Middle Antiquity

Middle Antiquity is the historical interval between the legendary earliest age and the time of Confucius, extending from the rise of the Zhou dynasty in the late twelfth century BC to the Confucian era in the sixth century BC. In the book’s account, this is not merely a convenient span of chronology: it is the setting in which the I Ching’s Text took shape, and the long distance between that Text and the later Appendixes is essential to understanding the classic as a layered work rather than a single composition.

Definition and Historical Boundaries

The account contrasts the highest antiquity, which Chinese writers dated back to Fuxi in 3322 BC, with the lowest antiquity, beginning with Confucius in the middle of the sixth century BC. Between them lay Middle Antiquity, a comparatively short period beginning with the rise of the Zhou dynasty toward the close of the twelfth century BC. The author uses this periodization to locate the formation of the I Ching before Confucius, while treating claims about its authors and dates as historical arguments rather than as an undifferentiated tradition.

The book also draws on an Appendix that asks whether the I Ching began to flourish in Middle Antiquity and whether its maker or makers knew anxiety and calamity. A second passage narrows the setting to the last age of the Yin dynasty, when the virtue of Zhou had reached its height and conflict between King Wen and the ruler of Yin brought danger and confinement. The text’s recurrent concern with apprehension, turning peril into security, and the overthrow that follows careless ease is presented as intelligible against that troubled historical background.

The I Ching’s Formation in the Period

The book dates the portion of the Text attributed to King Wen to 1143 or 1142 BC, or possibly to work begun in the first year and completed in the second. The proposed date follows the account of King Wen’s imprisonment by the last Yin ruler in 1143 BC at Youli, identified with a place in present-day Tangyin district, Henan. His friends secured his release the following year. The author therefore connects the circumstances of danger described in the Appendix with a specific episode in King Wen’s life, without claiming that the entire classic originated at that moment.

A larger share of the Text is attributed to King Wen’s son Tan, the Duke of Zhou. Its references include King Wu, who succeeded King Wen and became the first ruler of the Zhou dynasty, as well as events from the early years of the following reign. Since the Duke of Zhou died in 1105 BC, the book concludes that the I Ching, as it had come down to its author, was complete a few years before then, in the last decade of the twelfth century BC. Middle Antiquity thus contains both the proposed beginning of the Text and the completion of its early composition, rather than a single moment of authorship.

Later Appendixes and the Problem of Authorship

The Appendixes belong to a substantially later layer. Even if they were all the work of Confucius, their composition could not have begun before 483 BC, according to the book’s chronology. That would place them roughly 660 years after the portion attributed to King Wen and nearly 630 years after the part attributed to the Duke of Zhou. The author allows that the Appendixes may illuminate the views of the period in which they were produced, but rejects the assumption that they and the Text form one homogeneous work.

Traditional attribution was powerful: the Appendixes were commonly received as Confucius’s work and as an integral part of the I Ching. Yet none bears his name as a superscription or explicitly identifies him as its author. The earliest testimony cited is Sima Qian’s, written around 100 BC; it assigns the Appendixes to Confucius except for the last two, which it does not mention. The author’s examination of internal evidence challenges that broad attribution, especially where an Appendix repeatedly introduces material with the formula “The Master said.” In the third Appendix the formula appears at least twenty-three times, and in the first section of the fourth it occurs six times in thirty-six paragraphs. The author argues that a writer who repeatedly distinguishes quoted sayings of the Master from surrounding material cannot straightforwardly be identified with Confucius throughout.

The first three paragraphs of the fourth Appendix provide a further chronological difficulty: they derive from a narrative about a marchioness-dowager of Lu, whose words were spoken fourteen years before Confucius was born. The author consequently concludes that Confucius did not compose the third and fourth Appendixes as wholes, though passages explicitly introduced as his sayings may preserve his words. This case weakens confidence in assigning all the remaining Appendixes to him as well; the book treats their authorship as uncertain, not as settled by inherited attribution.

Preservation, Arrangement, and Interpretation

The distinction between the period’s early Text and later commentary also matters for the classic’s subsequent history. 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 destruction ordered against much ancient literature. By the beginning of the common era, Liu Xin’s imperial-library catalogue listed works on the I Ching and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions. The record shows that the classic had already become the subject of extensive, diverse study after Middle Antiquity.

Later editorial arrangement could obscure the historical layers. In common editions, five Appendixes were broken up and printed alongside the Text, a practice the author traces to Pi Ji of the first Han dynasty. Interleaving material composed centuries apart encouraged readers to treat the parts as a unified work and made it harder to distinguish their different ideas. The Kangxi imperial edition of 1715 printed the Text and Appendixes separately, while drawing on the discussions of 218 scholars whose commentaries covered the period from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. For the author, separating the layers is therefore not a merely bibliographical preference: it is the necessary route to interpreting the early Text on its own terms and to recognizing Middle Antiquity as the historical horizon of its formation.