Duke of Châu’s regency

Duke of Châu’s regency is proposed as the setting in which an image attached to one hexagram may have been written, during the troubled period after King Wu’s accession and while his son King Khăng was newly on the throne. The dating is a scholarly inference, not a firmly established episode: the book uses it to show how the political circumstances of composition might shape the meaning assigned to the hexagram.

The proposed historical setting

The commentator distinguishes the hexagram’s image from an earlier interpretation associated with King Wen. The earlier text, he argues, could express the sentiments of a lord of Kâu who considered his house more deserving of the throne than the kings of Shang. The image under discussion, by contrast, is attributed to the Duke of Zhou, after his brother King Wu had secured the throne. That difference in authorship and political position prompts the suggestion that the image belongs to the regency, after King Khăng’s accession.

This placement is explicitly conjectural. The commentator asks whether the Duke of Zhou’s image may have been composed in that troubled period; he does not present the regency date as a certainty. Its value is interpretive: it offers a possible political context for language that would otherwise seem detached from the transfer and early consolidation of royal authority.

Divination and the hexagram text

The historical discussion sits within a broader account of divination. The commentator says the practice was ancient: the tortoise shell appears in a document of the Book of Documents that purports to belong to the twenty-third century BC, and later evidence includes divination by lineal figures formed with plant stalks. The stalks used in the procedure were identified as Ptarmica Sibirica, which the commentator reports seeing cultivated near Confucius’s grave.

Divination, in his account, was not simply a means of foretelling fixed future events. Its purpose was to assess whether a plan or a contemplated set of circumstances would turn out auspiciously or badly. He stresses this distinction because careless readings of the text could make it sound as though the Changes promised knowledge of every future occurrence. A cited judgment from the Book of Documents instead allows that stillness may be fortunate when the tortoise and stalks both oppose people’s views, while active undertakings may be unlucky.

The stalk procedure itself was elaborate. Forty-nine stalks were manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram. Odd and even numbers yielded strong and weak lines, and the emblematic values nine, eight, seven, and six helped determine how the lines combined. Once the figure had been formed, interpretation turned to King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements. Numbers served in producing the figure; the commentator rejects the idea that they functioned as independent entities or causes of all things.

Political and moral interpretation

The account repeatedly treats hexagram writing as an interpretation of human and political conditions, not only as a ritual technology. In the discussion of one hexagram, the commentator says King Wen and his son wrote with a particular situation in mind: a disorderly political world, confidence in their own house’s destiny, and the hope that prudence, adherence to what was right, and the appointment of capable men could restore good government. The image associated with the Duke of Zhou can likewise be read against its proposed setting of early royal rule, though the regency connection remains an inference.

The book also shows how later interpreters draw social and political lessons from symbolic material. It explains a marriage image through a hierarchy between a ruler and ministers, and reads another account of a royal marriage as evidence for a rule about daughters of the royal house submitting to their husbands’ rank. These readings demonstrate how the hexagram texts could become vehicles for arguments about office, loyalty, and social order, while leaving open whether those applications were intended by the earliest writers.

Limits of the reconstruction

The commentator distinguishes historical claims from inherited explanations and openly marks uncertainty. He questions the historical existence traditionally assigned to Fuxi, challenges a proposed identification of a royal marriage, and cautions that a later drawing of the River Map makes the familiar derivation of the divination numbers uncertain. Such reservations matter to the regency hypothesis: the proposed date emerges from comparing layers of text and their political implications, not from a direct record of the image’s composition.

The result is a layered picture of early divination and authorship. Stalks and tortoise shells belong to the practical means of consulting for auspiciousness; the hexagrams and their line statements provide material for interpretation; and later commentary turns them toward moral and political instruction. Duke of Châu’s regency enters this account as a plausible historical frame for one such interpretive layer, rather than as a fully documented event.