King Wen of Zhou

King Wen of Zhou is the traditional author of the I Ching’s brief texts on whole hexagrams, and the historical and interpretive hinge of the translator’s account of the work. A virtuous and self-restrained ruler of Zhou, he studied the lineal figures while imprisoned under a disordered Shang regime. The translator reads his symbolic essays not as detached forecasts but as compressed reflections on political conduct: who may wield authority, when force is justified, and how a damaged state might regain order.

Identity and Historical Setting

The book presents the I Ching as sixty-four short, enigmatic essays, each based on a figure of six whole or divided lines. King Wen takes up the figures in an order of his own, interpreting the significance of each hexagram as a whole and sometimes indicating what action its circumstances call for and whether that action will bring good or ill fortune. The Duke of Zhou, his son, then supplies symbolic interpretations of the individual lines. In the translator’s account, the son’s readings are intended to accord with the combined meaning of the six lines and thus with his father’s reading of the figure as a whole.

The political background is a kingdom the text depicts as disorganized and demoralized under Shang rule. A brother of the reigning king describes the people as given to robbery, treachery, and violence, with officials violating the laws and little confidence that criminals will be apprehended. The dynasty, in his account, is sinking toward ruin, like a traveler unable to find a ford or bank while crossing a great stream. This image of a state in danger gives the hexagrams’ political concerns a historical frame: their questions about leadership and action arise in a world where public order has already faltered.

The translator further describes the Shang ruler as tyrannical and records the accusations made against him when King Wen’s son took the field. The declaration charges that the king slighted virtue, alienated Heaven and the people, rewarded the bad, dismissed his instructors, discarded the laws, and neglected public and ancestral sacrifices. These accusations present the political crisis not simply as a contest for power but as a collapse of the duties that legitimate rule is supposed to uphold.

In western Zhou, King Wen had long been regarded as capable and virtuous. He had succeeded his father in 1185 BC, become a kind of viceroy over a large part of the kingdom, and earned the support of princes and people. Yet, according to the account, he shrank from leading an attack on the tyrant because he did not want to incur the charge of disloyalty. When suspicion from the Shang ruler fell on him, he was imprisoned in 1143 BC, with the order for his death potentially imminent. The translator places his work on the figures in this period of political danger and constrained action.

The Hexagrams as Political Thought

The translator’s example of the seventh hexagram, Hosts, makes the connection between figure and governance explicit. King Wen’s title points to the way a feudal population could become an army when required: the people and the host were, in that political order, closely linked. The hexagram is read as raising a practical question about how an expedition should be conducted if it is to succeed. Its whole-figure interpretation therefore becomes a way of thinking about command and the purpose of force, rather than an abstract description of military power.

The accompanying line analysis assigns the central undivided line in the lower trigram the role of leader. The other figures represented by the remaining lines are expected to share his purpose or obey him. For the translator, this arrangement expresses a principle of command: an army needs a responsible leader, while authority situated in the fifth place would represent the sovereign. The structure of the image thus carries a political hierarchy, translating the relations among lines into relations among ruler, commander, and those who serve under them.

The commentary on the fifth line makes the limits on military authority especially clear. It interprets the image of harmful forces in the fields as plunderers and invaders, and the proposed action as their suppression. War is justified, in this reading, when defensive or undertaken by rightful authority to put down rebellion and lawlessness. The line’s weak or humble ruler has delegated the authority to execute judgment to the commander-in-chief, represented as the oldest son; the younger men who might share his power are associated with danger. Military success, then, depends not only on strength but on legitimate purpose and disciplined command.

The final line turns from battle to the settlement that follows it. The great ruler assigns distinguished people to govern states or lead clans, while the text warns against appointing unworthy men to those offices. The sequence moves from assembling a host, through the proper exercise of force, to the distribution of responsibility afterward. In the translator’s reading, the hexagram’s political teaching is therefore not exhausted by victory: order must also be secured through capable appointments.

Interpretive Method and Authorial Limits

The translator treats King Wen’s contribution as a set of sixty-four brief paragraphs, not as a fully explained system of divination. He argues that King Wen and his son knew the longstanding practice of divination and wrote in its symbolic manner, but were not themselves necessarily divining. Their words later became oracles for people consulting the hexagrams about whether to persist in or withdraw from intended courses of action. This distinction separates the authors’ work, as the translator understands it, from its later use as a means of seeking guidance about the future.

That distinction also shapes the translator’s approach to translation. He recalls that his first version, made in 1854, imitated the compressedness of the Chinese so closely that its English words had little syntactical connection and the result was difficult to understand. He later concluded that a literal rendering was misplaced: written Chinese characters, in his account, symbolize ideas rather than represent spoken words, and their composition conveys what the writer thinks rather than a sentence to be reproduced mechanically. Translation should therefore bring the reader’s mind into contact with the author’s thought and then express that thought as clearly and concisely as possible.

This method allows limited additions when English needs to make an implied connection explicit. The translator says he generally marked such words with parentheses, while maintaining that they represented what was already present in the writer’s thought. The principle is not unrestricted paraphrase: fidelity means conveying the original meaning accurately, even where word-for-word imitation would obscure it. King Wen’s cryptic language thus demands interpretation, but the interpreter remains accountable for distinguishing the text’s thought from his own additions.

Political Meaning and Historical Caution

The translator repeatedly reads the hexagrams as bearing on political conditions, while presenting such readings as interpretation rather than straightforward historical reportage. In the Hosts hexagram, the relationship between the people and the army becomes a question of legitimate mobilization; elsewhere, the imagery of disordered or threatened government is connected to the transition from Shang to Zhou. The figures’ symbolic form permits political judgment to appear indirectly, through roles, positions, and images rather than through a continuous chronicle of events.

The translator’s discussion of the hexagram Breakthrough offers another example. He interprets it through the seasonal image of the last cold and dark remnant of winter yielding to approaching warmth and light. Politically, the divided top line represents a powerful bad man sustaining a corrupt government or an aging dynasty, while the five undivided lines represent good order or the rising power that will replace it. The lesson, as he reads King Wen, is that a corrupt figure should be removed more by force of character and the creation of general sympathy than by arms alone. Political change must be openly justified, approached with awareness of its danger, and undertaken with reluctance among one’s own adherents rather than as an appetite for violence.

In the hexagram Coming to Meet, the translator sees a warning against an unworthy person insinuating himself into government. If unchecked, that influence would expand, displace good officials, and fill their places with allies. He also cautions that the interpretation is imposed through the minds of King Wen and the Duke of Zhou: the sentiments are not simply extracted from the figures as self-evident messages, but are sometimes fitted to them through symbolism the translator regards as strained or fantastic. His account therefore holds two claims together. King Wen’s hexagram texts preserve a consequential political vision, but recovering that vision requires judgment about how the symbolic reading was made.

Legacy Within the Text

King Wen’s work is presented as the foundation on which the line texts and later interpretations build. The whole-hexagram judgment establishes a governing theme; the Duke of Zhou’s line-by-line emblems elaborate how that theme might unfold through distinct positions and circumstances. Because the line meanings vary with the hexagram’s name and subject, their significance cannot be read apart from the whole. The translator stresses that knowing what a figure denotes is essential to understanding what its individual lines can mean.

The book’s example of Great Havings illustrates the breadth of the ethical and political concerns associated with the hexagrams. Its judgment promises great progress and success, while its first line warns that avoiding harm requires a continuing recognition of difficulty and danger. In the translator’s account, this sort of advice exemplifies how an apparently auspicious whole-figure statement can be qualified by the conduct demanded in particular positions. King Wen’s role is decisive because he supplies the framing interpretation through which the line-level counsel can be read.

The translator also resists treating later cosmological theories as King Wen’s subject. Discussing the Great Treatise, he argues that the text concerns the ever-changing phenomena of nature and experience, not a developed doctrine of primordial matter or a creation scheme. He considers it an anachronism to project theories formulated much later back into the I Ching. That distinction reinforces his broader portrait of King Wen’s work: its significance lies in interpreting change and human circumstances, especially questions of moral and political conduct, rather than in supplying a fully elaborated cosmology.

King Wen’s importance in this account is consequently both literary and political. His short, symbolic judgments give the hexagrams their whole-form meanings, while the circumstances attributed to his imprisonment make their concern with threatened authority and uncertain action historically legible. The translator does not turn the figures into a plain chronicle of Zhou’s rise; instead, he presents them as a compressed language of governance, in which legitimate power, disciplined action, and the restoration of public order are tested through images that later readers must interpret.