Confucius composed the Appendixes, he could not have begun them earlier than 483 BC, roughly six centuries after King Wen’s portion of the Text and nearly 630 years after the portion attributed to the Duke of Zhou. The translator therefore cautions that substantial changes in how thinkers understood the book could have arisen during this interval.

Authorship and Internal Evidence

The traditional account attributed the Appendixes to Confucius, but the translator tests that claim against their contents. None bears Confucius’s name as a superscription, and none expressly identifies him as its author. The earliest testimony he discusses is that of Sima Qian, whose Historical Records appeared around 100 BC. Sima Qian assigned most of the Appendixes to Confucius but did not mention the last two; the translator notes that this attribution was likely already common by the fourth century after Confucius’s death.

The formula “The Master said” complicates the attribution. In the third Appendix it appears at least twenty-three times, while the fourth uses it six times in its first thirty-six paragraphs. The translator reasons that a writer using this formula to introduce Confucius’s words is distinguishing those words from the surrounding material, making it difficult to attribute the whole composition to Confucius. He also points to passages in the fourth Appendix drawn from an account of a statement made by a Lu marchioness-dowager fourteen years before Confucius was born. For him, such internal evidence undermines the claim that Confucius composed these Appendixes as complete works.

His conclusion is qualified but consequential: portions introduced as Confucius’s sayings may preserve his words, yet the surrounding composition cannot thereby be attributed to him. He concludes that the third and fourth Appendixes were assembled after Confucius’s death, and that confidence in Confucian authorship of the other Appendixes should also be restrained. He allows that there is no comparable evidence against a Confucian origin for the first two in his arrangement, while expressing reservations about parts of the fifth, sixth, and seventh.

Transmission and Editorial Arrangement

The proposed period belongs to a much longer history of preservation and interpretation. The I Ching survived the Qin book burning of 213 BC because it was treated as a work of divination, a category exempted from the order to destroy many ancient books. By the beginning of the Common Era, Liu Xin’s imperial-library catalogue recorded works on the I Ching and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions. The translator presents that catalogue as evidence of an established and extensive interpretive tradition, not as proof that the layers of the book had always been understood as one.

Later editorial practices helped shape what readers encountered. The common editions placed five Appendixes alongside the Text, a layout the translator says caused confusion by intermingling ideas he regarded as incongruous. The Kangxi imperial edition, published in 1715, printed the Text and Appendixes separately. Its discussions drew on 218 scholars, whose commentaries covered a period extending from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. The translator credits native commentary with substantial interpretive value, even as he disputes the assumption that the received materials form a homogeneous work.

Historical Significance

The translator’s periodization separates two related but historically distinct activities: the composition of the older divinatory Text and the later interpretation of its figures and statements. The Appendixes help explain how the text came to be read, but their explanatory role does not erase their later date or settle their authorship. In this account, the Confucian period is therefore not simply a biographical label; it is a proposed historical horizon within which interpretations of an older classic took shape and were subsequently transmitted as part of its received tradition.