Zhou dynasty

The Zhou dynasty is the decisive historical frame for the formation of the received Yijing: the account places the core Text in the dynasty’s founding era, associates its first portion with King Wen and a larger contribution with the Duke of Zhou, and distinguishes these early materials from the much later Appendixes. The work’s subsequent life—as a divination book preserved through Qin’s book burning, catalogued and interpreted by generations of scholars, and rearranged in editions—shows that the Zhou-era text and the classic later readers encountered were related but not identical objects.

Formation in the Founding Era

The book locates the Zhou dynasty’s rise between the last years of the Shang and the Confucian era, calling this interval “middle antiquity.” An Appendix is cited as placing the flourishing of the Yijing in this middle period; another associates it more specifically with the final age of Yin, when Zhou’s virtue had reached its height and King Wen was caught in conflict with the last Shang ruler. These retrospective statements underpin the account’s dating of the text, while the author treats them as testimony to be assessed rather than as a reason to collapse all parts of the work into one period.

The transition from Shang to Zhou is dated to 1122 BC. King Wen, though remembered as the founder of Zhou, never occupied the throne. The narrative identifies him as a Zhou leader whose political standing and virtue made him a potential focus for resistance to Shang tyranny, yet who held back from attacking for fear of appearing disloyal. When the Shang ruler’s suspicions turned against him, he was imprisoned at Youli in 1143 BC. His friends secured his release the following year, making 1143 or 1142 BC the proposed date for the portion of the Yijing attributed to him.

The book’s account ties this textual activity to a crisis of political authority. It describes King Wen’s principality in the west as long distinguished for ability and virtue, and presents him as a wise, self-restrained leader admired by princes and common people. Although they would have supported an attack on the tyrant, he did not seize that opportunity while the charge of disloyalty remained a danger. In this telling, the Yijing’s early formation belongs not only to a chronology of dynastic change but to a moment when political action itself was constrained by legitimacy and peril.

King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, and the Text

The received Text is divided between the work attributed to King Wen and the larger contribution assigned to his son, the Duke of Zhou. The account limits King Wen’s part to 64 short paragraphs, associated with the hexagrams as wholes. In the author’s reconstruction, he named each figure with a term for the idea he connected to it and set out that idea in language that might exhort or warn. The figures drew on a practice of divination already familiar in the country, but the proposed work also sought to bring that practice within bounds of reason by attaching judgments to the figures.

The Duke of Zhou extended the work from the complete hexagrams to their individual lines. The author portrays his method as treating each line as if it came alive, suggesting a natural phenomenon or human circumstance from which good or bad fortune could be inferred. The line texts thus supplemented the hexagram-level material rather than merely repeating it. The Duke of Zhou died in 1105 BC, in the eleventh year of King Cheng; because some passages are understood to refer to events early in the next reign, the author concludes that the received Yijing Text was complete by the last decade of the twelfth century BC.

This reconstruction distinguishes attributed authorship from the later history of the whole book. King Wen’s imprisonment provides a particularly concrete setting for the first portion, but the author marks parts of the scene as inference: he imagines the figures arranged before the incarcerated leader and suggests that study of them might have seemed harmless to his suspicious captors. That imagined scene is not presented as an independently documented episode. The firmer claim is the proposed association of the text’s portions with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, followed by the dating of the completed Text to the early Zhou generations.

Divination and the Zhou Tradition

The Yijing’s association with early Zhou history is inseparable from divination. The account says that trigrams had long been used for this purpose and points to older descriptions of both tortoise-shell and stalk divination. King Wen, it argues, would have known divination as an established institution. The stalk method later described in an Appendix used 49 stalks, manipulated three times for each line; six lines therefore required 18 manipulations to form a hexagram. Odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones, with the numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 assigned roles in forming the figures. Once formed, the hexagram was interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements.

The author emphasizes that this procedure did not, in his reading, amount to certain foreknowledge of future events. Its purpose was to test whether contemplated plans or conditions were likely to turn out well or badly. He also distinguishes the early divinatory use of the lineal figures from the later cosmological claims made about them: numbers helped the operator construct a figure, rather than serving as an all-explaining principle of the universe. That distinction matters to his account of how Zhou-era practices were subsequently interpreted and defended.

The historical record, as presented, places divination with the Yijing well before Confucius. In narratives dated between 672 and 564 BC, divination appears repeatedly among the states of China; further cases fall within Confucius’s lifetime. These accounts quote the Text in a form the author considers substantially the same as the one transmitted later. In the Official Book of the Zhou dynasty, the Grand Diviner is described as responsible for rules governing three Changes systems, each with eight primary figures expanded to 64. The passage names the Zhou Yijing alongside two other systems whose contents, the author notes, have left no trace; the Zhou work alone survives complete.

Survival, Editing, and the Appendixes

The Text’s early Zhou setting did not guarantee a straightforward transmission. In 213 BC, during Qin’s destruction of much ancient literature, the Yijing was spared because it was classified as a book of divination. The exemption protected the work from the fires that devastated other writings, but its preservation was linked to a practical category rather than to the later status of the whole received classic. By the beginning of the Common Era, Liu Xin’s imperial-library catalogue listed works on the Yijing and its Appendixes from 13 authors or schools, comprising 294 portions.

The book sharply separates the early Text from the Appendixes traditionally connected to Confucius. The author places the latter in the Confucian period, probably between 450 and 350 BC, and argues that even if Confucius had composed them, he could not have begun before 483 BC—roughly six to seven centuries after the portions assigned to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou. He therefore rejects treating Text and Appendixes as a single work in a proper historical sense. The Appendixes may still help readers understand the older text and the relation between its statements and its lineal figures, but their later date means they also register later ways of thinking about the Yijing.

Editorial arrangement helped blur that distinction. The author traces the intermingling of the Text and Appendixes to the Han scholar Bi Ji, noting that common editions printed five of the Appendixes alongside the Text. In his view, this layout encouraged readers to combine ideas from materials separated by centuries and made it harder for foreign students to grasp the older text. The Kangxi edition, by contrast, printed the two parts separately. Its imperial editors had gathered a long history of commentary, but the author stresses that a clear physical separation could not by itself settle disputes about authorship, coherence, or meaning.

The commentary tradition itself became part of the classic’s history. The imperial edition of 1715 quoted 218 scholars, spanning from the second century BC to the seventeenth century, and the author regarded those figures as only a fraction of the interpreters who had tried to resolve the book’s problems. He also describes the Kâu Yî Keh Kung, the great imperial edition of the present dynasty, as a resource whose extensive discussions and interpretive decisions helped raise Yijing exegesis toward a science. The Zhou dynasty thus supplied the formative setting of the Text, while later catalogues, editions, and commentaries determined how that inherited work was divided, preserved, and read.