I Ching

The I Ching is a layered classic whose compact hexagrams became both instruments of divination and subjects of centuries of commentary. In James Legge’s account, understanding it depends on distinguishing the older Text from the later Appendixes, and on reading its symbolic lines as a structured system rather than treating every part of the received book as a single, harmonious composition.

Text, figures, and authorship

Legge describes the Text as sixty-four short, enigmatic essays on themes that are mostly moral, social, and political. Each is based on a hexagram of six whole or divided lines. The work does not explain the origin or formation of these figures; they are presented as the basis from which the Text proceeds. King Wen interprets each complete figure, indicating its significance and sometimes the action appropriate to the situation it symbolizes. The Duke of Zhou then treats the lines one by one, beginning at the bottom, using symbolic illustrations and indications of good or bad fortune. Legge says that the interpretation of the whole figure is meant to accord with the combined significance of its six lines.

Legge attributes the Text to King Wen and his son, the Duke of Zhou, placing its composition in the twelfth century BC: the portion associated with King Wen in 1143 BC and the Duke’s contribution thirty to forty years later. He distinguishes this material from the Appendixes, which he dates at least six or seven centuries later. Even if Confucius were responsible for some of those writings, Legge argues, the distance in time and frequent mismatch in subject matter make it misleading to treat Text and Appendixes as one work in the proper sense.

The figures also invite a reading through relations among their lines. Legge identifies the first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth positions as corresponding pairs; a correspondence is complete when the two lines differ in quality. The second and fifth positions, as the middle lines of their trigrams, carry particular force. When the fifth represents a ruler or commander, the second may represent a capable minister or officer, and their mutual action can signify a successful outcome. The hexagram’s name and subject therefore shape how any individual line should be understood; the same line does not carry one fixed application in every figure.

Divination and change

Legge says that King Wen and the Duke of Zhou knew the established practice of divination and wrote in its manner, but were not themselves divining in the passages they composed. Later readers did use the hexagrams as oracles, consulting the statements attached to them to judge how circumstances might develop and whether to continue or withdraw from a contemplated course. The Text’s symbolic style thus serves both its authors’ interpretations and the subsequent divinatory use of the figures.

The name of the classic is connected in Legge’s discussion to change: the character combines the signs for sun and moon, whose alternation exemplifies the continuing transformation of nature and social experience. In the Great Treatise, the term is applied both to the classic and to changes in the lines produced through divinatory manipulation. Legge summarizes the idea as “Production and reproduction is what is called (the process of) change.” The book and the divinatory system are related but not identical: the figures may change through manipulation independently of any oracle attributed to King Wen or his son.

The Text and the Appendixes

The Appendixes became part of the book’s received form, but Legge treats their integration with the Text as a major obstacle to interpretation. In common editions, five Appendixes, as they were ordinarily counted, had been broken up and printed alongside the relevant portions of the Text. That arrangement, which Legge traces to the early Han scholar Pi Chih, brought together ideas from different periods and made it harder for readers to recognize where one layer ended and another began. He notes that the imperial Kangxi edition printed the two parts separately, though many critics continued to defend their unity and the attribution of all the Appendixes to Confucius.

Legge’s argument is historical as well as editorial. He places the Appendixes in the Confucian period, probably between 450 and 350 BC, while maintaining that their authorship by Confucius himself is uncertain. They can illuminate the views of their own age and offer hints about how figures and statements were related, but they should not automatically be treated as the authors’ own explanation of the much older Text. In Legge’s judgment, blending them obscures not only chronological difference but also genuine incongruity between their ideas.

Preservation and interpretation

The book’s survival and authority accumulated through distinct historical stages. The I Ching escaped the Qin book burning of 213 BC because the order, as Legge recounts it, exempted works on medicine, divination, and husbandry; the classic was preserved as a divination book. Around the beginning of the common era, Liu Xin’s imperial-library catalogue listed works on the classic and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, amounting to 294 divisions. The later Kangxi imperial edition, published in 1715, quoted 218 commentators spanning roughly the second century BC to the seventeenth century. Legge presents these figures as evidence of an extensive and continuing interpretive history, not as proof that every commentary resolved the work’s difficulties.

His own method begins by separating the Text from its Appendixes, then approaching the symbolic writing as a communication of thought rather than attempting a word-for-word rendering. He explains that Chinese written characters are symbols of ideas, and that their combination represents what the writer thinks rather than simply reproducing what the writer would say. A translator must therefore seek the scope of a sentence and express its meaning accurately, sometimes supplying words that make explicit what the original leaves implicit. Parentheses mark many of those additions in his version. This freedom, he insists, is not license to depart from the source; it is a means of making its thought intelligible in another language.

That interpretive work remains constrained by the structure of the figures. A line’s meaning depends on its position, its quality, its relation to another line, and the topic named by the hexagram. Legge warns that explanations can become forced when readers assume that every later philosophical doctrine was already present in the classic. In discussing the Great Treatise, for example, he rejects the claim that its account of changing phenomena already contains a developed theory of primordial matter, which he locates much later, in the Song period. His account thus presents the I Ching not as an all-encompassing repository of later knowledge, but as an ancient, difficult work whose layers and interpretive history must be kept distinct.