Confucius and the I Ching

Confucius and the I Ching are joined in a tradition of late-life study and authorship, but the relationship is not treated as a settled fact. The book presents the classic’s Text as centuries older than the Appendixes commonly attributed to Confucius, and argues that neither the received attribution nor the blending of these layers should be accepted without scrutiny. The result is a distinction between Confucius as a reported reader of an ancient work and Confucius as the uncertain author of commentarial writings that came to define its interpretation.

The reported late-life encounter

Confucius’s engagement with the I Ching is placed in the closing period of his life, after his long and painful wanderings among the states, when he had returned to his native Lu and was nearly seventy. One report says that he wished for additional years so that he might devote fifty to studying the classic and thereby avoid serious errors. The book treats the number as a corruption of the text generally admitted by the best critics, rather than as a literal estimate of the years Confucius expected to live. Its value lies instead in what the saying attests: an I Ching existed in Confucius’s time.

Sima Qian’s account makes the late study more concrete. In the final years of his life, Confucius reportedly became devoted to the I Ching, read his copy so intensively that the leather thongs binding its tablets wore out three times, and wished for several more years to master it. Earlier, his conversations with disciples had chiefly concerned the Books of History and Poetry and the Rites and Ceremonies. The account therefore marks a late turn toward the I Ching, regarded as a monument of antiquity that Confucius had neglected during the prime of his life. The repeated breaking of the bindings gives the tradition an image of sustained study, while the wish for more time leaves mastery unfinished.

The Text and the Appendixes

The book insists on distinguishing the old Text from the Appendixes transmitted alongside it. The Text, based on still older lineal figures, is attributed to King Wen and his son Tan, the Duke of Zhou; the Appendixes are traditionally credited to Confucius. The author accepts the received account of the Text’s origins, but stresses that even if Confucius composed the Appendixes, they followed the Text by roughly six to seven centuries. The two parts consequently cannot simply be treated as one work produced at one moment or as a seamless expression of a single mind.

The tradition of Confucian authorship is nevertheless prominent. Sima Qian explicitly assigns Confucius the Appendixes except for the final two, which he does not mention, and the book takes this as evidence that the attribution was already commonly believed several centuries after Confucius’s death. The Appendixes, known collectively as the Ten Wings, were transmitted as an integral part of the I Ching by many Chinese readers and foreign scholars. But their association with Confucius does not appear as a self-identification in the texts: none bears his superscription, and none contains a sentence directly asserting that he wrote it.

This separation also changes the interpretive task. The Text consists of sixty-four short, symbolic essays on themes largely moral, social, and political, each based on a six-line figure. King Wen interprets each hexagram as a whole, sometimes indicating what action its circumstances call for and whether that action is fortunate. The Duke of Zhou then treats the lines individually, proceeding from the bottom upward through symbolic illustrations and judgments of good or bad fortune. Their readings are presented as mutually coherent: the interpretation of the whole hexagram accords with the combined significance of its six lines. Confucius’s reported role belongs to the later interpretive layer, not to this account of the Text’s composition.

The authorship dispute

The book tests Confucian authorship against internal features of the Appendixes, especially the third and fourth in its arrangement. In the third, the phrase “The Master said” occurs at least twenty-three times. The author argues that a writer who was Confucius would not ordinarily distinguish himself from himself in this way: the quoted sayings may be attributed to the Master, but the surrounding exposition cannot therefore automatically be assigned to him. The fourth Appendix presents a related problem. Its first section contains the same formula six times in thirty-six paragraphs.

An additional difficulty is chronological. The fourth Appendix begins with three paragraphs drawn from a narrative in the Zuo Commentary, where they are represented as the words of a marquis’s dowager of Lu, spoken fourteen years before Confucius was born. Zhu Xi’s attempt to explain the passage—that an older interpretation was used both by the dowager and Confucius, while a chronicler distinguished the sage’s actual words with the formula “The Master said”—does not, in the book’s assessment, establish who that chronicler was. The internal evidence instead points to a text compiled after Confucius’s death, incorporating reported sayings rather than written throughout by the person being quoted.

The resulting conclusion is deliberately bounded but consequential: Confucius cannot have composed the third and fourth Appendixes as wholes, though passages introduced as his sayings may preserve his words. That finding weakens confidence in the blanket attribution of the Ten Wings and leaves open whether there is sound evidence for assigning the other Appendixes to him. The author does not claim that every part has been disproved; he notes that the first two Appendixes in his arrangement show no equivalent evidence against Confucian authorship, as does much of the fifth. Yet he regards the endings of the fifth, the seventh, and, to a lesser extent, the sixth as too trivial to seem like the work of the great sage. The distinction is between what the evidence can sustain and what inherited reverence has made customary.

Reading across historical layers

The attribution matters because the Appendixes became a guide to understanding the older Text. The book acknowledges that they provide hints about the relation between the lineal figures and their statements; without those clues, a consistent interpretation would be difficult. But guidance is not proof of common authorship, and later explanations must not be mistaken for the original Text’s own concepts. The author points, for example, to interpretations of yin and yang as an already developed doctrine of primary matter. In his view, that philosophical system took more than a thousand years to form within the Confucian school and did not reach full development until the Song dynasty. Reading it backward into the I Ching makes a later intellectual history appear to belong to the earliest layer.

The same historical separation informs the author’s method of translation. His first translation, made in 1854 and 1855, had followed the Text and Appendixes together and, he later judged, yielded no adequate understanding of the book’s scope or method. After returning to sustained study in 1874, he treated the Text by itself, aided by the 1715 imperial edition, which kept Text and Appendixes separate. Eight concordances—one for the Text and one for each Appendix—showed that many words characteristic of the Appendixes, in his view, did not occur in the Text. The distinct vocabularies and styles reinforced the need to assess the layers separately rather than letting later commentarial language dictate the meaning of the earlier work.

That method also changes what translation can mean. The author had first tried to make his English as concise as the Chinese, producing passages with little or no syntactical connection, like the Latin version of Philippe Grégoire Regis and his coadjutors. Once he had found what he considered a clue to interpretation, he rejected literal word-for-word rendering: Chinese written characters, in his account, are symbols of ideas, and their composition presents what the writer thinks rather than a direct representation of what the writer would say. He invokes Mencius’s counsel, “We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence, and then we shall apprehend it.” The translator’s task is thus to bring the reader into contact with the author’s thought, expressing the meaning as exactly and concisely as possible while sometimes supplying words that the original leaves implicit. Parentheses mark many of those additions in his translation, though he questions whether they are always necessary.

A relationship that remains layered

The book preserves a double judgment. It treats the late-life study of the I Ching as historically significant evidence for the classic’s existence before Confucius, and it presents the story of the repeatedly worn bindings as a durable record of the sage’s concentrated attention. At the same time, it refuses to let that readerly relationship settle the authorship of the later commentaries. Confucius may be present in sayings embedded in the Appendixes without being their author as compiled works; the traditional claim that he wrote them all exceeds what the book believes the evidence can prove.

This distinction is not merely a dispute about credit. If the Text and Appendixes are blended into one harmonious work, later philosophical assumptions can be projected onto earlier symbolic statements, and contradictions between layers are concealed in the name of Confucian authority. Separating them allows each to be read in its own historical and linguistic terms: the Text as an ancient composition attributed to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, the Appendixes as later interpretations with disputed authorship, and Confucius as a reader whose association with the classic shaped its reception even where his hand cannot securely be identified. The relationship is therefore both foundational and uncertain: Confucius helped make the I Ching central to a tradition of study, while the textual record resists treating that tradition as proof that he authored its interpretive apparatus.