Xia Dynasty

The Xia dynasty is presented chiefly through the history of divination attributed to its age: the account associates the period with consultation by tortoise-shell and divining stalks, but does not establish those traditions as contemporary records of Xia rule. Its place in the article is therefore evidentiary and interpretive, linking ancient divinatory practice to the later use of the lineal figures without turning a traditional attribution into a certain chronology.

Xia-Era Divination Traditions

The translator reports that a section of the Great Plan, a work associated with the Xia period, describes how doubts were to be examined with tortoise-shell and stalks. He also points to an early passage in the Book of Documents that mentions tortoise-shell divination, and says that later evidence shows the continuation of that method alongside divination through lineal figures formed with plant stalks. These references place divination within the account of early Chinese practice, though the dating and attribution of the texts are presented as matters of historical transmission rather than proof that the surviving descriptions were written during the dynasty itself.

The stalks used in the later procedure are identified as those of Ptarmica Sibirica, a plant the translator says was still cultivated around Confucius’s grave. The divinatory tradition thus joins two media—the tortoise-shell and the stalks—while distinguishing the stalk procedure from the interpretation of an already formed figure. The text’s account of Xia-era practice supplies an early context for that broader history, not a complete description of a specifically Xia ritual system.

From Traditional History to Later Systems

Later traditions assigned different origins to the systems called Lien-shan and Kwei-zhang: some connected them with legendary rulers, while others identified them as divination books of the Xia and Shang periods. The translator offers a different proposal, explicitly calling it conjecture. In his reconstruction, Lien-shan began with the mountain hexagram, while Kwei-zhang began with the earth hexagram; he associates the latter image with plants disappearing into the earth and being kept there through winter. These alternatives show how Xia entered debates over the antiquity and succession of divinatory arrangements, but they do not amount to a verified Xia genealogy.

A separate origin tradition says that a map emerged from the Yellow River and supplied Fuxi with a model for the Eight Trigrams. The translator recounts this alongside the claim that the Xia-era Great Plan described divination, but treats the map story as fabulous and the proposed reconstructions of earlier systems as uncertain. Xia’s relevance is consequently part of a layered history: early textual references, later claims about the origins of divination, and the translator’s own effort to distinguish what those sources attest from what remains speculation.

The Divinatory Procedure and Its Limits

In the procedure described for the I Ching, forty-nine stalks are manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to produce a six-line hexagram. Odd and even numbers determine strong, undivided and weak, divided lines; the numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 are assigned to the emblematic symbols used in forming the figure. Once the lines have been produced, the diviner turns to King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements for interpretation. The numbers help generate the figure; they are not presented as a code that independently discloses every event in nature.

The translator defines the purpose of divination more narrowly than foreknowledge of the future: it tests whether a contemplated plan or set of circumstances is likely to turn out well or badly. He also reports that the relevant Appendix regards the tortoise and the plant as spirit-like instruments, while noting that some later writers questioned the wisdom of seeking revelations from old shells and dried stalks. The account therefore distinguishes the historical practice and its ritual claims from the translator’s skeptical judgment about its efficacy.

Historical Reception and Interpretation

The later history of the I Ching illustrates how material attributed to remote antiquity became part of an evolving textual tradition. The book survived the Qin book burning of 213 BC because divination was among the subjects exempted from destruction. A library catalogue compiled 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, published in 1715, quoted 218 scholars across a span from the second century BC to the seventeenth century.

The translator insists on separating the old Text from the Appendixes traditionally associated with Confucius. Even if the Appendixes were his work, he argues, they could not have begun before 483 BC—centuries after the portions attributed to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou. Their frequent intermixture with the Text in common editions, a practice associated with Pi Ji of the early Han, blurred the difference between the layers; the Kangxi edition printed them separately. This distinction matters for Xia as well: traditions about the dynasty’s divinatory past belong to a history of claims, texts, and later interpretation, not to a single, uninterrupted account whose authorship and date are beyond question.