Qin Shi Huang's book burning

Qin Shi Huang's book burning was a campaign against much of China's ancient literature in 213 BC, yet the I Ching survived under an exemption for works on medicine, divination, and agriculture. The episode reveals how a classification as a practical divination text could protect a classic from destruction, even as later readers and interpreters contested what its divination was meant to do.

The Exemption and the Book's Survival

The account identifies Li Si, the premier who advised the emperor to consign old books to the flames, and notes that the order exempted works concerning medicine, divination, and husbandry. Because the I Ching was regarded as a book of divination, it was preserved. The exception did not save ancient literature generally: the burning proved disastrous for most of it. The I Ching's survival therefore depended not on an explicit preference for its philosophical or literary contents, but on the category under which authorities placed it.

That distinction matters to the history of the work. The book's later standing as an ancient classic coexists with this account of its preservation for its divinatory status. Its survival made possible the continuing study of a text whose practical use involved interpreting formed hexagrams, and whose accumulated commentaries would become a major part of its reception.

What Divination Was For

The account distinguishes divination from absolute prediction. Its stated object was to determine whether schemes and contemplated conditions of events would prove lucky or unlucky, rather than to disclose future events as fixed knowledge. A passage about examining doubts likewise cautions against treating divination as a command to act: when both the tortoise shell and stalks oppose men's views, stillness is fortunate and active measures unlucky.

This scope clarifies why the category of divination could preserve the I Ching without settling the meaning of its authority. The text and its appendixes describe a procedure for producing figures, while the account distinguishes that procedure from the claim that every future occurrence can be known in advance. The practice concerns judgment about proposed action and circumstance, not unrestricted foreknowledge.

Materials and Procedure

The account traces divination in China to an early period. It mentions tortoise-shell divination in a document of the Book of Documents that purports to date to the twenty-third century BC, and describes the later use of lineal figures formed with plant stalks. The plant is identified as Ptarmica Sibirica, cultivated around Confucius's grave, where the author says he saw it growing. In the earlier account of King Wen, divination by tortoise shell and stalks is also described as an established institution familiar to him.

The appendix's stalk procedure used forty-nine stalks, manipulated three times for each line; eighteen manipulations formed a hexagram. Numbers derived from the River Map determined the lines: odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines, and even numbers weak, divided ones. The numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 were assigned to four emblematic symbols used in combining the lines. Once the figure was formed, interpretation turned to King Wen's judgments and the Duke of Zhou's line statements. In this description, numbers serve as aids in generating the hexagram, not as independent entities that determine the nature of all things.

Preservation, Belief, and Later Interpretation

The account separates the appendix writer's belief in the stalks' spirit-like virtue from the author's assessment of divination's actual reach. The appendix treats Heaven as having produced the tortoise and plant with qualities suited to divination; the author, by contrast, says that the method is no less absurd than other forms of divination. He also notes that Chinese people had abandoned the practice outside circles of professional fortune-tellers, even while scholars continued to praise the appended treatises for their depth and wisdom.

A story about a former marquis makes the skepticism concrete: a skilled diviner tells him that stalks are withered grass and the shell a withered bone, and advises him to listen to himself rather than seek guidance from things. The episode places the divinatory instruments beside a competing account of judgment grounded in human intelligence. Together, these contrasting views show that preservation under the category of divination did not amount to universal agreement about divination's efficacy.

The book's continued life also depended on interpretation. The account records that a catalogue of the imperial library, prepared by Liu Xin near the beginning of the Common Era, listed works on the I Ching and its appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, in 294 portions. The imperial Kangxi edition of 1715 quoted 218 scholars, spanning from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. These figures convey the long afterlife of a work whose escape from the fires secured its transmission, but did not resolve the many problems that generations of readers sought to interpret.