The copy people bring me in Sydney is nearly always the same one: Wilhelm and Baynes, hardback, Jung’s foreword at the front. They open it somewhere in the middle, point at a sentence, and ask what it means.
Most of the time the sentence they are pointing at belongs to the commentary layer rather than the core text, and several hundred years sit between the two.
People take this for pedantry, and I can see why. But it is the first gate into the book, and nothing afterwards sorts itself out until you are through it.
Two books in one binding
The core, the Zhou Yi proper, is sixty-four hexagrams. Each hexagram carries a short judgment, and each of its six lines carries a statement of its own. Three hundred and eighty-four line statements, plus two extra ones attached to the first two hexagrams. The language is clipped to the bone, occasionally broken past repair. The same fixed phrases keep coming back: favourable to cross the great river, favourable to see the great man. It was written to be matched against a question someone had already asked.
The second half is the Ten Wings, ten pieces of commentary: the Tuan in two parts, the Image in two parts, the Great Treatise in two parts, then the Wenyan, the Shuogua, the Xugua and the Zagua. Tradition credits Confucius with all of it. Most scholarship now puts it in the Warring States and early Han period, written by more than one person over a long stretch. This is where the philosophy lives. One yin, one yang, that is the Way is a line from the Great Treatise; you can read the core text end to end and never meet it.
Open a modern edition and the Tuan and the Image are already sitting inside each hexagram, as though they had always been there. Wilhelm keeps that arrangement and adds a layer of his own on top, and what it never tells you is that the Image under a hexagram was written some centuries after the judgment above it.
What the excavated manuscripts show
A complete Zhou Yi written on silk came out of a tomb in Hunan in the 1970s, part of the Mawangdui find. Its hexagram sequence has nothing to do with the received one, and a number of the hexagram names are written with different characters.
A partial Zhou Yi sits among the Warring States bamboo strips held by the Shanghai Museum. The strips at Tsinghua University include a text called the Shifa, a separate divination method altogether, with its own symbols and its own procedure that do not line up with the Zhou Yi.
Early China had more than one divination system, the text of the Zhou Yi stayed unsettled for a long time, and the sequence English readers memorise is one arrangement among several.
Two ways of reading, and the one the West received
Chinese tradition sorts readers into xiangshu, image and number, and yili, meaning and principle.
Image and number takes the hexagram apart and works it. Line positions, upper and lower trigram, nuclear trigrams, stems assigned to lines, hexagrams mapped onto the solar year. Han specialists like Meng Xi, Jing Fang and Yu Fan made this extremely intricate, and the aim throughout was accuracy in casting.
Meaning and principle turns on Wang Bi in the third century. He wrote a commentary that swept nearly all of that machinery aside and read each hexagram for its sense in human affairs. Four characters sum up his position, usually rendered as get the meaning and forget the image. Cheng Yi followed the same road, and by the Song dynasty this was the respectable way to read. Zhu Xi is the exception worth knowing about: a philosopher of the first rank who insisted the Changes was at bottom a divination book and had to be admitted as one.
The copies people actually own here came through the second door, with Jung’s foreword and his notion of synchronicity attached, and the 1960s did the rest. Philip K. Dick cast hexagrams while writing The Man in the High Castle. In Sydney bookshops it still sits next to the tarot.
The split I don’t accept
The claim I hear most often is that the philosophy is the gold and the divination is the dross, and a sensible modern reader keeps the first and quietly drops the second.
The core half is divination language from the first word to the last. Favourable to cross the great river is about whether the river can be crossed. Nobody put it there as a figure for courage. Take the casting away and there is nothing left of that half to read, and what you are holding is the Great Treatise and the Wenyan.
The opposite split is no better. I have met practitioners who drill the technical machinery and never read the Wings, and their readings have no sense of proportion at all. They will tell a stranger when and how they are going to die. In Australia that is a legal problem on top of being an ugly one. Anything touching illness, law or money goes to a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant, and that sentence is fixed in every report I write.
I use both halves. Casting is a procedure with steps, and the steps can be checked. Explaining what the result means for the person sitting across from me runs on the vocabulary of the Wings, because that is where somebody first tried to teach how a hexagram turns into a situation with proportions in it.
One of the Mawangdui manuscripts records Confucius talking about the Changes and saying that what he valued was its moral sense, with the divining put second. That gets quoted to prove the sage didn’t cast. What the passage does is rank them, moral sense first and divining second, with both still in the list.
The Leibniz question
I write software, so I get this one a lot. Was the Yi Jing the origin of binary.
Leibniz did see a diagram of the Fuxi arrangement of the sixty-four hexagrams, sent to him by a Jesuit working in China, and he had indeed worked out binary arithmetic. Two kinds of line, six lines to a hexagram, sixty-four being exactly what six binary digits allow. As a mapping it holds. The causation runs backwards from how the story gets told, though. He had the arithmetic already and was pleased to find what looked like ancient confirmation.
The encoding is one sentence long. The lookup table hanging off it took centuries to assemble, one line at a time, and nobody wrote down how.
What I can’t tell you
The sequence, first. The Xugua explains the received order as a chain, each hexagram giving rise to the next, and it reads convincingly. Then Mawangdui turns up with a completely different order. So is the received sequence meaningful, or is the Xugua a good explanation invented for an order that was already there? I lean towards the second and I have no way to prove it.
The other one is practical. When several lines change in a single cast, which line governs the reading. Zhu Xi set out a scheme for this; other lineages use different ones. I follow the method I was taught, it holds up in use, and I cannot tell you why that scheme is right rather than another. It is the part of my own practice I am least sure of.
As for which half to start with, I have no general advice. If you want to learn to cast, read the core text bare, no commentary, and let it stay strange for a while. If you want the philosophy, go straight to the Great Treatise and the Wenyan; they are the best written of the ten.