Zhōuyì 周易
The Changes of Zhōu
(canonical text — no single author)
About the work
The Zhōuyì 周易 (“Changes of Zhōu”), conventionally rendered Yì jīng 易經 (“Classic of Changes”) once it acquired canonical status, is the root divinatory and cosmological classic of the Confucian canon and the parent text on which the entire KR1a section comments. The Kanripo recension carried under this id is the bare received text — sixty-four hexagrams (guà 卦) with their hexagram statements (guàcí 卦辭) and line statements (yáocí 爻辭), followed by the ten so-called yìzhuàn 易傳 / Shíyì 十翼 (“Ten Wings”): Tuàn 彖 (upper and lower), Xiàng 象 (upper and lower), Wényán 文言, Xìcí 繫辭 (upper and lower), Shuōguà 說卦, Xùguà 序卦, and Záguà 雜卦. The base edition shipped here is the TLS digital text (Kanripo PROPERTY: BASEEDITION tls), without commentary.
Because the work is a layered composite (a Zhōu-period divinatory core overlaid with Warring-States to Hàn-period philosophical commentaries that were eventually canonized as part of the same “Classic”), the frontmatter dating window 900–100 BCE represents the composition-and-stabilization span of the received text as a whole, not the date of any single stratum.
Abstract
The Zhōuyì is universally agreed to be a stratified text. The guàcí and yáocí — terse, often divinatory phrases attached to hexagrams and individual lines — belong to the late Western Zhōu (conventionally ca. 9th c. BCE), as argued on linguistic, prosopographic, and ritual-context grounds by Edward L. Shaughnessy on the basis of references to specific Western Zhōu kings, marriage practices, military campaigns, and hexagram-statement formulae shared with Western Zhōu bronze inscriptions. Traditional attribution credits the trigrams to 伏羲 Fú Xī, the doubling into hexagrams and the guàcí to 周文王 King Wén of Zhōu, and the yáocí to the Duke of Zhōu (周公 Zhōu Gōng); none of these attributions is sustainable on internal evidence, but they are the reason the work bears the dynastic name Zhōu.
The Ten Wings (Shíyì) are a heterogeneous body of philosophical and cosmological commentary appended later. Linguistic and conceptual analysis dates them broadly to the Warring States and early Hàn (4th–2nd c. BCE), with the Xìcí (Dàzhuàn 大傳) and Shuōguà showing the strongest cosmological-correlative thinking. The traditional ascription of the Wings to Confucius is rejected by virtually all modern scholarship; the Lúnyǔ 論語 nowhere quotes them, and the language is typically post-Confucian. Manuscript finds — most importantly the Mǎwángduī 馬王堆 silk Zhōuyì (168 BCE tomb), and the Shanghai Museum and Fùyáng 阜陽 bamboo manuscripts — confirm that by the early Western Hàn the guà-and-yáo corpus already circulated in close to its received order, while the Wings were still individually packaged (the Mǎwángduī version places its commentary chapters separately, in different order, and includes texts such as Èrsānzǐ wèn 二三子問 not preserved in the received recension).
The text became canonical in the early Western Hàn through the transmission line associated with 田何 Tián Hé of Zīchuān 菑川, recorded in the Hànshū Rúlín zhuàn 漢書·儒林傳, and was established as one of the Five Classics under 漢武帝 Hàn Wǔdì (r. 141–87 BCE). Its received form has been textually stable since the 王弼 Wáng Bì (226–249, KR1a0006) recension supplanted the Hàn xiàngshù 象數 schools in the early medieval period. The standard Sòng-imperial print line runs through 孔穎達 Kǒng Yǐngdá’s Zhōuyì zhèngyì 周易正義 (KR1a0007), and the Sìkù 四庫 version of the canonical text is the one transmitted in the Shísān jīng zhùshū 十三經注疏.
The core hermeneutic divisions in the later commentarial tradition — between the xiàngshù 象數 (“image-and-number”) school descending from Hàn-Yì masters such as 孟喜 Mèng Xǐ, 京房 Jīng Fáng, 鄭玄 Zhèng Xuán (KR1a0003, KR1a0004), and 虞翻 Yú Fān, and the yìlǐ 義理 (“meaning-and-pattern”) school descending from Wáng Bì — structure the entire KR1a corpus that follows.
Translations and research
Translations into European languages exist in great number; only the most consequential are listed here.
- Richard Wilhelm, I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen (Eugen Diederichs, 1924), translated into English by Cary F. Baynes as The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Bollingen / Princeton Univ. Press, 1950) — the most influential Western rendition; arranges the canonical text together with the Ten Wings under hexagram heads.
- James Legge, The Yî King (Sacred Books of the East 16, Oxford, 1882) — separates guà/yáo from the Ten Wings in the manner argued for by Hàn-evidential scholarship.
- Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (Columbia Univ. Press, 1994) — the standard English translation following the yìlǐ tradition.
- Richard Rutt, The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document (Curzon, 1996) — translates only the divinatory core, omitting the Ten Wings, on the philological grounds that they belong to a later layer.
- Edward L. Shaughnessy, I Ching: The Classic of Changes (Ballantine, 1996) — translation of the Mǎwángduī silk manuscript; the indispensable witness to the early-Hàn state of the text.
- Geoffrey Redmond, The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text (Bloomsbury, 2017) — recent scholarly translation with extensive bronze-age and divinatory contextualization.
Major modern scholarship:
- Iulian K. Shchutskii, Researches on the I Ching, trans. William L. MacDonald and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Princeton, 1979) — first sustained Western philological monograph.
- Edward L. Shaughnessy, Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics (SUNY, 1997), and Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing and Related Texts (Columbia Univ. Press, 2014).
- Bent Nielsen, A Companion to Yi jing Numerology and Cosmology: Chinese Studies of Images and Numbers from Han to Song (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) — reference handbook.
- Richard J. Smith, Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing and Its Evolution in China (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2008) — standard cultural and intellectual history.
- Liú Dàjūn 劉大鈞, Zhōuyì gàilùn 周易概論 (Qílǔ shūshè 1986; rev. eds.) — standard Sinophone overview.
- Jīn Jǐngfāng 金景芳, Lǚ Shàogāng 呂紹綱, Zhōuyì quánjiě 周易全解 (Jílín dàxué chūbǎnshè, 1989) — standard line-by-line modern commentary.
Other points of interest
The KR1a section contains 170 commentaries and sub-traditions transmitted through the Sìkù 四庫 and other recensions; this entry is their common parent. Hexagram order in the received text follows the Xùguà 序卦 sequence (beginning with Qián 乾 and Kūn 坤); the alternative Xiāntiān 先天 (“Former Heaven”) arrangement associated with 邵雍 Shào Yōng (1011–1077) is a Sòng innovation and is not the order of the canonical text proper.
The TLS base edition (Kanripo BASEEDITION tls) used here is digital and unpunctuated; for critical work scholars normally use the Shísān jīng zhùshū 十三經注疏 collation of 阮元 Ruǎn Yuán (1815) or the Mǎwángduī silk manuscript transcription in Zhāng Zhèngláng 張政烺 et al., Mǎwángduī bóshū Zhōuyì jīngzhuàn jiàodú 馬王堆帛書周易經傳校讀 (Zhōnghuá shūjú, 2008).