Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing ( I Ching) and Related Texts

Unearthing

THE

Changes

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

EDITORIAL BOARD

Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair

Paul Anderer

Donald Keene

George A. Saliba

Wei Shang

Haruo Shirane

Burton Watson

EDWARD L. SHAUGHNESSY

Unearthing

    THE

Changes

RECENTLY DISCOVERED MANUSCRIPTS OF THE YI JING (I CHING) AND RELATED TEXTS

Columbia

University

Press

New York

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the preparation of the translation and in the publication of this series.

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

EISBN: 978-0-231-53330-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shaughnessy, Edward L., 1952-

Unearthing the changes : recently discovered manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and related texts / Edward L. Shaughnessy.

   p.     cm. — (Translations from the Asian classics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16184-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53330-0 (electronic)

1. Yi jing—Criticism, Textual. I. Title.

PL2464.Z6S466   2013

299.5'1282—dc23

2012023286

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover image: Shanghai Museum Zhouyi strip

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For

DAVID KEIGHTLEY     MICHAEL LOEWE     DAVID NIVISON

三人行必有我師焉

Where three people walk, there will certainly be my teacher among them.

—Analects 7/22

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.   Divining the Past Divining the Future: Archaeology and the Rediscovery of the Changes

2.   The Context, Content, and Significance of the Shanghai Museum Manuscript of the Zhou Yi

3.   Translation of the Shanghai Museum Manuscript of the Zhou Yi

4.   The Wangjiatai Bamboo-Strip Manuscripts of the Gui cang

5.   Translation of the Gui cang Fragments

6.   The Fuyang Zhou Yi Manuscript

7.   Translation of the Fuyang Zhou Yi Manuscript

Conclusions and Conjectures

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1.  Line drawing of Zhouyuan oracle bone H11:85

1.2.  Line drawing of Qijia Village oracle bone A3H90:79

1.3.  CHX 採集: 1 Pottery paddle

1.4.  CHX 採集: 1 Inscription

1.5.  CHX 採集: 2 Pottery paddle

1.6.  CHX 採集: 2 Rubbing

1.7.  CHX 採集: 2 Line drawing

2.1.  Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi strip no. 7: Shi hexagram

2.2.  Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi strip no. 8: Shi hexagram

2.3.  Sun Peiyang’s initial reconstruction of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi manuscript

2.4.  Sun Peiyang’s final reconstruction of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi manuscript

6.1.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strip no. 277

6.2.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strip no. 86

6.3.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strip no. 141

6.4.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strip no. 140

6.5.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strip no. 58

6.6.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strip no. 57

6.7.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strips 125, 126

6.8.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strips 151, 152

6.9.  Fuyang Zhou Yi strips 133–37

TABLES

1.1.  Sequence of Hexagrams in the Mawangdui Zhou Yi Manuscript

2.1.  Comparison of Hexagram Names in the Shanghai Museum Manuscript and the Received Text of the Zhou Yi

2.2.  Distribution of Red and/or Black Symbols in the Shanghai Museum Manuscript

2.3.  Physical Circumstances and Textual Contents of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi Manuscript Bamboo Strips

4.1.  Zhou Yi and Gui cang Hexagram Names and Numbers Compared

5.1.  Hexagram Names in the Gui cang and Zhou Yi Compared

6.1.  Characters per Hexagram in the Received Text of the Zhou Yi

PREFACE

In China, the Yi jing 易 經 , or Classic of Changes , also known as the Zhou Yi 周 易 , or Zhou Changes , or, more simply (and as I refer to it here), as the Yi 易 , or Changes , ¹ has traditionally been regarded as the most profound expression of human wisdom. It is supposed to have been created by four of China’s greatest sages: Fuxi 伏羲, who is credited with the establishment of marriage, among many other cultural institutions; Wen Wang 文王 (ca. 1110–1050 B.C.), the founder of the great Zhou dynasty (1056–256); Zhou Gong 周公 (ca. 1090–1032 B.C.), a son of Wen Wang and the person credited in large part with the consolidation of the Zhou founding; and Kongzi 孔子, or Confucius (551–479 B.C.), perhaps the greatest sage of all, born five hundred years after the death of Wen Wang. Early accounts of the text’s history hold that the basic text originated in the performance of divination—the attempt to determine the future—one of the predominant aspects of religious life in ancient China; both the earliest attested uses of the text and the enigmatic images contained in it do seem to reflect this origin. However, by no later than the Warring States period (5th c.–221 B.C.), the Changes was regarded as one of the Six Classics and understood as a repository of wisdom about the nature of the universe. Over the following two millennia, this understanding came to be ever more elaborated, with the great neo-Confucian scholars of the Song dynasty (960–1278), in particular, finding in it a guide to living an ethical life. In the West, on the other hand, aside from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716) supposed discovery of binary mathematics in the numerological structure of the sixty-four six-line pictures (the so-called hexagrams) upon which the text is based, the Changes has received rather less attention—especially from professional scholars. ²

The Changes is a famously difficult text. Herrlee G. Creel (1905–1994), once the Western world’s foremost authority on early Chinese cultural history, exclaimed in exasperation:

The language of this book is very concise, even cryptic. This has given rise to various theories that it contains a secret language or an occult symbolism. It makes one wonder if it was written at a time when the Zhous had not yet learned to write very clear Chinese.³

Even Li Xueqin 李學勤, the leading scholar in this field today and someone who has devoted considerable time to studying the Changes, warns,

I often feel that studying the Zhou Changes is very dangerous. The text of the Zhou Changes is arcane and simple, but subtle and abstruse; you can explain it this way, but it is also not hard to explain it that way. It’s bad enough if you borrow the terminology of the Yi to express your own thoughts, but if you want to find the original meaning of the Yi, it is really too difficult. One very common result is that one constructs upon the foundation of one’s own imagination a seven-story pagoda, the soaring eaves and complex structure of which give the architect the sense that it is entirely natural.⁴

Despite this danger in studying the Changes, Professor Li goes on to advise that through study of the text’s historical development, it is nevertheless possible to gain an objective understanding of it. As he also states, in this regard archaeology can play a key role.

As recently as 1997, when Professor Li was writing these remarks, the only direct archaeological evidence pertaining to the Changes available to the scholarly public was the early Handynasty (202 B.C.–A.D. 220) Mawangdui 馬王堆 manuscript (the manuscript was buried in 168 B.C.), which had been discovered in 1973 in Changsha 長沙, Hunan.⁵ In the years since then, the earth has not cherished its treasure, as the Chinese saying puts it; three different ancient manuscripts of or related to the Changes have been published in China. In the year 2000 came the first comprehensive, even if still informal, reports on two very different kinds of manuscripts: another Han-dynasty manuscript of the Changes, discovered in 1977 at Shuanggudui 雙古堆 in Fuyang 阜陽, Anhui,⁶ and two third-century B.C. manuscripts thought to be of the ancient Gui cang 歸藏, or Returning to Be Stored, that had been unearthed in 1993 at Wangjiatai 王家台, Hubei.⁷ This latter text is reputed to have been an alternative divination manual to that of the Changes but one that had been lost—at least for the most part—since no later than the fourth century A.D. These two manuscripts were formally published in 2004. In the same year came the publication of a still earlier manuscript, this one of the Changes itself, that had been robbed some years earlier from a tomb and then purchased by the Shanghai Museum; physical and paleographic evidence suggests that this manuscript was copied in the late fourth century B.C.⁸ Inspired by Li Xueqin’s advice that archaeology can play a key role in understanding the historical development of the Changes, I present these three manuscripts as the focus of the present book.

THE FORMAT OF THE CHANGES

Although Herrlee Creel was certainly correct in saying of the Changes that the language of this book is very concise, even cryptic, he was exaggerating more than a little when he went on to wonder whether it was written at a time when the Zhous had not yet learned to write very clear Chinese. The text is certainly open to multiple interpretations; indeed, this openness is one of the great hallmarks of the text, in some ways what makes it the unique classic that it is.⁹ Nevertheless, it is understandable—so long as one is clear about the historical context within which it is to be understood. One of the greatest problems in dealing with the Changes is that it is two (or more) different books subsumed under a single title. As most readers will know, the core of the text is organized around sixty-four graphs or pictures (known in Chinese as gua hua 卦畫), each of which is composed of six lines, either solid (—) or broken (- -); these have come to be known in the West as hexagrams (gua 卦).¹⁰ Each of these sixty-four hexagrams is supplied with a name and seven brief texts: a hexagram statement (gua ci 卦辭) understood to represent the entire hexagram, and line statements (yao ci 爻辭) for each of the six lines.¹¹ The hexagram statement is usually quite formulaic, often including little more than the hexagram name and one or more injunctions for (or against) certain actions.¹² The statement for Xian 咸, , Feeling, the thirty-first hexagram in the traditional sequence, is more or less representative:

咸亨利貞取女吉

Feeling: Receipt. Beneficial to determine. Taking a woman: auspicious.¹³

This is not the place to try to explain the kinds of meanings that have been attached to the various phrases of this statement, or to explain how they have been understood in the context of this hexagram. For now, it will have to suffice to note the formal structure of the text.

The line statements are counted from the bottom of the hexagram to its top, each one introduced by a sort of tag identifying its place within the hexagram and the nature of the line (whether solid or broken) to which it is attached: the bottom line is called First (chu 初), the top line Top (shang 上), and the intervening lines are simply numbered Second (er 二), Third (san 三), Fourth (si 四), and Fifth (wu 五); solid lines, understood to be yang (i.e., sunny, understood in the traditional Chinese worldview to be one of the two basic attributes of all things), are referred to as Nine (jiu 九) and broken lines, understood to be yin (i.e., shady), are referred to as Six (liu 六). The combination of these two features gives such tags as First Six (chu liu 初六), Nine in the Third (jiu san 九三), and Top Six (shang liu 上六). The line statement proper, on the other hand, is often built around an omen or image (xiang 象) describing some thing or activity in either the natural or human realms. It is these omens that strike readers as secret (à la Herrlee Creel) or even dangerous (à la Li Xueqin); they are certainly enigmatic. The omens are often followed by terms associated with divinatory prognostications: ji 吉, auspicious, xiong 凶, ominous, lin 吝, distress, wu hui 无悔, there are no regrets, and so on. Far from clarifying the text, these determinations often provoke the greatest discussion of its meaning.

The six line statements attached to Xian hexagram are again more or less representative of line statements in general, although one hastens to add that any single representation is bound to be misleading; in the words of the Xi ci zhuan 繫辭傳, or Tradition of Attached Statements, one of the early commentaries on the text that eventually came to be incorporated into the classic itself, the Changes cannot be codified or essentialized (bu ke wei dian yao 不可為典要).

初六咸其拇

First Six: Feeling its toe.

六二咸其腓凶居吉

Six in the Second: Feeling its calf. Ominous. Residing: auspicious.

九三咸其股執其隨往吝

Nine in the Third: Feeling its thigh, grasping its torn flesh. Going: distress.

九四貞吉悔亡憧憧往來朋從爾思

Nine in the Fourth: Determining: auspicious. Regrets gone. Tremblingly going and coming, the friend follows you in thought.

九五咸其脢无悔

Nine in the Fifth: Feeling its back. There are no regrets.

上六咸其輔頰舌

Top Six: Feeling its cheek, jowls, and tongue.

As noted above, and contra Herrlee Creel, there is nothing particularly difficult about the language of the text. To be sure, the hexagram name here, Xian 咸, and especially the way the word is used in the line statements, is unusual. Xian means completely or throughout and typically cannot be used as a verb. However, the early canonical commentaries Tuan zhuan 彖傳, or Judgment Commentary, and Xiang zhuan 象傳, or Image Commentary, both suggest that 咸 should be read as the protograph for the word gan 感, to feel; to cause to feel (i.e., adding a heart signific to the graph). This is entirely possible within traditional Chinese reading practice; the two words were closely homophonous in antiquity (*grəm for xian 咸 vs. kəm? for gan 感)¹⁴ and were surely cognate. I follow this gloss in the translation offered above. On the other hand, other interpretations are also possible. For instance, the modern scholar Gao Heng 高亨 (1900–1986) suggested that the original meaning of xian was to cut (zhan 斬), a suggestion reflected in at least a pair of other recent English-language translations.¹⁵

Whatever the word xian might originally have meant, it is easy to trace the omen’s gradual progression up the lines of the hexagram, from the toe in the First Six line up to the cheek, jowls, and tongue of the Top Six line statement. Although most other hexagram texts have a less-explicit structure than does Xian, throughout the text there is a pronounced tendency to differentiate the image according to the line’s placement within the hexagram. Thus, words that describe or can be associated with low or low-lying features tend to appear in the bottom line or lines, whereas words that describe high features tend to appear in the top lines.¹⁶ To a great extent, it is the changes that these omens go through as they progress through the lines of the hexagrams that make the Changes the unique text that it is.

Perhaps the most fundamental divergence in the reading of Changes line statements involves the divinatory prognostications; should they be read as integral to the image proper, or are they more or less ad hoc appendages or accretions to the text? If they are to be interpreted as integral to the image proper, then why does feeling its thigh in the Nine in the Third line statement give rise to the prognostication going: distress, whereas for feeling its back in the Nine in the Fifth statement there should be no regrets? And how are we to explain the seeming contradiction in the single Six in the Second line statement in which feeling its calf is followed by both prognostications ominous and residing: auspicious? Much of the long commentarial tradition devoted to the Changes has sought to explain how and why individual images should be either auspicious or ominous, or—as in this case—both. Many of the exegetical principles employed in these explanations are anticipated already in the earliest canonical commentaries and were then made explicit in the commentary of Wang Bi 王弼 (A.D. 226–249), which in turn became the foundation for the orthodox commentarial tradition of the Zhou Yi zheng yi 周易正義, or Correct Meaning of the Zhou Changes. Richard Lynn has provided a succinct account of these principles:

Yin lines are soft and weak; yang lines are hard and strong. The positions of a hexagram are calculated from bottom to top. The odd number places—first (bottom), third, and fifth—are strong yang positions, and the even number places—second, fourth, and sixth (top)—are weak yin positions. Yin and yang lines form resonate pairs; yin and yin or yang and yang lines form discordant pairs: the unlike attract; the like repel. Proper resonate relationships can take place between lines of the lower and upper trigrams—one with four, two with five, three with six—but each must pair with its opposite: yin with yang or yang with yin. Secondary harmonious relationships can also occur between contiguous lines when yang rides atop yin or yin carries yang but never when the reverse occurs, for this is an unnatural, discordant relationship—as, for example, when a superior supports or carries his subordinate. The sixty-four combinations of yin and yang lines and yin and yang positions schematically represent all the major kinds of situations found in life.¹⁷

According to these principles, the Six in the Second line is correctly positioned (a yin line in a yin position) and has an appropriate relationship with the equally well positioned Nine in the Fifth line (forming what Lynn refers to as a resonate pair). In traditional Changes exegesis, the second line corresponds to the place of the minister in society, whereas the fifth line corresponds to the ruler. This might explain why in this line residing should be auspicious; within the distinctively conservative social and political worldview that produced these exegetical principles, a soft minister was expected to keep to his place and not make any movement toward usurping the place of the ruler. So long as this was the case, the Nine in the Fifth line should have no regrets. Similar explanations can be offered for the other determinations, though none of these principles explains particularly well why the Six in the Second line should first be ominous.

Scholars who attempt to recover the original meaning of the Changes as a divination manual are less troubled by the apparent contradictions of the determinations. They tend to regard these terms as prognostications produced at different times by different diviners, some of whom may have interpreted the text of the Changes—and even the nature of divination—differently.¹⁸ To these scholars, attempting to derive consistent principles to explain why a particular line should be either auspicious or ominous is anachronistic, owing more to later philosophical perspectives than to the early divinatory context.

A similar divergence is seen in how to understand the sequence of the sixty-four hexagrams. The text is traditionally organized around pairs of hexagrams, related either by inversion of a single hexagram picture, such that the top line of one hexagram becomes the first line of the next hexagram, the fifth line the second, the fourth the third, and so on (e.g., Ji Ji 既濟, Already Completed, , and Wei Ji, 未濟, Not Yet Completed, , the sixty-third and sixty-fourth hexagrams in the traditional sequence), or, in the cases where this would produce the same hexagram picture, changing all lines to their opposite (e.g., Qian 乾, Vigorous, , and Kun 坤, Compliant, , the first and second hexagrams). One of the canonical commentaries traditionally attributed to Confucius, the Xu gua 序卦, or Sequencing the Hexagrams, explains the sequence as a natural progression through time. Each hexagram necessarily results from the preceding hexagram and gives rise in turn to the hexagram following it. The sequence begins with Qian and Kun, generally thought to represent heaven and earth, respectively:

有天地然後萬物生焉盈天地之間者唯萬物故受之以屯屯者盈也屯者物之始生也物生必蒙故受之以蒙蒙者蒙也物之稺也……有過物者必濟故受之以既濟物不可窮也故受之以未濟終焉

There being heaven and earth, only then are the ten thousand beings born in it. What fills the interstice between heaven and earth is only the ten thousand beings. Therefore, it follows it with Zhun. Zhun means filling, when beings are first born. When beings are born they are necessarily ignorant, therefore it follows it with Meng. Meng means ignorance, the immaturity of beings. … When there is passing, beings are necessarily completed. Therefore, it follows it with Ji Ji. Since beings cannot be exhausted, therefore it follows it with Wei Ji, ending there.¹⁹

There is no need to quote this commentary at greater length. Its reasoning never becomes any more compelling. Indeed, even within the canonical commentaries there is evidence that the Changes could be arranged in a different sequence: the Za gua 雜卦, or Mixed Hexagrams, commentary reflects one such different sequence of hexagrams. When the Mawangdui manuscript from the early Han dynasty was discovered in 1973 and revealed yet another radically different sequence,²⁰ it called into question again the antiquity of the received sequence. Despite Li Xueqin’s suggestion that archaeology can play a key role in gaining an objective understanding of the historical development of the Changes, at least in terms of this particular question, the archaeological evidence that has surfaced to date has been more effective in raising new questions than in resolving old ones.²¹ But for those of us who appreciate new questions just as much—if not more than—new answers, archaeology can indeed play a key role in understanding the early history of the Changes.

THE FORMAT OF THIS BOOK

The purpose of the present book is to introduce recently discovered archaeological evidence pertaining to the Changes, especially the three manuscripts mentioned in the preceding section: the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Gui cang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi. Each of these manuscripts is presented in two separate chapters: the first chapter provides a narrative description of the discovery of the manuscript, its nature, and its significance for the history of the Changes, and the second chapter provides a more or less complete translation of the manuscript.²² For both the Shanghai Museum and Fuyang manuscripts, I also provide translations of the corresponding portions of the received text. These translations are not intended to be definitive in any sense of the term; they are provided for comparison’s sake, to illustrate, however modestly, how the manuscripts differ from the received text and how these differences might help to understand the development of the Changes.

Before these six chapters devoted to the three recently discovered manuscripts, I provide also an overview of some of the other archaeologically discovered materials that either relate to the Changes or to its historical context. These materials, which range from oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang (ca. 1200–1045 B.C.) and especially Western Zhou (1045–771 B.C.) periods to various other manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin (221–207 B.C.), and Han periods, show that divination was practiced constantly by people of all walks of life. Even though these materials do not reveal when or how the Changes was transformed from an everyday divination manual into a classic for the ages, they are bringing into better focus the origins of the text.

The book concludes with a brief consideration of what this evidence shows about the history of the Changes. I am well aware just how tentative these conclusions are. In 1913, when Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) began his now celebrated translation of the Changes, he and his mentor, Lao Naixuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921), could approach the text with the confidence that it not only encapsulated all the world but that it was moreover intelligible. Now, a hundred years later, we are still learning just how little we really know about the Changes and the world that produced it. Paradoxically, each new discovery both adds a little bit to what we know and also undermines a little bit of what we knew. Nevertheless, I still look forward to more such discoveries.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ibegan my study of the Zhou Yi , or Zhou Changes , in 1976 with Aisin-gioro Yuyun 愛 新 覺 羅 毓 鋆 (1906–2011). Yu Lao insisted that we begin the study with the commentary of Lai Zhide 來 知 德 (1525–1604), a scholar who claimed in the preface to his own study of the Changes to have spent thirty years studying the text. At the time, thirty years seemed almost unfathomable to me, and I wondered what could have taken Lai so long. Thirty-five years have now passed in my own study of the text, off and on though it has been, and I have now come to a better appreciation of Lai’s efforts. Indeed, it is humbling to realize just how little progress I have made in this field, in spite of being the beneficiary of numerous advantages over the years.

Among those advantages, surely the most important have been my teachers and mentors, beginning with Yu Lao and continuing with the three scholars to whom I dedicate this book: David Keightley, Michael Loewe, and David Nivison, each of whom has contributed in important ways to my understanding of the Changes, but more than that, each of whom has contributed in countless other ways to my growth as a scholar. With all three of them, it is easy to follow Confucius’s admonition to select what they do well and to follow it.

Among others who have contributed to my understanding of the Changes, I wish to acknowledge in particular Richard Smith. The Western world’s leading authority on all aspects of the Changes, Professor Smith has produced a long series of books and articles, culminating in his magisterial Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I-Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). He has always been encouraging to me but never more so than when he served as one of the referees Columbia University Press asked to evaluate the present book. Within a matter of days, he produced a detailed and extraordinarily valuable report on the manuscript, not only pointing out its flaws but also suggesting several positive ways in which it might be improved. I hope I have corrected most of the mistakes, and I have certainly tried to incorporate all the suggestions for improvement. I am sure that the book is much better for them.

I am grateful also to Tiziana Lippielo, Attilio Andreini, and Maurizio Scarpari, who hosted me at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice during academic year 2007–2008, when I completed much of the basic research and writing for this book. I am grateful too to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support during that year, and to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Humanities Visiting Committee at the University of Chicago, and the Creel Center for Chinese Paleography of the University of Chicago for subventions toward the publication of the book.

I am grateful to the Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, to Cao Wei 曹瑋, and to Sun Peiyang 孫沛陽 for permission to reproduce images and figures. Sun Peiyang also assisted in designing the cover.

I am grateful also to Jennifer Crewe and her team at Columbia University Press, Lisa Hamm, Leslie Kriesel, and Kathryn Schell, and especially to Mike Ashby. Mike has edited with great care an extremely complicated manuscript. I am delighted as well that CUP invited my old friend David Goodrich of Birdtrack Press to typeset the book. David’s work, which he has done with his typical consummate skill, included creating numerous archaic characters, as well as various versions of Changes hexagram symbols.

Back home in Chicago, I am particularly grateful to my student Jeffrey Tharsen, who has patiently resolved various computing problems, and to Yuan Zhou, curator of the Regenstein Library’s East Asian Collection, who has provided unfailing support over the years. In retrospect, I am grateful too that after returning to Chicago in 2008, with a nearly complete first draft in hand, other matters conspired to keep me from finishing it straightaway; the University of Chicago, my scholarly home for almost as long as Lai Zhide studied the Changes, has always provided intellectual temptations to explore other topics. And for exploring the changes that we go through in life, which after all inform everything about my understanding of the Changes, I couldn’t have asked for better teachers—or more wonderfully fun companions—than Elena, Giulia, and Maria.

I

DIVINING THE PAST DIVINING THE FUTURE: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE REDISCOVERY OF THE CHANGES

In the West, the Changes , or Classic of Changes (hereafter simply Changes ), is best known through the translation done by the German missionary Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). ¹ Wilhelm lived in China for twenty years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, witnessing firsthand the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), and the fledgling creation of a new republican government. During this time, he came to be a fervent admirer of China’s native traditions, especially Confucian thought, and established the Confucian Society in his adopted city of Qingdao 青島 in eastern China’s Shandong province. In 1913, Wilhelm began to work with the Chinese scholar Lao Naixuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921) on his translation of the Changes. Lao had been an official under the Qing dynasty, which had been overthrown just two years before, and had sought refuge in the German protectorate. ² There he taught Wilhelm the dominant Song-dynasty interpretation of the Changes as a guide to life, an interpretation that Wilhelm succeeded brilliantly in translating into German. The famous first words of Qian 乾 A hexagram, the first of the text, yuan heng li zhen 元亨利貞, which literally mean something like first enjoy benefit divination, became in Wilhelm’s German Das Schöpferische wirkt erhabenes Gelingen, fördernd durch Beharrlichkeit, or, in the English translation by Cary F. Baynes, The Creative works sublime success, Furthering through perseverance. ³ The English translation, in particular, furnished with an introduction by Wilhelm’s friend C. G. Jung (1875–1961) explaining the Changes as a product of the collective unconscious, became something of a bible for the postwar counterculture generation. It is said that until the vogue of professors becoming television personalities in the 1980s, Wilhelm’s translation of the Changes was the best-selling book by any university press in America.

At the same time that Wilhelm was working on his Changes translation in Qingdao, a few hundred miles to the west another Western missionary interested in traditional Chinese culture was very much involved in work that would also come to transform our understanding of the Changes. James M. Menzies (1885–1957), a Canadian Presbyterian missionary living in Anyang 安陽, Henan, began collecting dragon bones that peasants there were busily unearthing.⁴ According to at least one tradition, these bones—actually pieces of the scapula bones of oxen and plastrons of turtles—had first come to the attention of the Chinese epigrapher Wang Yirong 王懿榮 (1845–1900) in 1899, the year that Richard Wilhelm had arrived in China, when Wang purchased them in a Beijing apothecary. He is supposed to have noticed writing on the bones similar to the inscriptions on ancient bronze vessels with which he was familiar, but still more ancient. He quickly purchased all the other bones that he could find in Beijing. When his collection was subsequently published, it set off a chase to find the source of the bones, which led within a few years to Anyang.⁵ This was significant because Anyang was known to have been the site of the last capital of the Shang dynasty (16th c.–1045 B.C.), the dynasty immediately preceding the Zhou dynasty of Wen Wang, Zhou Gong, and Confucius. Antiquarians and scholars alike descended on Anyang, setting off a digging craze among the peasants living there. For his part, Menzies explored particularly the village of Xiaotun 小屯 near Anyang, which, excavations would subsequently show, was the site of the Shang royal palace and cemeteries; during his time at Anyang, Menzies collected well over ten thousand pieces of oracle bone.⁶ When these and others were published,⁷ paleographers determined that the bones did indeed come from the Shang dynasty and that their inscriptions were records of divinations performed on behalf of the last kings of that dynasty.

One of the most important early interpretive breakthroughs came with the identification of the character , which appeared among the first words of almost every inscription. Scholars noted that the character was sometimes written in a more rounded form as , the pictograph of a cauldron, and that the word for cauldron, ding 鼎, was closely homophonous in ancient times with the word zhen 貞, ding pronounced something like *têŋ? and zhen something like *treŋ.⁸ The Shuo wen jie zi 說文解字, or Discussing Pictographs and Explaining Characters, the first dictionary in China, had defined zhen as to inquire by crack making (bu wen ye 卜問也).⁹ This was the same word found in the first line of the Changes, translated by Wilhelm as Beharrlichkeit, or perseverance. Wilhelm’s translation accorded with almost all traditional commentaries, which tended to gloss the word with yet another homophone, zheng 正, which means upright or correct. Indeed, we now know that all three of these words, zhen as well as ding, cauldron, and zheng, upright, are part of a larger word family that also includes words such as ding 丁, nail (originally written or , the pictographic form of a character now written 釘), ding 定, settled or definite, zheng 政, government, zheng 征, punitive military campaign, and ding 訂, to correct a text. All of these words share the sense of being (or making) upright, firmly placed, secure, correct. Even zhen, to inquire by crack making, shares this sense since divination in ancient China was not an open-ended inquiry into the future but more an assertion that one’s proposal for a future action was correct and deserving of divine assistance in its realization.¹⁰ Thus, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (A.D. 127–200), one of the best informed of the early commentators on the classics, combined these senses in his definition: to inquire into the correctness of some activity.¹¹ The connection through this word between the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions and the text of the Changes would come to revolutionize our understanding of this most important of all Chinese texts.

The discovery of divination records from the Shang dynasty also stimulated in very large measure the development of modern archaeology in China. In 1928, the Institute of History and Philology of the newly established Academia Sinica began the first scientific excavations at Xiaotun. Continuing for a decade, these excavations turned up tens of thousands of more oracle bones and decisively confirmed that this was indeed the Shang capital.¹² In addition to this general historical significance, the continued discovery of inscribed oracle bones also showed much more about Shang-dynasty divination practices. The following inscription, on a turtle shell unearthed in June 1936 from a large refuse pit at Xiaotun, includes all four parts of a complete Shang divination record: a preface, indicating the day of the divination and the name of the official presiding over it; the charge or topic being addressed to the turtle; the king’s prognostication; and a verification indicating, after the fact, what actually did happen.

癸丑卜爭貞自今至于丁巳我 王 曰丁巳我毋其 于來甲子 旬又一日癸亥 弗 之夕 甲子允

Crack making on guichou [day 50], Zheng determining: "From today until dingsi [day 54], we will slash Xi." The king prognosticated and said: On dingsi we will not slash [them]; on the coming jiazi [day 1], we will slash [them]." On the eleventh day guihai [day 60], Che did not slash them. That evening cleaving into jiazi he really did slash [them].¹³

In this case, the divination was one of several on guichou 癸丑, the fiftieth day in the Chinese cycle