Han dynasty

The Han dynasty shaped how later readers encountered the I Ching: Han-era restoration and editorial decisions affected the arrangement of its Text and Appendixes, while Han bibliographers recorded an already extensive body of writing on both. In this account, the dynasty’s importance lies not only in preserving and cataloguing a classic, but also in the transmission choices that could blur the distinction between its older core and later interpretations.

Preservation and Restoration

The history of the Han and the I Ching begins against the destruction of 213 BC, when the Qin book burning consumed much of China’s ancient literature. The I Ching escaped because it was classed as a divination book, one of the categories exempted from the order to burn old books. Its survival thus depended, in the account given here, on its practical classification rather than on a guarantee that its later readers would agree about its meaning or authority.

After the Han dynasty undertook the restoration of ancient classics, speculation arose about the form of the River Map, which tradition associated with the invention of the trigrams. The map was said to have been preserved at court in the eleventh century BC and to have later perished; the first publicly issued delineation of it appeared during the reign of Hui Tsung of the Song dynasty, from 1101 to 1125. This history illustrates a broader distinction in the book’s treatment of transmission: a tradition could remain influential even when the object to which it referred was no longer available for direct inspection.

Catalogues and Commentarial History

At the beginning of the Common Era, Liu Hsin’s catalogue of the imperial library listed works on the I Ching and its Appendixes by thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions of varying length. The catalogue offers evidence not of a single settled interpretation but of a substantial field of study already divided among multiple contributors and textual units.

The history continued through later scholarship. The imperial Khang-hsi edition, published in 1715, quoted 218 scholars whose commentaries extended from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. The translator judged this group to represent less than a tenth of those who had attempted to interpret the work. The figures make the I Ching’s reception history visible as an accumulation across centuries: preservation kept the text available, while successive readers continued to dispute and elaborate its meaning.

The Text and the Appendixes

The translator insists that the older Text and the Appendixes belong to different historical layers. He dates the Text’s traditional authorship to King Wen in 1143 BC and the Duke of Zhou roughly thirty to forty years later. Even if Confucius had composed the Appendixes, he could not have begun them earlier than 483 BC—about six centuries after King Wen’s portion and nearly 630 years after the Duke of Zhou’s. The translator therefore rejects treating the two portions as one homogeneous work, while acknowledging that the Appendixes supply guidance for interpreting the Text and the relation between its statements and figures.

He identifies Pi Chih of the first Han dynasty as the source of an influential editorial arrangement that broke up five Appendixes, by the usual reckoning, and printed them alongside the Text. In the translator’s analysis, this interleaving mixed ideas from works of different periods and made the meaning harder for foreign students to grasp. The Khang-hsi edition printed the Text and Appendixes separately, but the translator says that few critics had dared to question either their supposed unity or the attribution of all the Appendixes to Confucius. Editorial separation, in this account, was not a minor matter of page design: it made the historical difference between textual layers easier to see.

Divination and Interpretation

The I Ching’s classification as a divination book explains its exemption from the Qin book burning, but the account also defines the limits of the practice. Divination with tortoise shells appears in an early document of the Book of Documents, and later records describe both that method and divination by figures formed with plant stalks. The stalks were used to determine whether a contemplated plan or set of circumstances would turn out auspiciously or inauspiciously; the stated purpose was not to know future events absolutely.

The described procedure used forty-nine stalks, manipulated three times for each line. Since a hexagram has six lines, eighteen manipulations formed one figure. Odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided lines; the completed figure was then interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements. The numbers, in the translator’s account, served to form the hexagram rather than to function as independent causes or entities. This practical account sits beside the Appendixes’ language about divining materials as spirit-like, and the translator distinguishes that belief from his own judgment of what the procedure could establish.

Translation and Historical Judgment

The translator’s account of the Han’s role belongs to a larger argument about how texts acquire meaning through both arrangement and interpretation. He recalls that his first translation, made in 1854, tried to imitate the Chinese text’s concision so closely that its English became difficult to understand. He later rejected literal translation on the ground that Chinese characters were symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words: the translator should apprehend the author’s thought and express it clearly, while remaining as exact and concise as possible. That method included occasional supplied words, generally marked in parentheses.

This interpretive principle reinforces his insistence on distinguishing the I Ching’s layers. The Appendixes may illuminate the older Text, but their later date means that their explanations should not simply be treated as the original work’s own voice. Han editorial practice matters precisely because the arrangement of Text and commentary can make later explanations look integral to the earlier material. The dynasty’s legacy in this account is therefore both archival and interpretive: it helped transmit a work whose survival was secure, while the organization through which it was read remained consequential and contested.