Manji shishi

The divining stalks were the plant medium through which practitioners generated hexagrams for consultation in the I Ching. Their role joined material procedure to interpretation: stalks were manipulated to produce a figure, and that figure was read through the judgments associated with King Wen and the line statements attributed to the Duke of Zhou. The book presents the stalks as central to a historically established practice, but rejects the idea that divination thereby disclosed the future with certainty.

Historical Use and Purpose

The book places divination by stalks alongside the older use of the tortoise shell. It cites an early account that treats both as means of examining doubts, and describes stalk divination as established by the time that lineal figures were being used. The plant named is Ptarmica sibirica, which the author says was still cultivated around the grave of Confucius and which he had seen growing there.

The consultation, as the author defines it, was not a means of discovering future events absolutely. Its purpose was to assess whether a particular scheme, or a contemplated set of circumstances, would turn out fortunately or unfortunately. This qualification matters: the stalks helped a consulter judge a proposed course of action, rather than supplying an assured account of what must happen.

Procedure and Interpretation

The described procedure begins with forty-nine stalks. To determine each line, the stalks were manipulated three times; forming all six lines therefore required eighteen manipulations. The operations yielded numbers used to determine whether a line was undivided or divided: odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines, while even numbers produced weak, divided ones.

The figures called the four emblematic symbols were assigned the numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6, which had a part in combining lines into hexagrams. Once the figure had been formed, the operator turned to the hexagram judgments associated with King Wen and the emblematic line statements attributed to the Duke of Zhou for its interpretation. In the author’s account, numbers served this practical function in divination: they helped the operator construct the figure. He distinguishes this use from a philosophy that treats numbers as the underlying entities or causes of things.

Ritual Belief and Skeptical Judgment

The Appendix’s account of the practice gives the stalks more than mechanical importance. It says that Heaven produced spirit-like things, identifying the tortoise and the plant among them, and attributes to these divinatory materials a subtle virtue that made them suitable for consultation. The author reports this belief without accepting it as proof of the stalks’ efficacy.

He also notes that Chinese writing sometimes questions divination and the expectation that a tortoise shell or stalks can disclose the future. One reported argument calls the stalks withered grass and the shell a withered bone, insisting that a person should rely on human intelligence rather than seek knowledge from things. The example sharpens the contrast between ritual authority and skepticism from within the tradition itself.

The author’s own judgment is more sweeping: he considers divination vain and the I Ching procedure no less unsound than other methods. He argues that the stalks’ numerical operations served to make the hexagram, not to establish a science of all future events. He further says that the practice had been abandoned in educated circles in his own time, though scholars continued to defend the wisdom of the appended treatises that explained it.

Political and Interpretive Context

The book’s account of the stalks sits within a wider interpretation of the I Ching as a work whose symbolic language could address social and political conditions. It describes King Wen studying the lineal figures while imprisoned at Youli under a ruler whose government was portrayed as tyrannical and disorderly. The author suggests that work on divinatory figures might have appeared harmless to suspicious keepers, while presenting King Wen’s treatment of the hexagrams as an effort to place divination within the limits of reason.

That interpretive context helps explain why producing a figure and reading it were separate acts. The stalk procedure generated the arrangement; the inherited judgments and line statements supplied the language through which it could be understood. For example, the book reads the Hosts hexagram as a political image of assembled people and military command, and interprets its warning as favoring defensive war or action by rightful authority against rebellion and lawlessness. Such readings turn the divinatory figure toward questions of public order, even as the author disputes the claim that its means can reliably reveal future outcomes.

Survival and Transmission

The stalks also had consequences for the history of the text. In 213 BC, when an imperial order consigned many ancient books to the flames, the I Ching was spared because it was classified as a work of divination, among the kinds of books exempted from destruction. Its association with divinatory practice thus helped preserve the work that later readers interpreted in moral, social, and political terms.

The book’s account emphasizes that this practice depended on both an operative technique and a body of interpretation. The stalks supplied the procedure for forming lines, while the hexagram and line texts made those lines readable. Their importance is therefore practical and historical: they were the medium of a specific method of consultation, and the reason the I Ching could be treated as divination without being, in the author’s view, a reliable forecast of future events.