The basic unit of the Zhou yi is the hexagram ( 卦 guà), a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines ( 爻 yáo). Structure Oracle turtle shell featuring the ancient form ( ) of zhēn ( 貞) "to divine" Īnother tradition about the I Ching was that most of it was written by Tang of Shang. Eventually, a consensus formed around 2nd-century AD scholar Ma Rong's attribution of the text to the joint work of Fuxi, King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius, but this traditional attribution is no longer generally accepted. During the Han dynasty there were various opinions about the historical relationship between the trigrams and the hexagrams. The Rites of Zhou, however, also claims that the hexagrams of the Zhou yi were derived from an initial set of eight trigrams. According to the canonical Great Commentary, Fuxi observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams ( 八卦 bāguà), "in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things." The Zhou yi itself does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its own origins. The Zhou yi was traditionally ascribed to the Zhou cultural heroes King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou, and was also associated with the legendary world ruler Fuxi. Modern Sinologists believe the character to be derived either from an image of the sun emerging from clouds, or from the content of a vessel being changed into another. There is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for "changes" as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. Feng Youlan proposed that the word for "changes" originally meant "easy", as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, but there is little evidence for this. The "changes" involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination. The name Zhou yi literally means the "changes" ( 易 Yì) of the Zhou dynasty. It is possible that other divination systems existed at this time the Rites of Zhou name two other such systems, the Lianshan and the Guicang. A copy of the text in the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo and wooden slips (discovered in 1994) shows that the Zhou yi was used throughout all levels of Chinese society in its current form by 300 BC, but still contained small variations as late as the Warring States period (c. Based on a comparison of the language of the Zhou yi with dated bronze inscriptions, the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy dated its compilation in its current form to the last quarter of the 9th century BC, during the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou ( r. c. Modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries BC for the assembly of the text in approximately its current form. The core of the I Ching is a Western Zhou divination text called the Changes of Zhou ( Chinese: 周易 pinyin: Zhōu yì). The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. Many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision-making, as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching has been discussed and debated over the centuries. The hexagrams are arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. Each of the 64 possible sets corresponds to a hexagram, which can be looked up in the I Ching. Īs a divination text, the I Ching is used for a Chinese form of cleromancy known as I Ching divination in which bundles of yarrow stalks are manipulated to produce sets of six apparently random numbers ranging from 6 to 9. During the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, it took on an influential role in Western understanding of East Asian philosophical thought. After becoming part of the Chinese Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East and was the subject of scholarly commentary. Over the course of the Warring States and early imperial periods (500–200 BC), it transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the " Ten Wings". The I Ching was originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC). The I Ching or Yi Jing ( Chinese: 易經, Mandarin: ⓘ), usually translated Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. " I (Ching)" in seal script (top), Traditional (middle), and Simplified (bottom) Chinese characters
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