Zuo Qiuming

Zuo Qiuming appears in the book not as a developed biographical character but as the chronicler whose narratives provide historical evidence about the I Ching. His accounts show divination in use across the Chinese states before Confucius and preserve a saying attributed to a noblewoman before Confucius’s birth, thereby connecting the classic’s practical history with the later formation of its appendixes.

Historical testimony on divination

The book points to the Supplement to the Spring and Autumn associated with Zuo Qiuming for evidence that divination by the I Ching was frequent across the states of China before Confucius. It counts at least eight narratives of the practice between 672 and 564 BC, before Confucius was born, and five further occasions during his lifetime when divining stalks and the book were consulted in matters with which he had nothing to do. In these cases, the text of the I Ching as it survives was already freely quoted.

The cited narratives establish a substantial record, not a single isolated custom: divination appears repeatedly, in different states and across generations. The book argues that because the Spring and Autumn begins in 722 BC, an account extending back to the rise of the Zhou dynasty would likely contain further instances across the intervening period. Its conclusion is that the I Ching had been familiar throughout the feudal states for centuries before Confucius’s time.

The record and the divinatory procedure

Zuo Qiuming’s accounts belong to a wider documentary picture in which both tortoise-shell and stalk divination are attested. The book traces references to tortoise-shell consultation to an early document in the Book of Documents, and to the stalk method and lineal figures in later material. It identifies the plant used for the stalks as Ptarmica Sibirica, which the author says he had seen growing near Confucius’s grave.

The procedure described in the book used forty-nine stalks. Each of the six lines was formed through three manipulations, making eighteen manipulations for a hexagram. Odd numbers yielded strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones; numbers and the emblematic values 9, 8, 7, and 6 helped produce the figure. The resulting hexagrams were interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements. Zuo Qiuming’s historical record of consultations thus sits alongside a technical account of how such consultations could be carried out.

The book distinguishes the purpose of this practice from a claim to know the future absolutely. Divination was used to judge whether schemes or contemplated conditions would turn out auspiciously or inauspiciously. A passage from the Book of Documents on examining doubts likewise concludes that when the tortoise-shell and stalks oppose people’s views, stillness is fortunate while active undertakings are unlucky. The author warns that careless readings of the appendixes can make the I Ching seem to promise comprehensive foreknowledge, whereas he takes its practical scope to be narrower.

An earlier saying preserved in the commentary

Zuo Qiuming’s historical material also bears on the authorship and dating of the appendixes. The first three paragraphs of one appendix, the book argues, predate that appendix’s compilation: they derive from a narrative in the Zuo Commentary and report words spoken by a marchioness-dowager of Lu fourteen years before Confucius was born. The older saying was later used in a discussion of the four attributes associated with King Wen’s interpretation of the first hexagram.

This chronology complicates orthodox explanations that treated the appendix as Confucian in origin. Zhu Xi’s account, as presented in the book, proposes that the explanation was already an ancient saying, used by the marchioness-dowager and also by Confucius, with a chronicler distinguishing the sage’s words through the formula “The Master said.” The author finds this reconstruction unsupported and concludes that the appendix’s compiler or compilers were distinct from Confucius. The narrative attributed to Zuo Qiuming matters, therefore, not only as evidence for divination, but as a source that exposes the earlier material embedded in a later layer of commentary.

Limits and significance of the evidence

The book treats Zuo Qiuming’s record as evidence for the antiquity and reach of I Ching divination, while making clear that the surviving examples do not themselves supply a continuous account of every earlier period. Its argument about the centuries before Confucius is an inference from the dated narratives and the book’s starting point, rather than a claim that every intervening consultation is documented.

That distinction reflects the book’s broader concern with separating the classic’s text, its appendixes, and the historical records that illuminate their use. Zuo Qiuming’s accounts attest to divination as a social practice, including consultation of the existing text, while the story of the pre-Confucian noblewoman helps date material later incorporated into an appendix. His significance here lies in this double evidentiary role: a witness to the book’s early use and a source for tracing the older sayings that later interpreters gathered around it.