Sima Qian

Sima Qian is a historical authority invoked to illuminate both the early formation and later transmission of the I Ching. His reports connect Confucius’s intensive late-life study with the book’s appendixes, and preserve a tradition about King Wen’s work on the hexagrams during imprisonment at Youli; the translator, however, distinguishes reported tradition from what can be established about the text’s authorship and chronology.

Reports on Confucius and the I Ching

Sima Qian’s account, as presented by the translator, says that Confucius became devoted to the I Ching in the closing years of his life and wrote various appendixes to it. Confucius is also said to have read his copy so persistently that the leather thongs binding its tablets wore out three times. The anecdote conveys sustained study through a concrete sign of use, while the reported wish for more years to master the book emphasizes that this study remained unfinished.

The translator sets this late interest beside Confucius’s earlier intellectual pursuits. He had delighted in discussing the books of History, Poetry, and Rites and Ceremonies with his disciples; near the end of his life, the I Ching also occupied his attention as an ancient monument that he had neglected in his prime. The contrast makes Sima Qian’s report evidence not just for the book’s presence in Confucius’s era, but for a change in the sage’s scholarly focus.

The Appendixes and the limits of attribution

Sima Qian is cited as naming nearly all the treatises later grouped as the Ten Appendixes among Confucius’s writings. The translator notes that two are not included in the attribution. These materials were published alongside the older Text, which itself was based on still earlier lineal figures, and were accepted by many Chinese readers and foreign scholars as an integral part of the I Ching. The book’s received form thus joined writings that the translator insists must be distinguished historically.

The distinction matters because the translator does not treat Sima Qian’s report as proof that Confucius composed every appendix. Even on the assumption that Confucius wrote them, he could not have begun before 483 BC: the material attributed to King Wen was about 660 years older, and that attributed to the Duke of Zhou nearly 630 years older. The translator places the appendixes more cautiously in the Confucian period, probably between 450 and 350 BC, and allows that they may illuminate the views of that later age without settling their authorship.

King Wen at Youli

A separate notice attributed to Sima Qian says that, while confined at Youli, King Wen increased the Eight Trigrams to sixty-four hexagrams. The statement preserves a concise account of how the hexagram system arose under conditions of political confinement. Elsewhere, the translator describes King Wen as imprisoned in 1143 BC amid the ruler Shou’s suspicion, and says that he then occupied himself with the lineal figures. The report from Sima Qian gives that episode a specific textual consequence: the expansion from eight trigrams to sixty-four hexagrams.

The translator presents this as a historical tradition rather than a direct statement by King Wen or his son. He argues that the text associated with King Wen and the line texts associated with the Duke of Zhou are much older than the appendixes, while acknowledging that the precise history of the figures and their interpretation is difficult to establish. Sima Qian’s testimony therefore helps frame the book’s early history, but does not erase the distinction between a received account of its origins and secure evidence about its layers.

Historical authority and textual transmission

The translator uses Sima Qian’s testimony within a broader argument that the I Ching existed before Confucius. He also cites the preservation of the book during Qin Shi Huang’s book burning in 213 BC: the order described by the translator exempted works on medicine, divination, and agriculture, and the I Ching survived because it was regarded as a divination book. This episode is not itself attributed to Sima Qian in the cited passage, but it shows the historical context in which claims about the book’s antiquity and transmission are assessed.

The record of later scholarship likewise shows how much accumulated around the text. A catalogue prepared by Liu Xin near the beginning of the Common Era listed works on the I Ching and its appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, in 294 portions. The imperial Kangxi edition of 1715 quoted 218 scholars whose work extended from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. Against this long history of interpretation, Sima Qian’s accounts function as consequential testimony: they preserve traditions about Confucius’s reading and King Wen’s hexagrams, while the translator’s careful separation of Text and Appendixes prevents those traditions from being mistaken for a single, uniform authorship.