The history

Before it was a book, the I Ching was a gesture: questioning change. In Shang China, turtle shells were heated until the fire cracked them, and the answer was read in the cracks. From that gesture, through a thousand years of hands and annotations, grew the Book of Changes: sixty-four figures of six lines, each a way in which the world transforms.

The oldest core — the judgements attributed to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou — is almost three thousand years old. Around it, generations of commentaries: the «Ten Wings» of the Confucian tradition, which turned a manual of divination into a book of wisdom. It is the text to which tradition ties a saying of Confucius: a few more years to study it, and he would have been free of great errors.

The Zhou, who succeeded the Shang, entrusted the question to another gesture: counting stalks of yarrow. How they counted them then, we do not know: the Great Treatise, which describes the fifty stalks and the count that comes out of them, is centuries later, and the rite practised today is a reconstruction. What remains is the figure: six lines, laid from the bottom, each whole or broken, stable or changing. The book that gathered the words to be read beside those figures was called the Zhouyi, «the Changes of Zhou». The Zuozhuan, the oldest chronicle that cites it, names it some two dozen times, in consultations made for the noble houses between 672 and 485 BC; the Guoyu adds three; and neither ever explains the method. On the date of the text, philology is more cautious than legend: not much before 800 BC, with a final redaction perhaps one or two centuries later, and a text already settled by 300 BC. Almost three thousand years, indeed.

Tradition gave the book four fathers. Fuxi, sovereign of the origins, is said to have drawn the eight trigrams; King Wen, held prisoner at Youli by the king of the Shang, to have stacked them two by two into the sixty-four hexagrams and written the Judgements for them; the Duke of Zhou the texts of the lines; Confucius the commentaries. Sima Qian, the historian of the Han, already writes it, and with a caution that still holds: that the king, a prisoner at Youli, perhaps enlarged the eight trigrams into sixty-four hexagrams. Scholars today accept none of the four signatures. But the legend tells the truth about one thing: the book grew in layers, one hand upon another, and every layer needed a name.

Of Confucius and the book one image remains, again from Sima Qian: in old age he read it so much that the leather cords holding the bamboo slips together broke three times. That he wrote the Wings himself, however, philology no longer holds. They are seven writings in ten parts, composed between the fifth and the second century BC by nameless hands: the commentaries on the Judgements, the Images, the Great Treatise that makes of the gesture of counting a vision of the world. It was with the Wings that the sixty-four figures ceased to be merely a handbook and became a way of thinking; and when in this Library, beneath the Judgement of a hexagram, you read its Image, you have the two layers before you together — the ancient core and the commentary that made it a book.

In 213 BC the First Emperor of Qin, on the proposal of his chancellor Li Si, ordered the burning of the books. Left out were the manuals of medicine, divination and agriculture: the door through which, it is held, the Book of Changes passed. Seventy-seven years later, in 136 BC, Emperor Wu of the Han placed it at the head of the five classics of the state, and on it the officials of the empire were trained; Yijing, «the Classic of Changes», the name under which the book travels the world, says exactly this: jing, classic. Between 175 and 183 the text was carved in stone together with the other classics, on steles before the gate of the Imperial Academy, at Luoyang. Of the steles, fragments remain; of the text, everything.

The twentieth century gave it back two witnesses that no commentator had been able to read. In December 1973, among the silk manuscripts that emerged at Mawangdui, near Changsha, was a Zhouyi copied around 175 BC: the hexagrams stand there in an order different from ours, and commentaries that nobody knew accompany it. In 1994 the Shanghai Museum acquired fifty-eight bamboo strips written in the state of Chu around 300 BC: a third of the book, with many variants of spelling and a text already settled. Whoever opens the Book of Changes today reads, at its core, the words that someone in Chu was copying twenty-three centuries ago.

Then came the readers. Wang Bi, who died in 249 at twenty-three, rejected the correspondences between heaven and human affairs on which the commentators of the Han had built their readings, and read each figure as a situation to reflect upon. His commentary became the reading of reference for centuries, and in the seventh century it entered the official edition that Kong Yingda led by order of Emperor Taizong — commissioned in 638, promulgated in 653 —, the text on which officials were examined under the Tang and for almost all of the Song.

It was the Song who reopened it in two directions. Shao Yong, in the eleventh century, arranged the sixty-four figures in a new order — the so-called order of Fuxi — that can be written in a row, in a square of eight by eight or in a circle. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) instead recalled what the learned tradition had almost forgotten: that the Book had been made, originally, for divination. In 1186 he published the Yixue qimeng, which reconstructs step by step the rite of the stalks that the Great Treatise had barely sketched; in 1188 he completed the Zhouyi benyi, «the original meaning», where the Wings return to their place as commentary.

The coins came much later than the stalks. The three-coin method asks for six throws in place of a long count, and gives a figure in a few minutes. It is not the same gesture — the changing lines come out of it with different probabilities — but it is the simplest, and it is the one that made consulting a thing for anyone. Any three coins will do; and if they are round, with a square hole and four characters on the obverse — like those cast in Beijing from 1736 with the name of the Qianlong emperor — they also carry in the hand a piece of this story. Three coins, six throws, six lines from the bottom: the gesture has not changed, and it is from here that yours begins too.