Duke of Zhou's composition of the line texts

The Duke of Zhou’s composition of the line texts supplies the line-by-line interpretations that complete the I Ching’s hexagrams. Where King Wen explains each figure as a whole, the Duke begins at the lowest line and gives every line an emblematic illustration, together with an indication of the fortune associated with action in that situation. The result is a layered text: six distinct line readings are meant to cohere with the interpretation of the complete hexagram, yet each can also suggest a particular circumstance and course of conduct.

Place in the Text

The book’s translator attributes a larger share of the I Ching to the Duke of Zhou than to King Wen. King Wen’s contribution is described as sixty-four short paragraphs interpreting the hexagrams as wholes; the Duke entered into that work and extended its method to the individual lines. The line texts thus do not stand apart from the hexagram judgments: their combined significance is said to accord with King Wen’s reading of each complete figure.

The translator places the Duke’s contribution within the early Zhou succession. The line texts include allusions to King Wu, who succeeded King Wen and became the first sovereign of the Zhou dynasty, as well as passages understood to refer to events in the early years of the following reign. Since the Duke died in 1105 BC, the translator concludes that the received I Ching was complete by the final decade of the twelfth century BC.

Method and Form

The Duke’s method is to make each line seem alive through a symbolic or emblematic image. A natural phenomenon or an instance of human experience supplies the scene from which the line’s significance—and the likely good or bad fortune of conduct connected with it—may be inferred. The text therefore shifts scale repeatedly: from the governing theme of a hexagram to six sharply particularized images, each carrying its own judgment.

The translator emphasizes that the work was composed in the manner of diviners. King Wen and the Duke were familiar with divination, but the account distinguishes composing the text from personally consulting it: their words later became oracles for people who cast hexagrams to judge whether they should persist in, or withdraw from, intended courses of action. The line texts’ compressed, symbolic language reflects that inherited mode, even as the translator understands their purpose as interpretive and moral as well as oracular.

Reading the Lines

A line’s meaning depends not only on its own image but on its position and relation to the other lines. The translator describes the hexagram as a six-line structure assembled from two trigrams, with corresponding pairs at positions one and four, two and five, and three and six. A correspondence is complete when the paired lines have different qualities. The second and fifth positions, as the middle lines of the trigrams, have special force: in a suitable hexagram, the fifth may represent a sovereign or commander and the second an able minister or officer, whose mutual action can be beneficial and successful.

This positional system makes the line texts context-sensitive rather than a set of interchangeable maxims. The translator stresses that their significance varies with the hexagram’s name and with the condition it represents. Reading a line therefore involves relating its emblem to the larger figure and to the position it occupies; the whole-hexagram judgment and the separate line readings are intended to illuminate one another.

Example and Interpretive Limits

In the first hexagram, the Duke’s opening line depicts a dragon hidden in the deep and says that it is not the time for active action. The second line changes the image: the dragon appears in the field, and it is advantageous to meet the great man. These two readings show how line position carries a change in circumstance and counsel: concealment calls for restraint, while emergence makes an encounter advantageous.

The translator’s assessment is sharply mixed. He sees the Duke’s design as an attempt to make the six lines’ separate influences combine into the light of the whole figure, but judges the execution singular and often grotesque by modern literary expectations. He argues that the disappointment is partly explained by the requirement to write according to the conventions of diviners. His translation likewise rejects strict word-for-word rendering: because Chinese written characters, in his account, signify ideas rather than simply represent words, he aims to convey the author’s thought intelligibly, sometimes supplying words that the original leaves implicit. He presents this as a disciplined effort to express meaning accurately, not as permission to invent it.