Song dynasty

The Song dynasty marks a consequential stage in the later interpretation of the I Ching, not in the composition of its oldest Text. The translation’s author places the classic’s Appendixes in a much earlier period than Song rule, yet traces to Song scholars the development of a philosophical system built especially on the Third Appendix and the public reconstruction of the River Map. That distinction—between an ancient text and the ideas later readers brought to it—governs his account of the book’s history and meaning.

The Appendixes and Song philosophy

The author distinguishes the I Ching’s older Text from its Appendixes, which he dates to the centuries after Confucius, probably between 450 and 350 BC. He describes the Text as a work attributed to King Wen and his son, the Duke of Zhou, and treats the Appendixes as a separate, later layer rather than an undifferentiated part of the same composition. This division matters for his account of Song thought: the philosophical tradition associated with the dynasty, he argues, did not grow out of the I Ching’s core Text but out of its Appendixes, particularly the Third Appendix.

That judgment also bears on the interpretation of yin and yang. The author rejects the claim that a fully developed doctrine of primary matter, alternately expanding as yang and contracting as yin, can simply be read back into the ancient work. In his view, such a doctrine took more than a thousand years to form within the Confucian school and did not reach full development until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the Song era. To find it in the earlier I Ching, he warns, is to put the later intellectual outcome first and mistake subsequent philosophy for the original author’s subject.

He accordingly treats Song philosophy as an important reception of the I Ching, but not as transparent evidence of what the old Text originally meant. The Appendix’s concern, as he understands it, is the changing phenomena of nature and experience, not a fully articulated account of creation or a primordial substance. The Song-era system represents a later attempt to explain the classic, and its influence should not erase the historical distance between that interpretive development and the work it interprets.

The River Map and its public reconstruction

A second Song-era connection concerns the River Map, a scheme traditionally associated with the Yellow River and with the formation of the trigrams. The account preserved in the book says that a dragon-horse emerged from the river bearing marks from which Fuxi obtained the idea of the trigrams. The translator presents this origin story as fabulous, but examines it because the map’s later history helps introduce the rules by which readers interpret the lineal figures.

According to his account, the map once preserved at court had disappeared. After the restoration of the ancient classics began in the Han dynasty, scholars speculated about what its form might have been, but no reconstruction had been made public until the reign of Emperor Hui Zong of the Song dynasty, from 1101 to 1125. The scheme then presented consisted of small circles, divided almost equally between light and dark: odd numbers from one to nine were light, while even numbers from two to ten were dark. The author connects these contrasting marks with the distinction between yang and yin and with the bright and obscure qualities associated with sun and moon.

The map’s role is therefore both historical and interpretive. It supplied a framework through which later writers explained how light and dark, odd and even, and the whole and divided lines related to one another. Yet the translator cautions that the publicly circulated reconstruction was late and that its fidelity to a scheme from the Zhou dynasty could not be established. Its importance in the history of interpretation does not make its ancient form certain.

A later system applied to the figures

The translator explains that whole and divided lines provide the working basis for interpreting each hexagram. In the conventional rules he describes, the first, third, and fifth positions are correct for whole lines, while the second, fourth, and sixth are correct for divided ones. The lines are also paired by position: the first corresponds to the fourth, the second to the fifth, and the third to the sixth. A correspondence is complete when the paired lines are of different qualities, one whole and one divided.

The second and fifth positions receive particular weight because they occupy the middles of the two trigrams that compose a hexagram. If, for example, a whole line occupies the fifth position and a divided one the second, their relation can represent a sovereign or commander acting in beneficial accord with an able minister or officer. But these rules do not yield a fixed interpretation independent of context: the hexagram’s name and the condition it signifies shape what its lines mean. The translator emphasizes that the same line can therefore have different applications in different hexagrams.

This account links diagram, interpretation, and historical reconstruction without treating them as interchangeable. The River Map tradition offers an explanation of the figures’ origins; the rules of position and correspondence explain how the figures can be read; and the Text’s judgments and line statements supply their particular meanings. The translator’s discussion of the map is a means of clarifying that interpretive machinery, not an endorsement of the legendary account as literal history.

Divination, transmission, and translation

The book associates the trigrams and divining practices with a long history in China. It points to early references to tortoise-shell divination and to the use of plant stalks to work with lineal figures, describing both tortoise and stalks as established media for examining doubts. In the translator’s account, however, divination was not simply a claim to know future events in advance. Its practical question was whether a contemplated plan or set of circumstances would turn out auspiciously or inauspiciously.

The procedure described in the Appendix used forty-nine stalks. Each line required three manipulations, so a six-line hexagram required eighteen. Numbers derived in the system helped determine whether each line was strong and undivided or weak and divided; the completed figure was then interpreted through the judgments attributed to King Wen and the emblematic line statements attributed to the Duke of Zhou. Numbers, the translator stresses, served in this procedure to construct the figure. He rejects the comparison with Pythagorean philosophy when it implies that numbers in the I Ching are independent entities or the material principles of things.

The translator also disputes readings that turn divination into unrestricted foreknowledge. He cites the text’s warning that when both tortoise-shell and stalks oppose human judgment, stillness will be fortunate and active measures unlucky. In his reading, the point is not that the system reveals every future occurrence, but that its answer bears on a decision under consideration. He criticizes interpretations that claim a sufficiently knowledgeable reader could thereby foresee all possible events.

His own translation method reflects the same insistence on separating visible forms from the ideas they convey. An earlier attempt, made in 1854, followed the concise structure of the Chinese too closely and produced English with too little syntactical connection. He concluded that a literal rendering could not solve the problem: Chinese characters, as he understood them, were symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words, and a translator had to grasp the thought expressed by their combination before recasting it intelligibly in English. He aimed to convey that thought as accurately and concisely as possible, occasionally supplying a word to make explicit what the original left implicit; he generally marked such additions with parentheses.

That method helps explain why he insists on historical layers. The Song-era commentators and philosophers illuminate a powerful afterlife of the I Ching, but their explanations should not be silently folded into the older Text. For the translator, the classic’s history is not a single, unbroken doctrine: it is a record of an ancient divinatory and symbolic work, later appendices, evolving interpretive systems, and renewed efforts to make difficult language intelligible to readers.