What is the I Ching

     I Ching (also Yi Jing) 易經 means Book of Changes, and it is the oldest of the Chinese classics. Along with the Bible, are the most read and commented upon work in all of world literature. For at least three millennia it has been mainly an oracle book, but also an inspiration to spirituality. In the West, it has been known for three hundred years and it is the most recognised Chinese book, with many translations and almost infinite interpretations. Also, it’s not a book that you read it through from cover to cover. The way to read the I Ching is to use cleromancy, that is to determine an outcome by random means. Specifically a question is asked employing at the same time any method that gives a random result from 1 to 64, which will lead to one of the 64 chapters in the book. The 64 chapters are symbolized by six lines symbols called hexagrams, created from all the possible combinations of two original line-patterns, an unbroken ⚊ yang line and a broken ⚋ yin line, similar to the modern binary digits 1 and 0. Sixty four are also the "words" in our genome, as the I Ching developes through the same mathematics as our DNA. All these make the I Ching a very unique book, unlike any other.

A brief history

     The origin of the book is obscure. According to the tradition, everything started when Fu Xi (伏羲), a legendary Chinese hero from around 2500 BCE, attributed everything in the universe to eight patterns symbolised by eight trigrams, symbols with three stacked unbroken (yang) or broken (yin) lines. The original text does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its origins. The trigrams were arranged in a circular order called Pa Kua (八卦) which means eight symbols. When the eight trigrams are doubled with all their possible combinations, they give 64 six line symbols called hexagrams, the chapters of the I Ching. In the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE, oracle diviners would heat tortoise shells or flat animal bones and interpret the cracks that were produced. Many of these oracle bones (lots of thousands found) have hexagrams incised on them.

     Around 1050 BCE, count Wen of Zhou (周文王, 1099 – 1050 BCE) wrote brief comments for each hexagram that have since been known as judgments or decisions. Later, his son Duke Dan of Zhou (周武王) added comments to the individual lines of each hexagram, and the text was called Zhou Yi (周易) or Changes of the Zhou (dynasty).

     From 500-200 BCE, the text was regarded as a philosophical text because of the extensive commentaries written at that time on it under the name Ten Wings, traditionally attributed either to Confucius or to some of his students after him. Unfortunately, in some editions these comments have been appended in the ancient text and thus sometimes are mistakenly considered an inextricable part of it.

     For the West, I Ching was discovered in the late 17th century CE by Jesuit missionaries in China and in 1882 James Legge wrote the first reliable English translation of it. Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 translation of the I Ching in german and its english translation by Cary F. Baynes in 1950 made the book internationally known. Among many other publications, two of Edward L. Shaughnessy stand apart as they include recent important discoveries from excavations of earliest I Ching manuscripts than the one we knew (100 CE), named the Ma Wang Dui (about 100 BCE) and the Shanghai museum edition (about 300 BCE), where some chapters have different numbering, some have different titles, and most of them have some difference in words.