origins of the I Ching

    H I S T O R Y


The origins of the I Ching lie far back in Chinese history. The basic text
originates from around the twelfth century BC, thus it is about 3200 years
old. The author was King Wen, founder of the Chou dynasty, who wrote the work
whilst imprisoned by Chou Hsin, the last Shang dynasty Emporer. Wen's son
Tan, the Duke of Chou, further amplified the text. The Duke of Chou destroyed
the corrupt and sadistic Shang dynasty and became the first Chou Emporer.

King Wen wrote the text for each hexagram and Duke Tan the text for each
line.

The trigrams (or three lined figures) which, when combined, form the
hexagrams comprising the I predate the interpretative texts of King Wen and
the Duke of Chou. Tradition associates the discovery of the trigrams with
Fu-Hsi in about 3300 BC, over 5000 years ago. Legend claims that a
dragon-horse came forth from the Yellow River bearing on its back the
arrangement of marks that suggested to Fu-Hsi the eight trigrams.

In 213 BC, most of the ancient literature of China was burnt in a forerunner
of later cultural revolutions under the Emporer Ch'in Shih Huang Ti. The
I Ching luckily survived because as a book of divination it was exempt from
the Imperial edict of destruction.

By 1715 AD, the imperial edition of the I Ching had quotations from the works
of over 200 scholars stretching from the 2nd century BC until the eighteenth
century.

The most famous scholar to have worked upon the I was Confucius who said, in
481 BC when he was nearly 70, "If some years were added to my life, I would
give fifty to the study of the I Ching, and might then escape falling into
great errors."

Confucius added a commentary and this was further expanded by his followers.

In the third century AD, the scholar Wang Pi wrote to defend the view that
the I was not merely a work of fortune telling or magic, but a profound
moral and philosophical system.

Throughout Chinas long and venerable history, the I Ching has been highly
revered - whether by Confucians, Buddhists or Taoists. It has found a
home outside China - in Japan where it became an integral part of Shinto,
the Japanese state religion, in Korea and Vietnam and more recently in the
West where it has interested such diverse figures as the psychoanalyst Carl
Jung, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the novelist Hermann Hesse, the
mathematician Leibnitz and the magician Aleister Crowley.

The work was first brought to Europe by returning Jesuit missionaries three
centuries ago but has only become widely known in the latter half of the
twentieth century. The standard edition in English is that of the Sinologist
James Legge dating from 1882. Most modern works on the I Ching either use
this or the later version by Richard Wilhelm, a Christian missionary. Legges'
version is a translation of the imperial 1715 edition.