Yin (Shang) is the declining realm against which the book frames King Wen’s study of the lineal figures and the early formation of the I Ching. Its disordered government gives that work a political urgency: the text’s warnings about peril and security are situated amid dynastic crisis, while divination appears as an established practice rather than an invention of King Wen’s confinement.

A Realm in Decline

The account presents Yin (Shang) as a kingdom whose authority and social order had deteriorated. A brother of the reigning king described a dynasty no longer able to govern the land: the founders’ achievements had been undone by excessive drinking, officials violated the laws, and wrongdoing spread among both nobles and ordinary people. The state’s condition was compared to a traveler attempting to cross a large stream without finding either a ford or a bank—a figure for danger without a clear route to safety.

This political diagnosis is connected to the conduct of the last ruler, King Shou of Shang. In the declaration delivered when King Wen’s son took the field against him, the king was accused of contempt for virtue, disregard for instruction and law, and neglect of sacrifices to Heaven, Earth, and the ancestral temple. The declaration presented these failures as a rupture between ruler, people, and Heaven, and as the reason the dynasty’s continued rule could no longer be sustained.

Crisis and King Wen’s Confinement

The crisis unfolded alongside the rise of the western principality of Zhou. Its chief, King Wen, had become a powerful leader and an effective administrator, yet he held back from attacking the tyrant because he did not wish to be accused of disloyalty. King Shou’s suspicion eventually led to King Wen’s imprisonment in Youli in 1143 BC; his release followed the next year after his supporters eased the ruler’s jealousy.

The book associates King Wen’s study of the lineal figures with this confinement, when his death could still be ordered. It also relates the period of dynastic trouble to the growth of study of the I Ching: the explanations in the book are characterized as expressing anxious apprehension and teaching how danger may be turned toward security, while warning that careless ease leads to overthrow. In the author’s reconstruction, this context helps explain why the figures became vehicles for reflection on both human society and the kingdom’s condition.

Divination Before the Book’s Interpretation

The account stresses that the tools of divination were already familiar in China. It cites early references to divination by tortoise shell and stalks, including a description of examining doubts through both media. King Wen, as a leader of his time, would have known divination as an established institution; the text cautiously suggests that attending to the figures in prison might also have seemed an unthreatening occupation to his keepers.

The divination described in the later appendix was not, in the translator’s account, a means of discovering the future absolutely. It was used to judge whether schemes or contemplated circumstances were likely to turn out favorably or unfavorably. For each hexagram, forty-nine stalks were manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations in all. Odd and even numbers determined strong, unbroken and weak, divided lines; the resulting figures were interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements. The numbers served to form the figure, not as an independent doctrine explaining the material existence of all things.

Dynastic Change and the Text’s Reception

Yin (Shang) was superseded by Zhou in 1122 BC. The translator dates the portion of the I Ching attributed to King Wen to 1143 or 1142 BC, during his imprisonment or soon afterward, and argues that the work as transmitted was completed later, with a larger contribution attributed to his son, the Duke of Zhou. Thus the setting’s political collapse is linked not only to the book’s themes but also to the account of its composition across generations.

The book’s later history is distinct from this early setting. It survived the Qin book burning of 213 BC because divination was among the subjects exempted from destruction. By the beginning of the common era, a library catalogue listed works on the I Ching and its appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 sections. A later imperial edition, published in 1715, quoted 218 scholars. The translator also insists that the older Text and the later Appendixes should not be treated as a single composition: common editions had interspersed portions of the Appendixes with the Text, a layout he believed confused interpretation, whereas the imperial edition printed the two separately.